The True North, Strong And Free

Canada's women's hockey team celebrated an Olympic gold medal like any other team would celebrate:  they grab a few beers, smoke some stogies, and swipe the Zamboni.  Amanda Marcotte points out that some folks have a problem with this.

Oh, I’m sure people will swear up and down that men would get the same treatment.  And maybe they will....from here on out.  But let’s not fool ourselves here.  Some of the complaints are serious reaches, and not just when you express the idea that hockey players guzzling champagne (which is what the male winners of the Stanley Cup do as a tradition) is somehow an embarrassment to hockey’s image.  That they had to fend off complaints that this encouraged smoking is even sillier, but the mother of all concern troll complaints is that a player on the team was “underage” at 18, which is the drinking age in many parts of Canada.  That’s the sort of thing that screams “reach”, and the reaching is obviously due to the fact that a whole lot of people still have problems with female athletes, especially when they behave like athletes.

This tension seems pronounced when it comes to the Olympics, where a lot of properly feminine sports that involve costumes and the athletes starving themselves---like ice skating and gymnastics---are promoted heavily, and where women’s ski jump is still being kept out, with outdated arguments about ovary-jiggling being employed.  A lot of the Olympics organizers take the notion that the athletes are role models way too seriously, and when you start talking “role model” expectations and women, you’re going to start seeing a lot of sexist assumptions about ladylike behavior being employed.  Tracy Clark-Flory found at least one blogger using this incident to slam the very idea of women play “men’s” sports.  I wish hockey was that much of a threat to the patriarchy. 

Amanda absolutely has a point.  I seem to remember the USA men's hockey team trashed their hotel in 1998.  Nobody seemed to care then.  Frankly, having a celebration like this out on the ice, sharing the love in front of Vancouver's faithful, on home soil after winning a gold medal in the country's national sport?

Yeah, you get to swipe the Zamboni and chug a damn brew.  Lay off.  These athletes played hard, won big, and won it for the home country in the Olympics.  They've earned it.  Light it up, ladies.