Men Are From Crampon, Women Are From Talon

Shaker Audrey sends from France this advertisement for Sex and the City 2:


[If you can't view the image, it's a movie poster featuring a picture of a disembodied female leg from mid-shin down, the foot clad in a stiletto heel, underneath which is being crushed a soccer ball. Above the image are the words "Talons vs. Crampons," which translates in context to "High Heels vs. Cleats."]

Audrey writes (which I am sharing with her permission):

I saw the ad enclosed on my way to work this morning. The headline reads "High heels vs Cleats".

The rhetoric of the "war of the sexes" is very strong nowadays, with the World Cup. You can't turn on the TV without either watching a match or a "comedian" explaining how he had to gag / send away / lock away his wife for a month, so that he could watch his beloved football (har har har!).

There's not a shit ton of this in the US right now, but only because soccer isn't the obsession in the States (yet) that it is pretty much everywhere else in the world.

There has, however, been some pretty obnoxiously sexist commentary during the broadcasts, perhaps none so infuriating as the repeatedly intoned assertion leading up to Saturday's match between England the US that there has never been as eagerly anticipated match "in the history of US soccer." A history which includes both World Cup wins by the US women's soccer team, including their win in 1999, when the US was hosting and the entire country was going wild for that team of women, whom Sports Illustrated made their '99 Sportspeople of the Year.

And then there has been the discussion of notable US soccer players, which has not contained a single mention of any of those women, not even Mia Hamm, despite the fact that she is the most well-known US national team soccer player of all time, and probably the most popular female soccer player in the world. She is the only female athlete after whom I've ever heard a male friend actively petition to name his daughter.

She's a big fucking deal. But she doesn't warrant a mention at the Men's World Cup.

Oh, excuse me. The World Cup.

One of Iain's male friends recently had a daughter, and has been asking Iain a lot of questions about soccer during the World Cup. When Iain expressed being pleased that he was getting into soccer, his friend said (approximately), "Well, my daughter's not going to play football, and she's not going to play hockey, and she's not going to play baseball, although she might play softball, but she might play soccer. So I want to learn the game." Blub.

It's thrilling to know that there is a young generation of USian men who view soccer as a sport they can play with their daughters, in which there is institutional and organizational support for girls in the sport, from the youngest peewee leagues. That's due in no small part to the success of the US women's soccer team, which has already won two World Cups.

Something the US announcers seem to have forgotten.