This article (there's a video too) was about a pretty hard punch that a 6 foot 8 woman's basketball player named Brittney Griner planted on opponent Jordan Barncastle. As I was reading the article, some descriptive words jumped out at me. Words such as "unsavory" and "outburts" were used to show how distasteful it is to see a "lady" conduct herself on the court. I am not disputing the fact that what she did was a reflection of poor sportmanship, lack of respect for another player and innapropriate, but these incidents occur much more frequently in male sports without making the evening news or getting a million hits on youtube. Kim Mulkey, Griner's coach, announced that she would be benching her player for another game in addition to the National Collegiate Athletic Association's standard one-game suspension for a physical altercation. The coach's decision in punishment is between her and her player, but I am curious if this additional punishment would have been applied against a male athlete? Mark Krug, an NJCAA spokesman noted that during the 2008-9 academic year, there were 101 total ejections in all of NJCAA women's sports and that only 37 of those were considered "violent ejections" ;during the same academic year, there were 648 total ejections in men's games, 177 of which were "violent." I really like the way Carrie L. Lukas, vice president for policy and economics for the Independent Women's Forum, put it into words when she said, "This is part of a larger girls-gone-wild appreciation society has for girls doing bad things. Girls are either a goody-two-shoes or a total bad-ass. We need to give them space to just be girls."
KIN 332I - Ali Fernandez
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