“You do not have to love yourself in order to stubbornly refuse to hate yourself.”
–Horrible Mean Bad Woman
A few weeks ago I was managing a new player practice session for my baseball league with some other managers and I was doing a way better job than anyone else, of course. My baseball league, the LABF, is a labor of love and sweat and sometimes tears because there IS crying in baseball, actually. The only reason anyone thinks there isn’t is because Tom Hanks’ character said it in League of Their own, and then it became baseball cannon forever. History is written by the victors and 90’s Tom Hanks, as they often say.
This is going to be a ‘listen to women’ story, which is weird because if you’re here you are literally paying to listen to a woman, so like, duh. Howevs, there’s some things I haven’t talked about in the essay portion of the Wetterhead Fan Zone because I am still processing them, but I need to, and I want to, and I think it’s important to get these thoughts out so they can hopefully help someone else. I want to help women and woman identified folks who feel cornered like I did, and I want to empower women to walk through traumatic and triggering shit with their head held high. But also, there are a lot of well meaning menfolk here, and a lot of what I write is for you. I do not think there are enough places where men can go to learn about what it’s like to not be a man while also being entertained by one of the “Most Talented and Innovative Comedic Minds of Our Time” (from an interview I did for Things I Tell My Boyfriend While He is Trying To Play Video Games Monthly).
Back to the ball field, where I was lacing up my filthy cleats and I clocked two very, let’s say, baseball-forward men walking up. It was their first tryout for the LABF, and I can’t tell you exactly why, but I knew they were in the wrong place. One of them, who we will call Jimmy, was wearing a uniform from another league. He also had a bunch of baseball gear with him. He really looked like an aging minor league baseball player, and he certainly hit like one. When he came up for his turn to hit during a batting practice where I was catching, in full gear (so, literally right behind where the batter stands), I said “hello!” and he ignored me. Ok, fine, there’s a lot going on. But there was this weird like, eagerness? I felt like he came to show off. And off he showed, every single pitch was sent packing to the deepest unexplored depths of center field. Easily a single or triple every time. It reminded me of the one time we let my trainer, Dale play with us and he instantly hit a triple and it was frankly embarrassing. It looked like we hired someone. People hit home runs in our league approximately once a season, and it almost always involves an error or two. We work really, really hard to keep the league as competitive as possible while always maintaining a level of inclusiveness to beginners and less seasoned players. It’s just more fun that way. A lot of us, myself included, have played for more competitive leagues and it’s sort of this joyless aggression with a whiff of Theo Vonn. Also, it’s rare to have a co-ed fast pitch baseball league, because of the disparity between men and women who grew up playing. Softball skills are not necessarily transferable, and not very many women play softball into college and then randomly decide to play recreational baseball afterwards instead of softball. You have to really love baseball to want to leave the comfort of those awesome giant cantaloupe balls and very competitive lesbian ratios.
After Jimmy finished his little performance, I went up to another manager, Jon, to make sure we eliminated Jimmy from consideration. He was just way too good, and I got a weird vibe. Jon, was visibly sad about this, because his team really needs to draft some good hitters. Fortunately I do not care, so that was that. Except it wasn’t, because I later found out from the baseball managers slack channel (a hellish place because of my incessant bits) that STUPID Matt P wanted to draft Jimmy and his friend for their team. I will spare you the back and forth that eventually ended with a long phone call with Matt where he assured me that my opinion is his most sacred muse, a guiding force in his quest to become a better ally. But, he assured me, Jimmy was just an awkward guy (red flag, sorry) who meant well, and finally I agreed to talk to him specifically at the next practice so I could see I had it all wrong. Okay, I’m not sure I need to explain this to you lot, but “he’s just an awkward guy” is almost never applied to guys who are just awkward while every other characteristic they exhibit is positive. Pippin is just an awkward hobbit, he’s also a true friend and he loves harmless mischief and…the Palantír…ok bad example. You get my point. If Harry Vanderspiegel existed in the real world, there would be people saying “Um, I don’t think that he’s just awkward. I think he might be a murderer?” And then there would be Matt P from my baseball league inviting him to babysit his newborn.
I brought my concerns to the league, and it was agreed that probably there had been too much drama about Jimmy and that we didn’t need another cishet white male ringer when the priority is always drafting people from underrepresented communities. I acquiesced to this, knowing that for some people in the league the “drama” was me ranting about it, not people in our league trying to draft players who are very likely problematic. People hate drama so much that they wont endure a tiny bit of drama to prevent larger drama down the road. Fine, whatever. A lot of being a woman in coed spaces while fighting for equality is saying to yourself many times each day “Fine. Whatever.”
