Site things: This blog hasn’t been updated in a long period of time because I kind of burnt myself out on serious writing over the summer. I planned a lot of entries, even recently with the bullshit about Hugo Schwyzer (and the ensuing lessons taught to Big Feminism by women of color), and the Harriet Tubman sex tape comedy video debacle. But that just didn’t happen. I’ll hopefully explain why in the future, but instead, let’s praise the present.

 

Even as a pro wrestling fan, I didn’t really think much of Darren Young for a long time. He was a competent talent in an entertaining tag team, but not much of what he did inspired me past a certain level. He is different from Jason Collins in that I knew who he was before the announcement, but in much the same way, what I knew about him became irrelevant immediately after today. Darren Young becomes the first person in professional wrestling’s biggest company to come out as openly gay while under contract with them.

This is not the first time a gay performer has been under contract with WWE, but it may be the first time WWE is forced to become serious about an issue that has all but dominated mainstream culture in the past year. Unfortunately, past examples of gay performers don’t have positive endings in WWE. Orlando Jordan, a bisexual performer, was fired for his sexual escapades with an underaged boy. He subsequently was hired by the competing Total Nonstop Action (which yes, has the fucking stupid initials of TNA). And, well, this sort of thing happened on a weekly basis:

Another performer, Chris Kanyon, revealed that he was homosexual after his time with WWE was finished and said that he was harassed and bullied for his homosexuality during his time with the company. Kanyon committed suicide in April 2010.

Ultimately, the question lies in what WWE does with Young as a performer. They cannot afford to do to him what others have had done to them in the past. WWE is at a high in terms of casual cultural acceptance. They will never reach the level of legitimate sport in terms of common popularity, but their audience aim is also different. The success of a reality show like Total Divas has allowed the sort of cache that the NFL can barely touch with a show like Hard Knocks. More to the point, though, is that WWE is suddenly at a place which often is their most dangerous. They are at a place where they are holding the ball and have to do everything to avoid dropping it.

We’re likely to see a change in how WWE perceives Young, as his role as a bad guy simply will not cut it. But then it leaves a tougher question on if they try too hard to make Young’s sexuality into foreground, not good territory for pro wrestling to say the least and certainly not the territory that would label athletes like Collins, were he to be signed by another NBA team this fall. Even MMA star Liz Carmouche, whose fanbase has significantly grown upon her revelation as a lesbian, has also avoided being overly stereotyped by her sexuality, and is simply billed as a hero.

But all of this is speculative. For right now, in this moment, Darren Young is a hero. He’s broken open a taboo that wrestling always hid and hinted at, but never acknowledged. He’s also done it in a manner that suggests that this time, things just might be different. Let’s hope the era of wrestlers being bad guys for their choice of lifestyle is a bygone time.

A few days ago, when the whole situation with SB5 happened in the Texas House, I was immediately discouraged. It was cool that there was a definite public presence, but I couldn’t help but realize that the government was going to do what they can to subvert thousands of women protesting in their chambers. It also was the most basic thing that people could not get right. Protecting women’s bodies was a thing that somehow the government could not get right. That in itself is deeply saddening.

I wasn’t in on the ground floor on Wendy Davis’ filibuster. I didn’t hear about it until late last night, as I napped away almost the entirety of the day. I didn’t even tune in to the stream of her efforts until 11:30 PM Central. I’m not even certain I’ve ever heard her voice. And yet, she is immediately the biggest inspiration that I can remember in a long time.

Sometimes, it doesn’t take much to feel energized as a feminist. It is the small things, like when Ellen Page uses an AMA on Reddit to discuss the positives of feminist pornography or when a state senator uses her means to fight for what is right, time and bodily functions be damned. Applaud ’em. Thanks for being badass in levels I cannot even comprehend at 1:17 AM Central time. It doesn’t matter how fucking dumb the legislature is, or how easily they’ve violated a set rule. What matters is that there are still badasses out there.

CLAP FOR ‘EM CLAP FOR ‘EM CLAP FOR ‘EM

“I don’t believe women should be in the male dressing room.”

— Don Cherry, April 27, 2013, Hockey Night in Canada

File this under the obvious shit is obvious camp that Don Cherry, noted old institution in Canadian hockey lore, more or less doesn’t want female reporters to do their job because of some myth about dude testosterone or some archaic belief. This is a dumb belief to have and certainly being 79 years old is no excuse but this type of offhand idiocy is almost expected from the older set of commentators.

So I’m going to give Don Cherry some important things to add to his assessment:

— If women are allowed to use the internet, how will men be able to function? We will simply be too distracted by women to ever work on important things again.
— Why are women allowed to report? What if men accidentally give a quote they didn’t mean because they were simply too turned on at the time? What an inconvenience!
— If the pinkos are allowed to take over, then herp derp communism. (Shoutout for Don Cherry Wiki fans.)

