Hegemony

 From page 200 of THIS IS HOW IT ALWAYS IS, by Laurie Frankel:

"'...what Mr. Mohan meant is that men have most of the jobs in sports, especially the ones that pay well, and that's not fair, nor is it in the rules, but that's the case anyway, and it's self-perpetuating. Do you know what that means?'

Poppy shook her head.

'It means that the fact that that's the way it is means that keeps being the way it is. It means when a little girl says she wants to be a baseball announcer when she grows up, someone tells her she can't because there are no female baseball announcers, which means no one grows up to be one. And so on.'"

Have you ever read something from a novel that feels like it simultaneously smacked you in the face and punched you in the gut? That's how this passage hit me.

I was a Tom boy. I dressed like Kristy, was shy like Mary-Anne, artistic like Claudia, and I was a dead-ringer for Mallory. (I wanted to be Stacey.) As much as I dressed like Kristy, I never had her voice or strength or confidence. I did, however, know that I wanted to be involved in baseball.

As it became more and more clear that I had zero athletic abilities, no matter how hard I tried, I realized that playing baseball was not going to be in the cards for me. I would not be the first female player on the Red Sox. Once I accepted this, I figured that I would go into managing or announcing. Fine, at least it was still baseball. It was not fine. This was the mid-nineties. Girls didn't get those jobs. Girls weren't supposed to dream about those jobs.

Everyone from teachers, to friends, to parents, told me girls couldn't get/do those kinds of jobs. It didn't matter if I worked 10 or even 1,000 times harder than everyone else, I couldn't do it. I always, always, think to these crushing moments. All the times I was told 'no' because of my gender. I always think, 'fuck you for saying that' but these days? Fuck me for listening.