Simone Biles attacks Riley Gaines

Wonder what Simone thinks?

This is a positive outcome at least.

Public figures who do interviews often re-tweet the media outlet's tweet of their interview, to further their outreach. It's a common thing. I doubt JessaWoo would have a problem with it if the interview blurb had her discussing defence, education, the tanking economy of her state, or her favourite book club review. It's just because Gaines was asked about Biles attack that JessaWoo has a problem with it.

There, is the hypocrisy.

Edit: just googled Biles' height. And converted my 148cm in an online height conversion calculator. Biles and I are exactly the same height! Wow, how about that! It's a rare height. So yeah, I get her, and I get her insecurity. I empathise through actual personal experience. But, I have never insulted a taller girl or woman because of their height. So at least I have that.

And I am actually around Biles' height, I'd have to check what her actual height is, but I'm 148cm (don't know what that is in feet/inches) and I think we're actuallty the same height, so I get her insecurity on a personal experience level. But I've never bullied or insulted tall girls to make myself feel better.

I suspect she herself has been body-shamed a lot and been picked on due to her small stature and so like other bullies, feels that she can make herself feel better if she attacks the 'pretty blonde tall girl'. Sometimes people who have been bullied go on to bully others. Drag others down to make themselves feel better about themselves. I suspect there is a lot of of underlying jealousy there. She looks at Gaines and feels jealousy and resentment, so picks on her height (which is strange as Gaines is completely average height) to make herself feel better. It's a sad truism that to cope and survive the bullied often becomes the bully.

I'm sure if you look on certain message boards, you can find some Murican right wing bros saying that women shouldn't play sports. But that's really really fringe. It's not a view you would find aired on Fox or Daily Wire or National Review.

What you can find quite easily in the US is shitloads of Republican voting women who don't fit a British mould of left-leaning feminism, but who are extremely assertive in pushing for what they see as the interests of women and girls, and who get very angry when their daughter risks losing out on a sports scholarship - or being injured - because some bloke has identified onto the team.

That's Riley's audience. This might not be obvious to Brits who think any American woman to the right of Kamala Harris is a weird meek tradwife from a Louis Theroux show. (And actually, if the Harris campaign is anything to go by, that's how many Blue Tribe Americans think of women in the Red Tribe.)

Apparently she retweeted it. The horror.

That is not her twitter account....

So it seems your issue is simply that you don't like right wing women. That you would give Gaines more benefit of the doubt if she were left wing?
Somehow I truly doubt that.

So womens rights activists are only allowed to be from the left? This speaks to the narrow-minded and bigoted purity spiral I spoken of before. There are plenty of good, decent right wing women who advocate for womens rights. And there are plenty of so-called 'left' wing women who advocate against womens rights. You are stuck in the 'goodies' vs 'baddies' tribalist purity spiral. It is indeed, narrow-minded and bigoted in it's very essence. Being right wing doesn't mean you're bad. Being left wing doesn't mean you are a good person or have the truth.

Secondly, Biles advocating to remove the ladder from girls and to prioritise boys' 'feelz' is as conservative and right wing as you can get. Those who advocate to remove the work our foremother feminists achieved, those spaces, those rights, are conservative. Regardless of if they promote the lie that they are left wing. They are not 'left wing'. Not at all. I am politically very left wing and Labour member and voter. Though feeling politically homeless right now. And I would sooner listen to a conservative woman advocating fair sports for girls and the retention of our spaces, than a pseudo so-called 'left wing' Labour woman advocating for the removal of all those rights to centre men's feelz.

But then again, despite my membership and how I vote, I am not brainwashed nor a unthinking tribalist that thinks conservative are the 'baddies' and our side are the goodies. I am not that shallow or insular or narrow-minded. I am realistic. And consider values and beliefs on their merit. Not the brand label on the outside. Maybe that's what I'm doing wrong. Who knows.

Brilliantly put. So accurate.

Absolutely agree.

When someone says "wife" in their profile like that, it's sending a signal. So I'm interested to see what she does next. I think her husband is a NFL player, so still active in sport.

Some US conservatives think that sport is unbecoming for women, like voting - they want to ban in. Trans women in women's sports is applauded because it means fewer women. I don't think we have conservatives in this country taking that line.

Also, on surrogacy, manyconservatives in the US are all for it because they see it as a way of saving embryos which would otherwise be discarded. And again that's not an argument you really see herr.

The US is a very different place and we don't necessarily pick up on the messaging.

Quite. Anti-feminism has it's roots in conservativism. That's the irony and hypocrisy. Saying females don't have rights to fair sport, or to safety, dignity and privacy in female only spaces. It's the height of conservatism. It's pseudo-left to claim that removing all that our foremother feminists fought bloody hard for is somehow 'progressive'. Most of these anti-feminists/pro-trans people are conservative at heart, as it's not 'progressive' to remove women and girls' hard fought for rights. It is no surprise to me that a woman who advocates for Mens Rights (which is what pro-trans is, covertly or not so covertly to us who can see) would list being a 'wife' first and foremost. They are the quintessential conservatives.

