Hundreds of years ago, when I was an athletic young goddess going out with the teenage head of the Pantheon Tennis Team, Jove stopped me at the heavenly court gates: “Let him win,” he whispered.
“Not if I can beat him,” I said.
“Beat him and you’ll lose him as both a partner and a lover,” Jove replied.
This suggestion that goddesses and women must feign fragility and sacrifice the fun of a real competition (which tennis IS, after all) in order to inflate the egos (and thus win the love) of gods and men infuriated me, as it has infuriated earth girls everywhere. Even on earth, didn’t this ancient piece of nonsense die along with Leave it to Beaver? Even one of the endless cautionary tales, Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid, whose jacket copy says, “a timeless story of courage, sacrifice, and the triumph of unselfish love,” cleaned up its act for the movie version, downplaying how MUCH courage, sacrifice and unselfish love was put smack on Little Mermaid’s tail and not on the Prince’s.
But the thinking is alive and well even in your most sophisticated urban high schools.
Hanna Berner, 17, is such a good tennis player that she’s the only girl on the Beacon High School tennis team on the Upper West Side of New York City, a team that has won the three major high school tournaments this year and earned the coveted Mayor’s Cup. Her game is described in The New York Times as “aggressive,” and yet she nevertheless says she always has to prove herself worthy (aggressive enough) to play with the boys.
But watch as players and coaches grumble at the very idea of playing against such a talented girl. One angry boy, losing to her the other day, broke his racket in a rage. Huh? This is permissible? Surely not. But what did his coach say: That he should wake up and realize that some girls are even as physically powerful as boys these days–and isn’t that specatacular? That he has the good luck to be playing against a girl who is, like any other opponent, worthy of his greatest respect? No, his coach said Hannah Berner’s team had an unfair advantage because her presence unnerved the boys. “It’s a lose-lose situation,” he said. “If he wins, he’s supposed to win. If he loses he’s lost to a girl.”
What century, sir, are you living in? Are you aware that it’s only a lose-lose situation for a losing boy-a boy who might need an attitude update and who, after all, might have won? Certainly it’s a win-win situation for teenagers everywhere who see how talented a girl can be (a girl, by the way, who didn’t have the option of playing on a girls team because there isn’t one), a girl playing with and against a mass of testosterone and muscle and height and weight who hasn’t once mentioned “being unnerved” by it.
Listen, I’m all for love. But I’ll never, ever tell you-if you’re a teenager– to let boys win so they won’t be “unnerved”? I’ll never, ever tell you , if you’re a beautiful, high-achieving young woman, not to try too hard to beat the guys in the boardroom, lest the men become uncomfortable. I’ll never, ever tell you high-achieving 21st century earth darlings out there that because the consciousness of many of the men you’re working with, dating, marrying and procreating with is locked somewhere back in the 20th century, you should regress. I wrote a book, in my earthly incarnation, about the men who ask a woman to hold back everything strong and powerful and competitive and real in her, in the name of love, and it’s called Drama Kings: The Men Who Drive Strong Women Crazy. I mention it because loving a Drama King is loving one of these guys who is unnerved by a woman who is truly herself; and because it means knowing you’ll never be known, and never loved back.
