Taking about women....

Talk about arriving at the party late. I’m going to talk about Elizabeth Lambert. Yes, I realize that everything that can possibly be said about the University of New Mexico defender has already been said. The frat boys have chimed in with their lesbian fantasies and the hardcore feminists have reminded us how misogynistic and double standard the coverage of the incident has been. It’s pretty clear that the young woman was guilty of doing little more than what Kevin Harmse earned a pro career with and that the insane over-reaction by much of the mainstream media had everything to do with what body parts she does or does not have.

So, I’m not going to add to that noise. Rather, I wish to use her story as a jumping off point to criticise my own coverage of women’s football.

Here we are in the 20th post of my all day marathon and it’s the first reference to the women’s game. In spite of the fact that nearly half the registered players in Canada are female, and that the women’s national team is much higher ranked than the men’s, this blog puts 90 per cent of its focus on the men’s game. And I’m a source that tends to be at least aware of the program.

I sometimes wonder if I’m the worst kind of hypocrite when it comes to the women’s game. The good liberal in me feels that I should try to provide some coverage, but the coverage I provide is far more surface than it is with men’s soccer. I can’t fake a base of knowledge that isn’t there and I will fully admit that what knowledge I have comes from me researching, rather than seeking out info for the sake of it. I will support the women’s program, but I’m not always sure I’m a fan of it.

So does that make my attempts to cover it condescending? I don’t know. I do know that when the Lambert story broke that most soccer blogs dragged out their seldom used “girlz game” label for the day and had a good laugh at the crazy blond chick trying to behead her opponent. I resisted, because I thought I’d be clichéd, and decided to let the whole thing pass.

What I didn’t do was try and tell a good story about the women’s game. I didn’t seek out info on the Canadian team and I didn’t write an opinion piece on their preparation heading into a World Cup qualifying campaign. Instead I sat back and smugly played the morally superior card by not touching the Lambert story.

I’m not sure I was all that superior.

I’m also not sure if there is an audience here for women’s news. Certainly, what stories I do run tend to get very few if any comments. I have no way of tracking individual posts for amount of reads, but I have my suspicions.

I don’t pretend to have any answers with this post, but I wanted to throw it out there. Just how interested are you in seeing women’s coverage here?


This is the twentieth post in my 24-hours of blogging marathon. The purpose is to raise some funds to allow The 24th Minute to continue to provide quality (and quantity) coverage of Canadian, MLS and world football.

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