And transactivists don't make money when they go on non-right news outlets? If you follow any social media of some of the well-known transactivists, you will see that literally the brand of being trans is all they have, all they live for. At thi point it is beyond a social contagion, it's a manic obsession where they have no reason to live except from being seen as being trans. Go on social media. They have in their name 'transmoma', 'translicious', 'transpride', 'transforever', etc. Everything despite the pompoms and cheerleading or lyrics to sweet transoline in their bio. It's an intense over-identified mania and love and fixation. An infatuation. It's akin to Scientology where any dissent will cause the 'suppressor' to be thrown out, and there reason for living or being if it's not for the trans c*lt. It's like Jonestown imo, they even say "Death before detransition". If those cult-like words don't make your blood run cold, I don't know what to say.

And it's all they make their money from. Several of them are unemployed. Being trans is their entire identity, their entire reason for being alive. They don't discuss sport, the desecration of bee colonies, the war (Ukraine or Gaza), their favourite tv show. Or even mention their families at all. They have zero point to being alive apart from being trans as a currency.

Yet you say absolutely nothing about that.

You don't realise; every comment you make so far can be argued to be duplicitous and hypocritical, and applies equally - at bare minimum - to your side.

It's a purist spiral that these people are on. Fox News are the 'enemy'. So therefore, anyone, anyone who appears on there is evil and the devil. These people are narrow-minded and bigoted in their outlook and they can't see it. They genuinely, truly can't see their own narrow-mindedness and bigotry. Their echo chamber depends on there being 'goodies' and 'baddies' and anyone who dares venture out of that BINARY, out of their tribalist purist self-righteous pious echo chamber is suspect.

It never dawns on them that they are creating a Separatist society where people are too afraid to cultivate cross-isle understanding. If feminists only have one outlet available to them, and that outlet is the 'wrong un' then the expectations is that feminists stay silent. Suffer in silence. And have no platform. Because to them, NO platform is better than the 'wrong un' platform. They truly are bigots in the very definition of the word. It's the "Hitler was a vegetarian so all vegetarians are evil" school of thought. It is true, pure bigotry.

*NB My post is referring to those on the left (or even the right, come to think of it, if they are refusing to go on ABC/BBC/CNN, etc) in general who see not conferring with 'perceived' 'enemy' at all as the most pure choice, not to or about any poster on this thread or site.

Exactly. I’m concerned that @JessaWoo doesn't really understand what “engagement farming” is.

Ooohhh yah! It's about someone who has a neflix doc coming out wanting to promote it. Even if that means bullying a feminist, and body shaming her. I mean, it's fair game, right?

Right?

Anything for the engagement farming. Anything for the almighty buck! Up the bucks! Down the sisterhood.

And you think she was wrong to retweet it? I mean, it's true! Biles IS pulling the ladder up behind her. If the truth hurts you, maybe ask yourself why.

LittleBitofBread

Yes. Considering the previous tweet mentioned bullying, you are quite correct in how the accusation appeared.

For me it brought back the feeling of being bullied and heckled at school (by the girls, I should add, never the boys) who delighted in calling me a bloke because I was tall. It was hurtful and mortifying. It's such a spiteful thing for her to have said. I've gone right off her.

There was no need to body shame. But also, significantly, no need to make the comparison to Riley being a 'man' sized woman.

And FFS, I and all my family are 'man sized' women. The fact she posted that comment after the other initial attack could be indicative that it was a very deliberate comment.

I just honestly can't understand why she felt the need to bring Riley's body into it.

Even if Simone was 100% right about everything - a totally unprovoked attack on another women's body is not ok. You'd think Simone, of all people, would get that.

It made me suspect that her character is not what I thought it was/how it's been portrayed.

There's something that has been particularly bugging me about Simone's body shaming of Riley and I think I've worked out what it is.

Simone Biles is undoubtedly an exceptionally talented and hard working gymnast. But could she have been a gold medalist in swimming? Or rowing? Or weight lifting? No. Why not? Because she's 4ft8.

She is a tiny woman, competing in a sport where being small gives you a natural advantage.

Riley Gaines is a fairly petite woman, competing in a sport where being tall gives you a natural advantage.

In the race where Riley tied for 5th place with Lia Thomas, the female swimmers who placed 1st and 3rd were both over 6ft, meaning that height-wise at least, they were both around the same height as Lia Thomas. (That's not to say that Lia didn't still have a physical advantage over them in terms of overall body composition.)

And yet teeny tiny Simone Biles has the gall to describe Riley Gaines (who is 5ft5 and weighs about 9 and a half stone) as "man-size"?

No, Riley Gaines is very much NOT "man-size", and that is half the point. The majority of the most successful female swimmers ARE "man-size", albeit not "man-shape", and that is part of the reason they've managed to get to the very top. None of them could get to the top in gymnastics, and none of the elite gymnasts could get to the top in swimming.

Riley Gaines, being a woman of average height and slim build, is probably too small to get to the top in swimming and too big to get to the top in gymnastics.

Given that she tied for 5th place with a male athlete who is 8 inches taller than her and has been through male puberty, if Riley Gaines actually were "man-size" she might have won Olympic medals in her sport, like Simone.

The only people who don't centre men are feminists.

And believing TWAW is incompatible with feminism.