This Week In Sexist History: Girls, Girls, Girls Edition
Newspaper stories from the good old days say the darndest things. So every week on the Sexist, let’s take a ride on journalism’s way-back machine, to a time when descriptors like the following—”big girls and little girls, blonde girls and brunettes, dark-haired blondes, sunset blondes, Rhinegold blonde—blondes of all kind save the prescription pattern”—qualified as college baseball commentary.
This Week in Sexist History:
Good Ol’ Day: June 23, 1909
Dateline: New York, NY
Subject: Reporter at Yale-Harvard rivalry baseball game fluffs up his flowery play-by-play with a rhapsodic account of the glorious array of girls in attendance. Collect one in every ethnicity!
First, let us immerse ourself in the peculiar style of turn-of-the-century Ivy League baseball reporting:
The “real old Jamake,” guy? Whatever—this man has clearly got column inches to fill. And then:
Who has a baseball game to report on when there are girls to scrupulously detail?
At this point, you might be thinking that this guy should get back to the game at hand instead of ranking the glorious blossoms of the rose garden that is female college baseball enthusiasts. No? Okay. What were they wearing?
That explains it: He fancies himself a novelist. Say what you will about this reporter’s choice to obscure the whole ballgame with testimony on gowns “such as made Paris a memory” and excuses for his own lechery—it beats his baseball reporting:
Yeah, where are the girls again?
Comments
Leave a Reply
You can follow any responses to this entry through its comments RSS feed.
Blogs Linking to this Article
-
Linked From: June 30th, 2009"Classy? Rather! Pep? Plenty Of It!" [Girls, Girls, Girls] by Funny Celebrity . info
1:00 pm[...] Sexist has dug up this little gem, a clipping from a 1909 Harvard vs. Yale baseball game, in which the writer fills several inches of [...]
-
Linked From: July 2nd, 2009Last Week’s Most Popular Blog Posts - The Sexist - Washington City Paper
4:44 pm[...] America’s birthday than reading a bunch of random shit about sex on the Internet? 1. This Week in Sexist History: Girls, Girls, Girls Edition, an indulgence in olde-tyme sports writing. I say it’s sexist! Commenter says it isn’t! [...]
-
Linked From: July 9th, 2009Bingles and bungles were bunched in the breakaway « Viva Cerveceros
11:44 am[...] July 9 by The Mighty Boosh I was linked to this post in the Washington City Paper’s blog The Sexist and it included what I can only assume to be old-timey baseball speak, describing the 1909 [...]
-
Linked From: July 9th, 2009Vintage Sexism Finds Modern Defenders - The Sexist - Washington City Paper
12:05 pm[...] this commenter’s response to a 1909 sports reporter’s rhapsodic, objectifying, and paragraphs-long detailing of all girls in the audience. It’s an account which has apparently aged well over the past [...]
-
Linked From: July 22nd, 2009This Week In Sexist History: Bathing Beauties Edition - The Sexist - Washington City Paper
9:46 am[...] What’s lifting these male vacationers from the depths of their pathetic existences? If you’ve been studying your Sexist History, you’d know that the answer probably starts with Pretty and ends with Girls: [...]
4:26 pm
Sexist, but the sportswriting was much more colorful back then. I’m sure the author even put some thought into it.
4:48 pm
How on earth is that sexist? I don’t see one comment that is disparaging of women. He’s simply admiring the abundance of women at the event, and his writing is actually fantastic, much better than most of the BS that’s out there today.
4:49 pm
Bingles and bungles were bunched in the breakaway? Honestly, I wish all reporting was still like this.
8:03 am
Interesting how it has to be explained to some readers 100 years later that an article published 100 years ago describing women purely as objects for men’s pleasure is sexist.
11:10 am
@Steve: Amazing, actually.