You may have already heard about the piece the Rangers posted on their fan site this morning called “A Girl’s Guide to Watching the Rangers.” The piece was so awful and ill-received, they pulled it within about an hour. You can still read the full text here.
We’ve seen this sort of mysogynistic crap on the internet before, but never before has it been Tweeted out by a professional team. My guess is that the fan site did this and the parent company knew nothing about it, but that’s not really an excuse. Clearly they’re going to have some content review policies put in place.
This BuzzFeed reaction piece is pretty great, if only for the tweets they include that show some pretty darn smart (and snarky) Rangers fans reacting to this drivel.
I was all set to spend my lunch hour penning my own reaction when MaggieSox sent me the link to this piece over at Stanley Cup of Chowder that ties together all kinds of lady fandom issues into one really well-written package. Forget whatever crap I’d have given you – read this instead.
Really, I was going to past a few of the better parts here for you, but I ended up copying most of the text, which ain’t right, so just do yourself a favor and go read it.
I commented over there and I’ll re-post it here:
I’d like to say that there’s no reason you couldn’t substitute any sport’s fandom into this piece and not still get the point across. Female baseball, football, soccer … fans go through the same “prove yourself” mentality.
Texy has it right in saying that we have to stop hating on each other – how can we ask guys not to judge us when we’re judging the hell out of each other?
And I’ll admit this was a hard thing for me to come to terms with, especially when it comes to the pink hat crowd – I always felt like I was justified in my anger because they were making it harder for me, a “real fan.” But we all started out somewhere – I know I’m hardcore, but I certainly didn’t come out of the womb spouting about crappy PP or WAR. So now I try to be open-armed to all the ladies who want to watch and I’ll do my best to make them feel welcome and help explain anything I can.
Maggiesox is the one that’s always telling me I can’t judge on the pink hatters and I’ve spent a long time defending my right to find them problematic, but really she’s right and I need to learn to be accepting of all female fans. They’re not giving me a bad name and there’s nothing wrong with the way the find their way to fandom.
I’m still annoyed at all the folks that won’t just wear their team’s colors (I’m looking at you, orange Yankee hat-wearing dude), but ultimately if they want to spend $40 on that hat, that’s their prerogative, right?
Ladies... 