Beyond Babedom

We're (way) over 40. Deal with it.

Rules were made to be. . .

Girls  follow the rules.  Boys don’t. When you were a kid, following the rules meant you’d be rewarded . . . I think they called it being a  “teacher’s pet”.  Growing up, we women over 40 were praised for being “little ladies” while those bad, bad boys had to stay after school. But, boys played sports so they had coaches, and when you play sports you’re taught to break rules – as long as you can get away with it – because the most important thing is winning. Just ask Joe Paterno.

Forget about those fairy tales where coaches preach team work and school spirit. It’s about winning, pure and simple. At all costs. And what’s needed to win? Anything and everything.  Tackle low; hit hard and rough up the other players. Is it any wonder that all those men, brought up with these “principles” were able to ignore a 10 year old boy being raped by one of their own?

They ignored a coach who was raping a 10 year old boy. How much do you have to want to win to do that?

But, it isn’t just about men making (and breaking) the rules, and running the world (which they do) and women expecting to be rewarded for following the rules, but constantly being marginalized for doing so.

Actually, it is.

As adults, women still follow the rules. We still believe that, if we do everything we’re asked to do, we’ll get ahead. We are such chumps. Men know this, and they take advantage of us, left and right. Need something done that involves long hours and no reward? Ask a woman! Need to cut your payroll and pile that extra job on someone else? Give it to a woman! When you see some guy getting honored for all the charitable work he’s done, you better believe there was a woman or two doing most of the grunt work and getting none of the credit. And, here we are, still, thinking, “If I work really hard and show them I’m a team player, I’ll be rewarded.” It’s time for us to grow up.  We take on more and more responsibility and get less and less. We follow the rules and go nowhere. They break the rules and control the strings. And we get really pissed off about it. When will we learn?

Oh, I know. I’m guilty of it too. I’ve complained to my manager about a guy who stole my accounts. His response: but, he got the sale! I complained – but that was breaking one of their rules: never whine. That’s what they call us when we get screwed and point it out: whiners. Because we expect them to follow the rules they instituted. But what we really need to learn is that the rules are made to be broken.

Instead of getting mad, maybe we have to learn how to break the rules, too. Maybe we have to lie, ignore injustice (and rape, apparently. Just ask Coach Sandusky.) and back-stab our co-workers. At the very least, we have to stop expecting the male population – especially those we report up to – to practice fairness and equity.

Or we can say pretty please. . .

 

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 12th, 2011 at 9:13 AM and is filed under Career. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

  1. Karl says:

    I totally disagree! The disgusting PSU situation is the exception, not the rule.
    When you play college football you are constnatly taught to follow the rules both on and off the field .Those of you who have played football know that the values and discipline learned in football stay with you throughout your life and always give you an advantage, particularly during tough times.This article seems like yet another generalized cheap shot at men.

  2. Pat says:

    Wow, this is sooo right in so many ways

  3. Roberta says:

    I don’t know much about college football except for watching U of M team play when my son went to school there. What I do know is that these horrific acts were glossed over, and it appears , without anyone having a guilty conscience. Learning more and more,as this is revealed, makes me disgusted that the men who knew something were protecting their own ass. So what would a woman have done?

  4. Tony says:

    I just want to know why Paterno didn’t dismiss Sandusky years ago? No doubt he recognized the gravity of the situation. Somebody has to “talk”. There’s more to this.

  5. Rob says:

    You got this one wrong cuz, and Karl is 100% correct. As disgusting as this whole PSU situation is, all you are doing here is piling on. In general, sports instill a discipline to do things right that is not taught in most of society. There are bad actors in all walks of life, but that doesn’t mean that there is an institutional issue here with football in general. Yes, it is true that money has corrupted big-time college football to a degree, but don’t paint all of football with the Sandusky brush. Next thing you know, you are going to want to ban football from society.

  6. Judy Herring says:

    What happened at Penn State in 2002, was terrible. And, what everyone needs to pay attention to is how the victims will be treated and helped. Hopefully, the legal system will handle this properly and Sandusky will receive the punishment he deserves. As far as Paterno and the others who knew about the abuse – I bet nothing was said to protect the University’s reputation. How ironic – they were more concerned about the school!! Did they really think it would never be revealed?? The rules that need to be adhered to is any type of abuse MUST be reported immediately and people must not worry about their reputation for doing so.

  7. Chris Munson says:

    Okay kids, how many of you have taken the time to actually read the Grand Jury Information…anyone?…anyone?

    Here’s the link. You’ll have to paste it into your browser, or do a search for “Penn State Grand Jury Report”. I know it’s a chore, but well worth the effort.

    http://www.attorneygeneral.gov/uploadedFiles/Press/Sandusky-Grand-Jury-Presentment.pdf

    For those of you not wanting to take the time and make the effort, here’s what the media is missing: THIS HAPPENS ALL THE TIME; just not with a long time coach in a Big Ten school.

    Sandusky, (he’s, like, the Perpetrator), is a classic sexual abuse predator; setting up a “honey trap” in the form of a charity for troubled kids, then exploiting them. The only reason why this is such a kerfuffle is that the University of Pennsylvania is a high profile media target, and college football is also high profile sport into which the Great Unwashed can pour their prejudices and preferences.

    Law Enforcement, the High School in which one of the victims was enrolled, Child Protective Services in Pennsylvania all these entities muffed it. But Penn State and Paterno get all the heat. Why? you ask. Because it sells newspapers, gets eyes on the screens, and the righteous tut-tutting about the tenuous connections between sports, and sexual abuse is simply one more way to ignore the real issue which is we want to regard this as an aberrant “once in a lifetime” incident.

