Is it just me, or did anyone else notice that the members of the Rutger's Women's Basketball team--all the ones I have seen pictures of--had styled hair?   The only "naturals" were the limp heads of the white team members.

Forget offensive.  What Imus said was untrue.

Actually, Harry Shearer did notice it, and worked it into a hilarious skit on his radio program, "Le Show."

You may quite rightly assume that I am more likely to listen to Shearer than Imus.  I mostly listen to public radio, and don't accuse me of being elitist, I just listen to what I like.  I also happen to spend a lot of time on a country hill where I don't get TV reception but I do get great public radio--WFMU, WJFF, WAMC, a great jazz station out of Philly, etc.  When I'm in NYC I don't have much time for radio.

Not sure I've ever actually heard Imus' show--but ages ago I did model "punk" fashion for some friends of mine on some cable thing called "Imus Plus."  Hope nobody saw that.

So here are my disqualifications for an opinion:  not an Imus listener, not black, not athletic.  What I am is, I am a woman.  Imus' highly publicized remark struck me as more sexist than anything else.

I had never before heard a white person use the term "nappy head."  I thought it was something African-Americans used among themselves.  Maybe Imus picked it up off a rap record or heard it on the street, and thought it would give him some nasty sort of street cred.  But I am guessing it is the equivalent of "hairy-legged hippie" (which I have heard used, incidentally, by a white guy, in reference to Natalie Merchant) or "greasy-haired skank."  Can you imagine if Imus had used such terms for upper-middle class white teenage girls?  The reaction would have been interesting, actually.  What if he had called male teenagers "pimply-faced geeks?"

I think everyone, male and female, remembers what a painful time adolescence and young adulthood can be and how being publicly labeled unappealing could be--literally--a catalyst for suicide.

Imus seemed to be speaking from some sort of (I hope) long past era in which women who dared to compete athletically were automatically assumed to be unattractive.

That makes sense, right?  Women with terrific muscle tone, stamina, and flexibility couldn't be any fun in the sack, right?

Not much fun for a man who is insecure and easily intimidated. 

Once upon a time, I was intimidated by girl athletes.  All through elementary school and junior high.  Myopic ( I wore glasses and an eye patch from age two), asthmatic, I felt bullied.  Mind you, I always knew how much worse it would have been to be a boy and be like me--I would have got the shit beat outta me.  But the humiliation, and always being last to be picked on a team, were bad enough.

Funny thing, by the last couple of years of high school, I started to catch up.  Oh, yeah, I got a little better, learned to deal with my bad depth perception, realized personal health is a good thing, PE not just some fascist plot to torture me and pummel me into submission.  Got more confident.  But more to the point, the girls who had been good at sports started to backslide.  Never got the glory the male athletes did, didn't expect the scholarships, or have the dream of going pro. 

And it certainly did not make them more popular with boys. 

Why not?  Why do girls tend to flock around male athletes but not vice versa?  Sure, some female athletes are gay (so are a lot of male athletes) and I don't know whether or not that helps them in the romance department.  But society seemed to be sending a strong message of discouragement to these girls who really seemed to get a lot of pleasure from sports.

The Williams' sisters, I would hope, have done a lot to glamorize women in sports.  The higher profile of women's pro basketball teams.  "A League of Our Own."  But then, Babe Zaharias was a glamorous superstar athlete decades ago, and all it takes are petty little jabs like Imus' to send a tremendous amount of hard work sliding downhill.

No joy in his losing his job.  Word has it he's a nice guy personally, and he does good work with charity.  The real hope is that the attention focussed on these nice-looking girls will do something to change the weak-minded attitude he expressed about female beauty.

My husband just bought an old videotape of "Pat and Mike" at a thrift shop.  I think I'll go watch that tonight.