Kathleen Stock, Vogue & Bridges - the perfect Sunday morning read

[MrsOvertonsWindow]

A wonderful humorous article in today's Sunday Times about Vogue's inability to find any sportswomen this year to include in their Vogue 25 women "power list". Instead they lauded Emily Bridges and gave Emily space to moan about the unfairness of insisting that women's cycling remains for women & threatening to fight British cycling in the courts & the streets

Well worth a read this Sunday morning (along with articles by Sarah Ditum and Hadley Freeman). Share token to enjoy:

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/992bf3e8-43fd-11ee-bf34-ee777f6f2b5b?shareToken=51086949c8a70b63dc73442c3ab8e374

Many thanks!

Great article, thanks

Sarah Vine has a similar price in the Daily Mail this morning. Emily seems to be peaking lot of people , so : thanks Emily.

Brilliant- thank you!

I read it this morning - utterly marvellous.

Slightly off-topic, but I'm hoping that the pretty united anger against the Spanish football federation guy (not just for the kiss but for the appalling pressure he put on Hermoso to support and exonerate him) will help to peak a lot of people, because it shows how the issue of transwomen in women's sport sits within such an extreme disregard for women generally, among the various sports bureaucracies.

Hermoso's treatment shows how women in sport are always expected to roll over and facilitate men's interests, making it unsurprising that these bureaucracies happily allow men to steal their competition places and their medals.

Kathleen absolutely nails it. Vogue has ignored so many great women who could have represented sport in this list, instead choosing to centre an entitled male. I can’t believe more people haven’t opened their eyes to the blatant, almost comedic unfairness of males wanting to compete in women’s sport categories. It’s delusional and exclusionary. Women should not be excluded from their own competitions in order to pander to deluded men.

Thanks for the link, MrsOvertonsWindow. I enjoyed reading it. It is actually really sad that Vogue chose Emily in a year in which there have been so many examples of women excelling in sport.

”Contrary to what Vogue apparently thinks, allowing males to compete in women’s sport doesn’t “diversify” it, just as letting cheetahs run in men’s sprint races wouldn’t diversify male sport.”

Lovely! Thanks for the share token.

Thank you for the share token.

Vogue has been irrelevant for over a decade now. They are lurching from fad to fad trying to look relevant, which is ironic given their name and once-held status as trend-setters/cutting edge/curators of cool.

Fantastic article! A perfect blend of hard-hitting points, intelligence and wit.

I wonder how long it will be until the following (quote from the article) is adopted in real life by the EDI training gurus to improve diversity? Who needs categories, right?

..should we applaud the presence in a race of a Scotsman, an octogenarian, an endomorph or someone born on a Tuesday?

Perhaps Emily could fight for this too, in the courts and in the streets.

Kathleen is a great writer, always so enjoyable. I love her description of magazines like Vogue causing a kind of 'panicky self-consciousness bordering on insanity' in the reader 😁

I enjoyed that thanks for the share token @MrsOvertonsWindow

Thanks OP! I love Kathleen Stock.

Kathleen Stock writes like an angel. This piece justifies this month's Times subscription all on its own.

Great article, and the mention of Hannah Mouncey gives me an opportunity to link to Mouncey’s screenshotted tweet here twitter.com/RukhsanaSukhan/status/1387420970332262406?s=20

Glad that everyone enjoyed it as much as I did - as did the commentators below (once they reopened the comments after closing them last night).

It's great to see Bridge's hyperbole and ludicrous demands exposed with gentle humour in this way.

EB et al certainly are “defining and redefining” what it is to be a woman.

I’m long passed being polite- they and their proponents can piss off.

I have no time for Vogue and the like. And this is a fantastic article.

It's a consequence of never being told NO isn't it? Some people just escalate and never learn to regulate their behaviour - as we saw with the appalling SJ Barker (now back in prison)
I'm also reminded of the transgender runner Lauren Jeska who escalated his fury at being investigated by British Athletics because he was running on the women's races, to attempted murder (and was jailed for 18 years )
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-39266777

The piece closes with a rousing commitment to fight British Cycling’s decision “in the courts and the streets”.

it's delusion on an industrial scale. Do they really think that people 'in the streets' will back them?

Bring it on, they're going to get a nasty shock.

Has there been any response at all from Vogue?

Wonderful article. Absolutely nails it. Shows Vogue's utter vapidness . Being a woman to Vogue is surely nothing more than a simple matter of aesthetics and / or the money to invest in your appearance.

I'm no sports expert but surely a lioness could have been on there?!

Thankyou for the article.

I remember reading an article a few years ago about why the Uk cycling team (men’s presumably) were doing so well in competitions.

They said the coaches looked at every tiny aspect of racing and tweaked it to just gain a few milliseconds of advantage. I can’t remember what they were but guess it was things like shaving legs etc.

Anyway all those tiny tweaks ended up accumulating in a winning advantage.

So Dr Stocks comment about male puberty made me think of the same with regard to Emily Bridges.

EB possibly has the same hand span as another elite woman athlete. Or the same calf size as one of the other women competitors. Perhaps the same height, weight, leg strength, VO2 capacity etc, etc.

But EB will be the only one who has them all. And all those minor (or major some may say) advantages add up to having an overall unfair advantage.

I am against EB racing as a women. I’m not sure my comment adds anything to the argument, but when I read the Dr Stock piece I remembered the other article.

This is excellent.

In 2022, EVAW wrote to the FA and Premier League imploring it to improve how footballers treat women and girls and, in particular, “confront a culture of gender-based violence”. It believes recent events are cause to strengthen that call. “Given the seriousness of sexual violence and the way high-profile cases involving footballers influence our wider culture and attitudes, clubs and institutions must stop looking at players solely in terms of the multi-million-pound revenue they bring and start taking responsibility for fixing a problem they’ve helped create,” Simon said.

https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/footballs-nasty-truth-its-badly-failing-women-fcdp36zpk