Caroline Pla (10) with teammates

Caroline Pla, according to news reports, has played football in the Archdiocese league for six years and in the CYO league for two years before officials made her aware of the rule that prevents girls from participating in the league. Neither her coaches nor her teammates were aware of the rule, and by all accounts, Pla is a standout player: she was voted to the league’s all-star team following the 2012 season. The Archdiocese bent its rule to allow her to finish this season but has not changed it to allow her to continue playing, citing safety concerns, ABC News reports:

“CYO football is a full-contact sport designated for boys,” archdiocese spokesman Ken Gavin wrote in a statement to ABC News. “There has been some perceived ambiguity in the policy regarding this point. It is currently being reviewed and will be addressed moving forward to provide complete clarity.”

That isn’t exactly a strong reason to ban Pla, who has started a Change.org petition asking for reinstatement, from playing the game. There are more than 1,500 girls playing high school football across the country, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations, and the number has increased more than 17.5 percent from four years ago. Multiple women have earned chances to play football at the college level, including Katie Hnida, who became the first woman to score a point in an NCAA Division I game when she kicked an extra point for the University of New Mexico in 2003. And Sam Gordon, the 9-year-old football sensation, captured America’s attention earlier this year and ultimately ended up on a Wheaties box.

There isn’t an alternative available to Pla, who didn’t abandon a female football league to play with the boys. She’s simply playing on the only field, in the only league, available to her, and there is no evidence that she does not belong. But she isn’t alone: across sports, there are cultural and systemic barriers to female participation, and those are barriers we as a country have been tearing down in the four decades since Title IX became law. We’ve made progress, but as participation rates and funding levels (not to mention senseless rules like the one enforced by the Archdiocese) show, there is still progress to be made.

The Archdiocese’s concerns for her safety and well-being are legitimate, but they should not arise simply because Pla is a girl. It is becoming increasingly evident that football and the head injuries that can accompany it can pose serious risks to the futures of the young men and women who play it, and those injuries don’t discriminate based on gender. If the Archdiocese is truly concerned about safety, those concerns ought to cover all of its players, not just the ones who happen to be female.

Over at Wired, entertainment editor Laura Hudson (formerly the editor in chief of Comics Alliance) explores the understandable confusion that women who find themselves the target of violent threats on Facebook feel about Facebook’s refusal to take down some of that content, despite the clear statements in its terms of use that forbid bullying or the use of threats or hate speech against other users. Facebook, which responded to Hudson’s request for comment, didn’t clarify things as much as they seem to hope that they might:

Wired reached out to Facebook for a comment, and a representative clarified the site’s position:

“We take our Statement of Rights and Responsibilities very seriously and react quickly to remove reported content that violates our policies. In general, attempts at humor, even disgusting and distasteful ones, do not violate our policies. When real threats or statements of hate are made, however, we will remove them. We encourage people to report anything they feel violates our policies using the report links located throughout the site.”

What’s a threat and what’s a joke are both subjective things that depend on both the intent of the speaker and what’s heard by the person who is the target of their speech. What Facebook is effectively saying with this decision calculus that it’s willing to give more deference to speakers who say that they’re trying to be funny—a rationale that can be a very convenient shield for people who don’t want to be responsible for how their speech is received—than the fear of people who feel threatened. A joke doesn’t have to be “real” or effective in the same way a threat apparently does, a hugely subjective standard, to be actionable.

After I read Laura’s post, I read Melissa Gira Grant’s review of Katherine Losse’s memoir of working at Facebook, The Boy Kings. Grant urges us to recall Facebook’s origins as a site that scraped photos of women from existing databases and its transition to a site that got women to give up those images of themselves voluntarily. And she explains how Losse’s experience was part of a larger organizational disdain for customer service, even as a comfortable customer service experience was integral to the idea of getting people to be excited to and feel safe about sharing images and accounts of their personal lives online:

Facebook’s most valued employees—software engineers—relied on customer support staff largely in order to avoid direct contact with Facebook’s users. Rather than valuing their work as vital to operations, Facebook’s technical staff looked down on the support team, as if they were not much better than users themselves. “Personal contact with customers,” Losse writes, was viewed by the engineers as something “that couldn’t be automated, a dim reminder of the pre-industrial era…”…Women workers at Facebook, the customer service buffer between programmers and users, were charged with the social upkeep of this “safe space.” Hundreds of times a day, Facebook users would email Losse and the support team to ask, “What does poking mean?” “We always responded innocently,” Losse writes. “Being coy, not admitting the libidinal urges driving much of the site’s usage, was professionally necessary, a way to differentiate Facebook from the cheap and overtly sexual vibes of MySpace.”

It’s not particularly surprising to me that an organization that started with a culture of putting women in subordinate service positions, that regarded customer service as an irritant, and that’s reliant on getting people to put up data on the site might end up with some of the problems that Facebook has now. All of those tendencies militate against taking down content, against taking customer complaints seriously, and against valuing women’s perspectives over the overall needs of the site. But if Facebook continues to want women to feel safe living their digital lives openly on its platform, it may have to start communicating more clearly, and being more responsive, to women who feel threatened on its digital streets.

Over the past year, one of the most popular ways to call out sexism in the depictions of female superheroines or women on the covers of fantasy and science fiction novels has been to illustrate what it would look like if men assumed similar poses. Illustrators have posed the other members of The Avengers like Black Widow. Others staged a wide range of superheroes like Wonder Woman, whips or other objects snaking through their legs. The Hawkeye Initiative subs in Hawkeye in any number of ludicrous positions and costumes superheroines are drawn in. And novelist Jim Hines, who’s posed in similar positions as women on fantasy novel covers, challenged his fellow writer John Scalzi to a pose-off for charity.

But something Hines said about the reaction to the pose-off resonated with me, and clarified a bit of concern I’ve had about this particular trope. In an update to the original post introducing their entries, he noted: “I’ve also seen a few areas where response has begun to shift from, ‘I say, those poses seem remarkably impractical, and how exactly does one do that without dislocating one’s ankle?’ to ‘Hey, guys dressing or posing like girls are both ugly and hilarious!’” And in a follow-up called “Wait, What Are We Laughing At?” he wrote:

But if you’re laughing because you’re a straight guy and therefore must declare all male bodies brain-searingly ugly? If you’re laughing because you think a man in a dress is funny and should be mocked? In other words, if you’re laughing because of various aspects of ingrained sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and other discriminatory nonsense? Then you’ve missed the point so badly it’s not even funny…So please do me a favor. Step back and ask yourself what exactly you’re laughing at, and where that’s coming from. ‘Cause I’m starting to see some rather problematic reactions out there.

And this is what makes me nervous about this particular tactic for exposing sexism. What happens if people see these poses and think they’re ridiculous because it’s ridiculous to see a man pose like a woman, to see a man dressed like a woman, to see a man pretending he’s displaying sexual characteristics he doesn’t actually possess? And what if they walk away from these posts thinking that it’s silly for men to do these things, to dress this way, to pose like that—but that it’s perfectly natural for women to be presented this way.

I wonder if the solution is less to pose men like women, than to demonstrate what superheroes would look like in sexual situations, or if they were sexually aroused, and to place them in the context of doing their jobs. If we want to demonstrate that posing superheroines is ludicrous and sexist, we need to demonstrate that it’s because it undercuts their power, that it leaves them less prepared to respond to events taking place around them, that they have sources of power that aren’t sexual. And we need to demonstrate that the same thing is true for men, that their strength comes from muscles and brains rather than their genitalia, and that it would be odd to the point of utter illogic to suggest that it did.