I could go on, but here’s the real breaks: Cherry, while known for his rash of ridiculous as hell statements, will barely get touched for this opinion. It doesn’t even compare in the mainstream eye to his use of “pinko” or his ethnic comments in the eyes of a Wikipedia page or elsewhere. This will not suddenly break him as an employee. Yet this comment, or at least the implications therein, is baffling and stupid. Female journalists are essentially left out in the cold because of the “boys will be boys” mindset. I don’t need to tell you that this is a tacit fortification of rape culture. In fact, I don’t need to tell you that this is anything other than incredible stupidity from an old fella. So let’s leave it at that.

A couple of days ago, I had the pleasure to be interviewed by one of my favorite people in the world, musician Adam Morrow of Callooh! Callay! fame. Due to some site troubles, we’ll put up a little chunk of that interview on here and then I will direct you to go to WellThatsCool.com for the whole thing. Good times.

I met Trey Irby for the first time at some point in the fall of 2010. He paced around the mostly empty upstairs bar of Mellow Mushroom. It was definitely a Thursday, and probably 9pm, long before the first band would start, but there he was, PBR tallboy in hand, ready for music. He talked to folks with gusto, he absorbed all of the music that was played with an attentiveness that would thrill most bar bands hoping someone “gets it,” and he laughed loudly and genuinely. And that’s Trey. Since then, he has amassed a body of work that speaks to that spirit, and conveys just how much he is thinking about not only music, but how it fits in a larger cultural landscape. Where are we right now? He’s perpetually grasping to figure that out, whether it be in this column, at the shows he frequents, or in 140 characters on Twitter. It was high time someone asked him about himself.

What was the last thing you listened to?

Mobb Deep’s “Shook Ones (Part II),” out of all things. Just before that it was Wye Oak’s “Holy, Holy.” I think I’m only doing that because I have to be like “I listen to everything, I’m not just into hip-hop!”

Where were you born?

I was born in Oak Grove, Louisiana. Very, very small town in the northeast Louisiana area. Thats why, if anytime you pay attention to my Facebook posts, because I know everyone does, thats why I have a sudden, random liking of the University of Louisiana-Monroe, ’cause I would have actually ended up going there if we had stayed in Louisiana and not moved here.

So where did you grow up?

I grew up here, basically.

When did you move to Tuscaloosa?

About 5. I would have been about 5. In Oak Grove, you really could not get a job anywhere. Its one of those, its a classic small town situation. You would either be working at the gas station or you’d be working at, I don’t know, the Merle Norman or whatever.

So by the age of 16, Trey Irby is living in Tuscaloosa. Where’d you go to school?

Hillcrest.

Introduce me to 16 year old Trey Irby.

He was…kind of a dork. There’s a lot of other layers to this. The famous picture of me now, in the Eagles (basketball) jersey and all that, that was from my Christian school days, when I went to Open Door Christian School. But when I went to 10th grade, I went to public school, and obviously I didn’t know a damn thing about public school. But it was probably the best decision I ever made. I was probably going to have all this resentment if I didn’t leave Christian school.

16 year old Trey Irby, he started to pay attention to the Internet a lot. Like, go on an online forum, and they’d be like, “You should listen to this band…they’re called the New Pornographers!” and I was like, “Huh, ok, I’ll listen to a couple songs.” I kind of grew into this indie hipster…there was part of me that was like, “I’m getting really into these bands that I found on this site called Pitchfork!”

—

The rest will obviously be seen in due time. And if you are in Tuscaloosa, come out to Green Bar tonight to see Callooh! Callay! perform. You’ll enjoy it.

We didn’t do any coverage on the Steubenville rape case because truth be told, I felt that capable writers, bloggers, and twitterers covered the hell out of the sad bullshit throughout that case, namely the accusatory nature of “she was drunk, so of course she deserved it” logic and how fucking dumb it is. Through it, there was some fiery discussion on institutionalized rape and rape culture. So naturally, I’m going to very loosely tie it in with what I’ve thought about a lot. The connection isn’t completely loose: a lot of the criticism on how CNN covers Steubenville is in the American idolatry of athletics and ultimately the masculine athlete. This idolatry is buoyed by the popularity of sports games.

Still, I’m going to delve more brightly on a top that I feel a little more qualified to discuss in sports video games. I may have mentioned on either this blog or the blogs I’ve posted on noted wonderful site WellThatsCool.com that last year, I attempted a book on the Madden NFL franchise, the leading franchise in sports video gaming. This project, through my own laziness, has basically went on the backburner for now, but the game franchise obviously has not. In Madden’s success, the EA Sports division of mega company Electronic Arts has generated many of the examples we will talk about.

