#wheelsblogging

It's truly been fascinating to see the number of angles from which the writer has managed to piss people off. Like damn! That was not a brief post, but I could probably write 6x its word count and not be done saying things about it, and frankly none of them are particularly kind. It's hard to know where to start.

But I think neonfretra hit the nail on the head when they said that probably a core reason this article is pissing everyone off is that it's not doing what it asserted. It's not in any way a successful analysis of masculinity in hockey, "changing" or otherwise, because that's ultimately not what it's about. Of course its gender analysis is flimsy as hell and its dashed-off references to race and xenophobia feel emptily perfunctory and it seemingly thinks the writer and his friends invented woman+ interest in sports and its supporting proof of hockey's changing standards (my guy are you seriously asserting the boston bruins invented goalie head taps or whatever in 2022) all seem to be from three years ago, because it's about a particular subset of stan twitter trying to make sense of and defend their love of the game and the fandom. Which imho is actually a good thing; I think self-reflection is great, but in order to do that successfully you have to be clear on what you're looking at. "Why do I like this thing?" is a different question than "why is this thing so gay, actually?" I'm a gay person, I can make anything gay. Me making it gay and it being gay are not the same thing, actually, and it's a real unforced error to confuse the two. The piece itself comes off as pretty confused on that point despite defining the distinction in its preamble.

So that's one thing that I'm stuck on, the way these assessments of gender and queerness seem to take for granted that they're grounded in factual observation / serious study and not projection.

I don't know how you look at a group of like-minded people all deciding Quinn Hughes is eldest daughter-coded and never entertain the idea that this says a lot about those people and really nothing at all about Quinn Hughes. Fixating on the idea of Mitch Marner being the first male victim of misogyny is pretty shallow and unserious in part because that's kind of one of the core foundations of the enforcement of masculinity, that the worst thing a man can be is a woman; neither hockey nor sports generally invented it and the last few years of hockey fandom didn't invent calling it out. Mitch Marner is not remotely close to the first male person who gets shit shoveled at him because he's perceived to be doing personhood in a feminine way, and I shouldn't need to explain that to someone who is positing that they've unlocked hockey gender with One Weird Trick.

I'm not the first to point out that the writer confidently describing Brock Boeser's reaction to his "Mr. Sensitive" nickname as "playful" seems like a serious misreading. You can be very happy to see something in your favorite fixations that makes you feel seen etc, but you feeling seen or validated does not mean that that's what's on offer. I'm glad that people find it relatable, interesting, and wonderful to see men crying, but I'm uncomfortable that they seemingly haven't entertained the idea that the crying men perhaps conceive of their public tears quite differently than the gender studies enthusiast and/or fandom critter observing them might. Do you get what I mean? It feels, to me, akin to someone without prompting telling a fat person that the bravery they exhibit by wearing a crop top and not hiding their belly rolls makes them, someone seeing said fat person, feel better about their own bodily imperfections. Like maybe that's true, but you might wanna sit with that for a second and also conclude that it's an inside thought. "You're so brave for not being able to stifle tears about your dying father, it makes me feel like your gender is getting less problematic to enjoy" -- thanks I guess??? In some ways, all of this is basically agreeing with the regressive enforcement and conceptions of gender but doing it with a thumbs up. "Yeah man we all agree Mitch Marner is a girly little fruit, but when I say it I'm being approving."

Again, you can have these conversations, you can force-femme hockey players to the ends of gender and back with any degree of sincerity that appeals to you. These are public people, you ain't hunting them for sport. Go ahead! It's fun! But being convinced that your identification with or fixation on a public figure you do not know says something definitive about them or the milieu in which they exist and were formed is not particularly, uh. Good. To say nothing of the fact that "man is the Bad Gender and being Less Man is intrinsically Better" plays into some really, really tired transphobic nonsense. If you need to mitigate the man-ness of your blorbos in order to feel like you're enjoying them in a god-honoring way, then that's a you thing and I think it might be preferable to leave Johnny Gaudreau out of it. Somewhat relatedly, a cursory skimming of more than the last few years might have lead you to the treasure trove of fics and other fandom errata about the dainty woman-coded sensitivity of a certain player formerly on the Chicago Blackhawks, and I think we all know how insightful that perception ended up being. Many such cases, as they say.