    There’s precious little known, and less practiced, when it comes to investigation of sexual abuse allegations. I know. I did it for three and a half years. It’s a hideously difficult crime to determine. If our society took the offense seriously, it would devote more resources to the problem. It’s a failure of institutions on many levels, private and public, that such activity as displayed in this instant was not taken seriously, or addressed properly over the course of more than a decade. Unwanted, vulnerable children will continue to be the chum on which such predators feed until we get serious about the problem. So don’t blame it on “Men”. Don’t blame it on sports programs. Blame it on the indifference and neglect with which we ALL regard the problem of sexual abuse until it smacks us in the chops, we have a fit, and punish everybody in sight, then go back to grumbling about whether we’re being taxed too much, or the other guy is being taxed too little.

  8. David says:

    Karl is right. No one is taught to engage in or allow this kind of behavior. Don’t let your dislike for sports cloud your judgment, Lucille!

    • But, David, I don’t hate sports. I just hate being forced to watch/listen to them. And I hate my tax dollars being spent on privately-owned sports stadiums.

      As for no one being taught “to engage in or allow this kind of behavior”. . . ah, David. You are so naive. Maybe you never played sports or never had a coach who suggested you take that extra step before shooting a basket, or foul another player covertly or even surreptitiously twist the other quarterback’s leg after a tackle. I, on the other hand, knew a lot of athletes in high school and college and many did get this kind of advice/coaching.

  9. Judy Herring says:

    I think I finally understand what you were trying to say…the other night my husband was watching cage fighting and I was making dinner (kitchen and family room are one big room) fighter A kicked fighter B directly in the groin – fighter A deducted one full point – ref tells fighter A “watch those inside kicks”. fight resumes – fighter A kicks fighter B in the groin again – ref tells fighter A “no more inside kicks stay to the outside” (you can do an inside kick in cage fighting)fight resumes – fighter A kicks fighter B in the groin a third time – ref tells fighter A ” i said no more inside kicks”. Figher A ignored what the ref said and ignored the rules of cage fighting.I can see accidently kicking in the groin once, these guys move really fast, but a second and third time?? It was deliberate. He made up his own rules to have the advantage and injure his opponent to weaken him. Yep….I get it now Lucille!!!!

  10. Steven says:

    In sports, women are taught the same “moves” as men, having been on the peripherals of Tn women’s basketball with Pat Summit. In business, women have outmaneuvered me in the past for business in certain accounts. I know for a fact, because I trained her in sales and professionalism, that because of wearing short skirts while dealing with predominately male ee accounts, she wrote more business than the average male agent, me. Just saying… both sides of the coin.

    • Lucille says:

      But that’s my point, Steve. Boys learn to break the rules; in our generation, girls didn’t get the chance to play sports, so we were never taught to break the rules. We were taught that if you DID play by the rules, you’d get ahead. And if you didn’t, you were bad. Now, girls have the dubious “advantage” of playing team sports so coaches have taught them to ignore the rules as well as the boys do!

      • And there is a difference between “outmaneuvering” and wearing a short skirt and breaking the rules. So, it really isn’t two sides of the same coin. If men want to wear tight pants to get more sales, more power to them.
        But I have a feeling that won’t really work, even when they’re selling to women. That, my friend, is future blog post. . .

  11. David says:

    Please explain to me the difference between outmaneuvering and wearing a short skirt? I’m naive about this, but a woman dresses in a way that draws attention to her physical attributes acknowldeges she will not be judged on her abilities to do the job. Maybe Carly Fiorina can add something to this discussion on how woman always play fair! Really, Lucille, drawing a direct line between taking an extra step to the basket and child abuse! Going a long way to make a dubious point.

    • There is no difference between outmaneuvering and wearing a short skirt. But there IS a difference between outmaneuvering and breaking the rules. That was my point.

      And my point of mentioning taking an extra step in basketball was merely to illustrate how boys are taught to break the rules. I never said there was a direct link between being taught that pulling on another player’s jersey or any of the other rule breaking moves a player might make are the equivalent of child abuse. I simply pointed out that there is an overarching forgiveness for rule breaking that women (at least in my generation) do not take advantage of, and that this environment could lead some people to believe that they can get away with anything.

      You have to admit, men as a group, tend to break more rules than women – who commits most of the crimes?

  12. Tony says:

    We’re going through a marked change in society, as you may all attest to. What was once considered right and just and “playing by the rules” are now considered mediocre operating. I have heard it expressed that cheating is in fact a means to an end, and if you cannot get there by another other means, then the cheater that doesn’t get caught, gets ahead. Of course the “ole boys network” is also still strongly in effect.

    In sports I have never been “coached” to cheat, but as a wiley player cheating to level the playing field is somewhat accepted. The player who grabs the jersey of another player may gain a step or two and/or may slow the faster opponent just enough. If the ref doesn’t catch you, fine. You all have seen the video of the female college soccer player who roughs up her opponent and throws her to the ground? that s par for the course. As a matter of fact in football “Pulling of opponents hair is not a foul”

    In terms of Penn St. It is a fact that a young boy was raped by Sandusky, however we don’t know what details was told to Paterno by the witnesses father. The story may have been muddled or whitewashed, with details left out by that time, which is known to happen. I assume the facts will come out as to what exactly was told to Paterno. It’s the old “can and string” thing.

    . . . my experience is based on HS sports and Varsity Basketball at Monmouth U. in the 70’s.

Leave a Reply

Click here to cancel reply.

Feed Shark