House of Mirrors

Tonight, I'll be at Storm-Mercury, a game I strongly urge you to watch. I devoted much of a recent Works to Lauren Jackson's brilliance; tonight, she'll be crowned the league's MVP. It will be her third such award. The Storm do some unreal things when they really get moving, and the Mercury, who are every bit the WNBA's answer to the Suns, will certainly encourage that. The Mercury may have lost Cappie Pondexter, but are greatly improved defensively -- albeit in a totally weird, kickstart-the-break way that Seth Pollack explained earlier in the season.

Bill Russell has once again shown up to grant the Storm his blessings, and on the off-chance that you've never seen Diana Taurasi play, this SI article from a while pretty much captures why you'll be pleasantly stunned.

Now then. In the wake of my recent flurry of WNBA posts, I've found out -- the hard way, mind you -- that appearance and the WNBA are touchy issues. This sentence: "Jackson is the league's most dominant player, a tough-as-nails, strong, athletic center whose garish make-up and terrible red dye-job are somewhere between war paint and a kabuki mask," was a faux pas, because it sounded like I was insulting LJ's appearance. Never mind that I was also saying Jackson was capable of things on the court that yours truly had never seen before; "garish" and "terrible" were just too harsh. I guess I could have toned it down, at the expense of what I was trying to build up writing-wise. And, as if it weren't readily apparent that "war paint" and lookin' good suggests a complicated dance of signifiers, I spelled it out in a later FD post. But then I suggested that Cappie's crazy 'do might be better for her image than a ponytail, and was accused of objectification or trying to limit CP's life-horizons.



Okay, now we're wandering into that murky realm where, depending on the situation, a double-standard can be either good or bad. Gendered bodies, and the work they do, are at the forefront of any discussion of women's athletics. I know this. I can't help but wonder, though -- hasn't anyone noticed how much the appearance of male athletes is discussed, almost as a matter of course? When are the Nuggets brought up without their tattoos sneaking in, usually as a punchline?

Iverson -- who, as I mentioned earlier, had his hair braided before every game to look his best -- was often discussed in terms of bodily attributes. While we rarely discuss how attractive NBA players, or any male athletes, are or aren't, sports are really, really homoerotic. Sorry. No one has ever bothered to explain how "man-crush" isn't totally gay. We ooh and ah over the bodies of LeBron James or Amar'e Stoudemire, as if this were the essence of their being; "stud" is a really weird word to throw about so casually, since it evokes both slavery and sexual performance. And yeah, some dudes get called ugly -- primarily white ones, but that might just be a coincidence. The point is, athletes are aestheticized, even objectified. Because of our very sexist outside world, bringing this into the WNBA sets out all sorts of alarms. At the same time, the way bodies -- especially the black ones -- is discussed in basketball should make us no less comfortable. And let's not even get into the peculiar role fashion has played in shaping the league's image over the last decade.

Here's the caveat: NBA players make millions upon millions of dollars. They can deal with it. They can take it. In the WNBA, pride and dignity are part of all they have. If you like that reasoning, walk away now, and revisit that entire William Rhoden-inspired debate that came out of a certain Comic Sans outburst.

I'm not trying to draw a false equivalency. Women and men have different attitudes about their appearances, and these will invariably manifest themselves in the way they present themselves as athletes -- both on and off the court. It's more complicated for them. However, to suppose that male athletes face none of these same issues, and in some cases (like Iverson) find themselves as physically scrutinized as any woman would be, is some serious tunnel vision. I don't want to say "it comes with the territory," nor do I want to deny WNBA players their woman-hood. At the same time, though, their situation doesn't stand in opposition to the coverage of male basketball players -- in fact, it's a chance for us to be a little more self-aware in the way we discuss all athletes.

She Loves You Too

Hopefully you got a chance to read my piece on Lauren Jackson, and what the WNBA has to do with the Positional Revolution. Apparently, any WNBA lead is like kryptonite for NBA fans, even when the column contains three times as much men's content underneath. Oh well; you are going to have to click on it for the photo, otherwise this post might not make sense.

There's one point that I left out, lest everyone on both sides get angry at me. I wrote about LJ's demented in-game appearance. She looks terrifying, but because she does so using make-up and dye, there's also an inclination to judge her as "looking like shit." These are not only traditional signifiers of femininity, or beauty, but ones that identify both as a process of alteration, or aspiration to a universal ideal. The ideal is unattainable; Jackson uses them to reify individuality, while at the same time trading in their connotations: grotesque, damaged, even crazy.

The irony is that, even if other WNBA players go out of their ways to look "girly" in a variety of context, off the court Jackson is the only one who consistently, blatantly sexualized herself along those same lines. On the court, she is hunched, glowering, and from a traditional standpoint, unattractive. Which is the point -- she's kicking ass, not making pretty. There are plenty of WNBA players who do make a point of getting their hair did, and making their faces up right, before games. No shame in that, especially if it's a national broadcast. Think of Iverson and Melo with their braids.

Back to Jackson: do a photo search for her, and you'll find plenty of shots of the league's intimidating MVP nude, semi-nude, or modeling skimpy bathing suits. Without her Joker-esque get-up, Jackson isn't just striking, she's pretty damn hot. She knows it, and wants you to know, too. But not on the court. And if the WNBA has any concerns about its best player willingly objectifying herself, they are hard-pressed to voice them -- since when she plays, Lauren Jackson does more to deconstruct beauty rituals than a whole galley of theorists could do.

UPDATE: No idea why I labeled this "update". Anyway, kindly take a gander at my lengthy piece for FanHouse on hanging out with Dave Cowens and trying to go through an NBA practice. It has Barkley gossip!