An idea worth looking at but maybe a little extreme. There are good and bad men and women coaches. Some think it's OK to yell at and otherwise abuse athletes. Others take a more reasonable approach.
An idea worth looking at but maybe a little extreme. There are good and bad men and women coaches. Some think it's OK to yell at and otherwise abuse athletes. Others take a more reasonable approach.
I don't know what the solution is, but a coach-athlete relationship is usually a very unbalanced power situation that some people take advantage of. How many times have you heard about female athletes getting involved with their coach...and how many times do you think it has happened (or the coach sexually harassed the athlete) that we haven't?
Let's face it: some men are jerks and take advantage of women when they get the chance. Perhaps the "solution" is that could be like a male doctor seeing a female patient; ideally, there should also be another woman present.
This is one of the odd results of a few decades of feminism (by the way, I'm a woman and I do consider myself a feminist in some respects--just a critical one less susceptible to marching in lockstep with the party line just because everyone else is doing it). Before, men and women spent most time apart. There was the "man's world"--the office, the lumberyard, the steel mill, the farm--and the "women's world"--the home and the children. That setup, for better or worse, has been pretty much the case since the beginning of human history. But things changed massively in the 60s/70s and now we have a world where men and women work closely alongside across pretty much all fields. That's a HUGE difference from 98% of earlier human history.
What we're seeing now, I think, is the shift away from that. Women are more inclined to work with women, feel safer and more comfortable with their own sex, even if we now have the option not to. That's completely understandable, just as it's completely understandable for men to feel uncomfortable working closely with women. I completely sympathize with men who are utterly and sincerely confused about how to interact with women in the workplace, particularly with all the baffling and overblown Me Too stories. I also sympathize with women who actually did feel abused and mistreated by powerful men. Not to mention, the biological difference when it comes to the athletic field--male bodies are much more predictable than female bodies, and you can probably safely tell a male athlete an arbitrary number to hit on the scale and he will improve. Women's weight can change every few days, depending on hormones and the time of the month. To expect a male to know all that when it's not firsthand is quite a big ask.
I think the commentators who are taking the party-line feminist angle on this whole story and conversation (ahem--the Oiselle crowd--though, I love your clothes!) on this are wrong. Salazar himself seems a true villain, but for smaller, more gray-area cases, it seems to more of residual confusion about gender dynamics than of outright malice and abuse.
Anybody here ever heard of Joe Vigil?