I’ve written before about the ways in which anti-heroes wives tend to get judged even more harshly than the villainous men they’re married to. And in the Los Angeles Times today, the great Meredith Blake talked to me, the New Yorker’s television critic Emily Nussbaum, and Jezebel founder Anna Holmes about why that’s the case. Meredith, Emily, and Anna pointed out something I think is critically important: these characters are initially set up as obstacles at a point in the story when we still want to see these men succeed:

Shows like “Breaking Bad” encourage viewers to relate to men who do truly unspeakable things (poisoning children) while judging their wives for much smaller transgressions (retaliatory affairs). If they stand up to the men in their lives, they’re irritating obstacles; if they don’t, they’re hypocritical colluders. See also: Soprano, Carmela. “These women are called upon to provide the drama, to serve as roadblocks that the male protagonist has to get around,” says Anna Holmes, founder of the feminist website Jezebel.com.

The phenomenon frightens and perplexes series creator Vince Gilligan. “Skyler compared to Walt is Mother Teresa. She’s the hero of that duo, yet so many viewers are saying, Man, I wish she could get bumped off, killed off or otherwise get out of his way so he can really break bad,” he told The Times in an interview earlier this year. “I want as many people as I can to watch the show, but wow, I hope I’m not living next door to any of them.”…

“They’ve designed Betty as a character you’re supposed to react against. Even if you wanted to be sympathetic, it triggered in you as a viewer this kind of ‘Ha-ha!’ Nelson reaction,” says Nussbaum, referring to the bully from “The Simpsons.”

It’s one thing to have your characters have arcs and grow over a series of several seasons. It’s a harder thing to completely reverse polarity on your characters when you’ve established it so strongly from the beginning, too. While that’s an orientation that makes it easier for audiences to hate female characters than male characters, it’s a problem that also gets in the way of viewers appreciating the downfall of male characters, too. If characters don’t want to see Vic Mackey or Walter White punished, then they might find it frustrating to discover that the creators of their favorite shows side with the wives, rather than their anti-heroic husbands.

The vicious and ugly coordinated campaign to drive video blogger Anita Sarkeesian off the internet for the temerity of trying to raise money to support a series about the depictions of women in video games was one of the biggest stories in the feminist and geek spheres this year, and I’m glad to hear from Sarkeesian herself, through a talk she gave at TEDxWomen, precisely how unsuccessful that campaign was:

It’s amazing to hear that Sarkeesian is able to do this work full time, that a curriculum came out of her efforts, and perhaps most encouraging, that video game studios have invited Sarkeesian in to speak to them—the organizations that make the games that Sarkeesian’s haters would like to see stay reductive and as attuned to straight male fantasies turn out to be interested in her voice and perspectives.

But even more than knowing that Sarkeesian is still standing, still fighting, and appears to be bearing up psychologically just fine despite a campaign even more intense than some that have succeeded in pushing other women offline or out of covering certain areas of popular culture, it’s the way she explained what happened to her that is important. The attacks on her, she explained, were coordinated like a massively-multiplayer online game. Participants psyched each other up like they were fellow guild members, providing reinforcement for each other even as other voices condemned their actions. The escalation of the campaign was a form of leveling up. And Sarkeesian herself was turned into a boss character. That dynamic made the game sustainable, encouraged other people who might have otherwise sat on the sidelines to join in, and incentivized steadily worse behavior towards Sarkeesian. It worked at getting people participating. But at the end of the climactic boss fight, she’s still standing. For people who are considering gaming dynamics as an organizing tool, this is a powerful, if very negative, lesson about how to get participants to enlist in a campaign, if not how that campaign can be successful.

And the designation of Sarkeesian herself as an ultimate enemy is very telling. It’s one thing to enjoy depictions of attractive people of whichever gender you happen to be attracted to. It’s another to think you have a right to depictions of those people. And another entirely to be so attached to those depictions, and so uncomfortable or insecure about acknowledging that they might be problematic, talking about it, and enjoying them anyway that you get hysterically angry when someone proposes simply to analyze them. That says a lot more about you than your rational, intelligent, easily-supportable target. And it means that even if you succeed at whipping up a small, dedicated subculture to try to shut the thing you hate down, your chances of succeeding, and of being taken seriously by the outside world, are necessarily going to be limited. In a way, Anita Sarkeesian’s haters are like the Westboro Baptist Church: they can cause real emotional pain, but not substantive change, and they mostly exist as a reminder of their own increasingly marginal role in cultural or political life.