Rotten teeth & pretty hair
Moving and thinking slowly, which is my style, today's thoughts are on things the TV showed me this weekend that made me think about physical beauty, or lack thereof, and what it means and how much of a difference it does or doesn't make. Crap like that.
First up was the speedy cutie Danica Patrick, who was about as overexposed as an "athlete" (quotes used not because she's a woman, but because she's a race car driver, something I have a hard time thinking of as an athlete) could be without a) winning or b) getting naked and/or arrested (please note: just guaranteed myself tons of visits from searches for "Danica Patrick naked").
There was a decent amount of criticism that this overexposure was only because of her looks, and while this is somewhat fair, it's also a little ridiculous. She was one of only a handful of women ever to race at all in the Indy 500, and she was among the favorites to win. She's young, she's confident, she finished fourth (and was leading at one point very late in the race) and there's no reason at all not to get excited about a woman doing that well and having that much promise such an overwhelmingly male-dominated sport.
But...the looks don't hurt. As much as we all want to pretend that we evaluate people on their merits, the simple fact is that good-looking people are, um, good to look at. It's just fun to look at them. And it's just better that we all take a deep breath and admit that we're a lot more interested in, say, the story of a female race-car driver when she happens to be really cute and have gorgeous hair.
On the opposite side of the coin...well, on another coin altogether...okay, on another coin of a completely different currency is former Pogues singer Shane MacGowan, who I saw a documentary of on Sunday. Not only is he a horrible living cautionary tale of both alcoholism and dental neglect, but he kind of seems like a bastard, and his grating, self-worshiping laugh just makes him downright vile. But...he's a genius. A man who took both punk and Celtic music and made them both uniquely his own can look and act like pretty much whatever he wants, and still end up with a extremely cute longtime girlfriend who worships him in spite of his personality that an hour-and-a-half documentary can't seem to find a single positive point about.
So lets sum up this pointless and superfluous post: the more fascinating and accomplished someone is, the less attractive they have to be to be noticed. The more attractive someone is, the less they have to accomplish to get noticed. And if you're someone like Danica Patrick, who is both attractive and reasonably accomplished, no one shuts up about you.
Thus concludes entry #2 of "I realized at the end of it that it was a totally stupid post, but I'd spent all that time writing it so I may as well publish" week.
4 comments:
I'll just say the things I always say when people put quotations around the word athlete when referring to racecar drivers, or proclaim so smugly that "all they ever do is stomp on the gas and turn left once in a while. anyone can do that". No. anyone can't do that.
Drivers are squeezed into a very compact space for three or more hours. They battle fatigue, dehydration, and have to maintainan extrodinarily high level of concentration for the entire time. No restroom breaks, no halftime, no time-outs. Pit stops are usually in the neighborhood of 14 seconds, and that's the only respite they get. When you get in your car and drive a couple hundred miles, you get exhausted. You complain of being stiff and you need to stretch your legs. And you've been going 70 miles an hour with a cushion of about 20 feet between you and the next car. These people are going close to or (especially in the case of Indy or F-1) in excess of 200 miles per hour, and the next car is about seven or eight inches away. That takes an exceptional amount of skill to do that, and to constantly make minor adjustments to your car and the other cars around, and the track conditions, and the meteorological conditions. There ain't no "sunshine delay" either. The margin for error is so microscopically small at those speeds and with such little space between the cars. If these drivers weren't athletes and were devoid of any physical skill as so many people seem to think, nobody would ever finish a race, because every single car would be in the wall the entire time, or there would be too many multiple-car wrecks.
I know, I know. You'll say ..."yes, they have a complicated and difficult job, but they're not athltes because it isn't their physical skill that wins or loses the competition. They have machines". That may be true, but the cars are theoretically identical to one another in terms of all the measurements and weights, and engine capacities. The pit crews tweak things that can be tweaked and the drivers go out there and make it happen. You have to admit that there's skill involved and that much of that skill is on the physical level. I don't know what else defines an athlete. They have physical strength, physical skill and stamina. They compete. And unlike football, basketball, baseball, hockey or soccer players, they know that they could easily die doing what they do.
I'm not that much of a racing fan, so I don't know why I care so much, but I do.
Wow! I didn't realize I said all that! ;-)
It's not that I don't think that driving doesn't take skill...it obviously does. Otherwise, how would any one driver have an advantage over any others? And of course it takes physical stamina and endurance. No question.
But to say it again, I have a hard time thinking of a race car driver as an athlete. Being a sports spectator to me is being able to actually see the athletes move, and actually watching the physical act one human being go up against another. To me, watching a car race is like watching someone play video games: it can still be really thrilling, it certainly takes a lot of admirable skill, but ultimately, it lacks the visible physical athleticism that make most other sports worth watching. To me. This is my opinion. This is how I feel. One man. In a world where sports are king.
It's not that I don't think that these competitions have less worth. It's that adding a motor into the equation, while not devaluing racing, seems to put it in another realm of competition, one where I have a hard time thinking of the drivers as "athletes". They're drivers.
As long as you word it like that, I can't really object. You like to see the athletes move. No problem. That makes sense. I just have serious issue with people who say "all they do is sit there and turn left once in a while" or for F-1 cars "all they do is sit there and turn right once in a while". At least we can agree that they're not just "sitting there and turning once in a while"
You could compare them with jockeys in horse racing. True, they are not the ones physically generating the movement, but there is skill and a certain level of physical stamina required.
By the way, my job requires me to sit at a desk and turn around once in a while. (Not to mention my mad excel skills...I can pivot a table faster than anyone.) I'd like for people to start referring to me as an athlete. Or just introduce me to Danica Patrick. That would be fine too.
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