After Atalanta

So the elimination of "lady" from the nickname of the University of Arkansas is being presented as a smart and logical marketing choice. Who cares what the reason is (okay, I care and I will talk about that in a second)? It's gone. The Lady Razorbacks (ridiculous sounding of course, though I have heard worse) are no more. The University of Arkansas is merging its men's and women's athletic departments (not surprisingly the woman who was athletic director of the women's athletic department has been demoted and is now answering to the former men's athletic director--a subject for another post. Of course this woman also thought the lady prefix "made sense" when the departments were separate). And to create a stronger brand they decided to just all be one happy athletic department full of Razorbacks. And no one seems to mind. Yeah! Though no one is really presenting this as the right thing to do for equity. The praise they will get from feminists an...

Some Louisiana institutions of higher education are sticking to "tradition" and retaining the lady part of the sports teams' nicknames--the women's teams, of course. I feel like I have addressed this issue enough and I don't think I have anything really new and/or profound to add to the discussion. Helen over at Women's Hoops Blog talks about it smartly and succinctly when she employs her gender reverse test and replaces ladies with gentlemen and women with men. I wonder if such play with language would convince some of those women who want to be treated like ladies that this so-called tradition isn't really in their best interest. They cite history and tradition, but do they know what it really means--historically, traditionally--to be treated like a lady? Sure lady has a class (and race) connotation that would seem to suggest that women who qualified as ladies (versus working class women and many women of color) had a better life; were somehow less oppr...