This is once again where we note the unfortunate attitudes about women in sports before we even remotely discuss women in video games. Despite the phenomenal work of talents like Baylor basketball star Brittany Griner, the US women’s national soccer team, et al, there is no representative from these sectors represented in the very sports games I love. I state this to not immediately blame game companies, but lament these sort of circumstances. Griner is not out of college yet, and EA no longer even puts out basketball games related to college basketball, ending the last franchise to do so in NCAA Basketball in 2009. As far as I’m aware, there have not been video games about women’s softball or women’s gymnastics (bar a token playable sequence in one of the many Olympics games).

And unfortunately, that is more of a sigh about commodities than about the cultural implications. If college basketball video games, a simulation of one of the biggest tournaments in North American sports, are not financially feasible for a major company, then women’s softball isn’t exactly going to be a big seller. Yet there is one thing that throws me off on the subject. EA themselves have been very selective in what sports will portray women. In FIFA, a sport represented by two US women’s World Cup teams, there have been zero female representations. All this despite the abilities and tactics that are closer to the men’s game than one would think. (I think a Bill Simmons podcast from the era of the 2011 Women’s World Cup gives surprising credence to this last point as well. And yes, Bill fucking Simmons proves a point about female athletes. I’m shocked, too.)

EA has put women in two of their major sports titles as athletes, the NHL series and the Tiger Woods series, both in only the past two years. And again, it is funny as hell that some of the most progressive portrayals of female athletes come from the Tiger Woods games. Yet one of these makes sense. The Tiger Woods games have a responsibility to properly simulate a world where Michelle Wie has a very real possibility to reach to men’s ranks of the PGA tour. And before I researched this, I assumed there had never been a woman that participated in an NHL game. I was wrong, however, as Canadian women’s national hockey team goalie Manon Rhéaume did play in preseason NHL games in the 1990s. However, there are zero active women in the rosters of NHL teams. Yet the recent NHL games allow a player to create women, reportedly in response to a young girl’s letter to EA asking for women to be put into the game.

This is where representation becomes important. It seems very small to have women as playable characters in sports where the top leagues hold zero women athletes, but this is also very complex. Women do compete in admittedly segregated forms of sport from the WNBA to the (now closed) Women’s Professional Soccer league and, yes, the Lingerie Football League. Though the last one is a cheesecake take on real sports, it is not out of the realm of possibility to have women in professional leagues. It is as a friend of mine would put it in that this is a very small thing, but small things actually hold important beacons on representation. It is still scary to me that sports culture is viewed as a masculine affair. More men compete in this, but women participating in sports known for male competition have a higher lens of examination.

But more accurately, if these simulations are slight blends of reality and fantasy, why not represent everyone? Why can’t someone make an athlete built like She-Hulk that destroys the NBA game by game? Why not have a tough running back who is also able to tell her story through sports games’ increasing “reality in fiction” social media modes? Hell, who says a person can’t just make a great bit player because that’s something they always wanted to do? This isn’t very hard. The technology is there. Put women in sports games, 2K and EA.

Much of this site is obviously devoted to issues (with a z or something), but I feel like I want to look inward to why I do this. During the time this blog has been active, I have been in a creative writing class. I find this probably too interesting and don’t expect people to get personally attached to that. But my writing has evolved with how I feel. I think about being a flawed person, at points. A lot of the pieces on Boner Lulz come from first drafts and they might read like stream of consciousness. I don’t know any other way to respond than to just vent or gush, context be damned. This is informal stuff. This is the first draft of the manifesto I’ve written for this class, but moreover, I’m going to be revising this. I’m curious to see where the final product ends up.

I always have a difficult time writing about why I write without sounding like a colossal asshole. So I apologize if I come off like that. I don’t think I ever started writing because of any great impetus, only that athletics and other general school things were always out of the question. My favorite writer is Chuck Klosterman because he has this weird tendency to change his point from something about say football to a discussion on culture within an essay. This has gotten me in trouble during actual academic writing, but it inspires the hell out of me.

I tend to place my manifesto as telling people that I “do writing.” Obviously, this is grammatically incorrect. No one, according to the sentence structure of English language, “does” writing. They write. But I don’t think there’s another way I really think about writing as a whole. And this isn’t to say I dislike writing, by the way, but that I feel that I avoid things that would clearly make me a better writer but also too much of a worker.

I detest revision. This draft is my first draft of this piece and it will be the last. Revision would make my work better, obviously. I think I trick myself into thinking that typing the last word is completion. I don’t recommend this style. I see that people come off way better by editing. But I can’t prove this. I’ve never seen where I feel my thoughts would be more succinct. It’s a weird complex, very much like writing in the first place.

I was a silent kid, very much of the introverted world. I dug into video games and doing things like organizing a videotape collection when everything else around me was on the floor. This is how I write. I feel a bit guilty when someone tells me that I have a wonderful concept for a piece, but that the actual execution is all over the place. I procrastinate and I’m very guilty of creating my own problems in a college environment. I am a contradiction. I need deadlines to finish a thing, but I detest those deadlines all the same.