Now I really must set the scene for the next piece of our story: A Tuesday night, dinner has been cooked and and et, and we are picking up the dishes when Garret shares with me a ‘weird email’ he got wind of that has been sent to the league from, you guessed it, Jimmy. The email had a smooth 754 words in it, mostly about how sad his life is. I skimmed it (financial hardship, family drama, I am a nice guy who just wants to play ball, blah blah), and paused when I read this sentence:
I really needed this and you denied me of it— you should all be ashamed of yourselves.
I’m going to be brutally honest. My first thought was not “Oh shit, this guy is bad news, we need to protect ourselves.” It honestly should have been, as it was from the beginning of my interactions with this man. The first thought I had was “A-hah! I motherfucking TOLD you so.” I admit it, I was thirsty for the vindicashe. So I rushed to the league slack to post a message:
Just saw that unhinged email from Jimmy. This is the kind of thing where I feel vindicated but also like, ya gotta trust women when they tell you there’s a bad vibe. And it’s not always some specific thing we can bring to you that is evidence of bad intent.
As we know, Garret is my fiance, but he does get downgraded to boyfriend sometimes when he is acting a fool. Such was the case when he actually got MAD AT ME for sending that message. His gripe was that I wasn’t diplomatic about bringing this issue up, and that I was essentially throwing a grenade into the team slack thereby creating a multiverse of side conversations about Jimmy, new player communication, safety, etc, because the league at large was not actually aware that this email existed. In fact the only reason I knew about it was that a dude Garret is friends with got a hold of it, ostensibly through another dude who checks the email. My gripe was:
Why the halfpenny fuck are three dudes sharing this unhinged email and not immediately telling me about it, and also why are they not thanking me for warning them????
Advocating for one’s humanity is hard work, and if you’re a woman, a lot of that work is hindered by how men perceive your advocacy. It’s not the fact of me telling a group of people that they need to let women decide who is safe for them to be around, it’s how I tell the group about it. This, as my mom puts it, is bullshit. In fact, her practice for many years has been that if a woman tells her she’s saying something in an unhelpful way, she will listen to the critique and take it into consideration, but if a man says it, she ignores it. This isn’t run-of-the-mill misandry, but more of a practical approach to communication. It has been my our experience that if you are saying something challenging to a man, he will critique the way you say it. Very few men will listen first and then ask themselves if the reason it makes them uncomfortable or angry is because what they are hearing is falling out of a woman’s face. Authority on our own experience is still seen as hysteria, because 2025 is basically 1925 with computers. And I don’t think men who don’t instantly question their inherent biases are bad allies. Garret did this! Our Garret. Our special, fuzzy, soon-to-be-husband-when-he-works-off-his-penance (in the sink trap mines) guy. We love him. We love men! We just know you don’t see the things we do because you don’t have to. So we get tone-policed a lot.
The thing about this is that it makes us feel like shit. I wish I could tell you that being proven right about Jimmy made me more steadfast in my quest to sniff out baseball creeps and repel them from my community. It probably will in the long term, but getting admonished made me feel tired, lonely, and feckless. I look at myself and see my mother more and more as I get older, and I am repulsed by it. Spending a lifetime getting annoyed at the person who raised you and their mannerisms will do that, but internalizing society’s perception of women aging into irrelevancy speeds things along rather effectively. This repulsion turns into self-doubt, and then instead of looking at how I can communicate more effectively, I’m looking at how I can be more likable. That train is never late.
More than anything, I want to see post-menopausal women for what and who they are. I want to see people living defiantly and joyfully in a world that hates and ignores them, and I desperately want to see that hatred as the ugly thing, instead of the wrinkles and the shaking voices. But misogyny is like microplastics. By the time we figured out it was in the fish it was too late. Ha, what if my conclusion was that all fish are sexist.
There is an influencer/comedian named Horrible Mean Bad Woman who’s thing is being a sort of human wrench in the gears of patriarchy. Her social feeds are all tips and tricks to undermine sexist bullshit and, more importantly, how to live outside the bounds of a society created for and by men. In my favorite video, she questions whether we should even strive to love ourselves “flaws and all” when in fact, most of those flaws wouldn’t be considered flaws on a man at all. “Maybe you are ugly, so what?” she says. It’s liberating to imagine there is a way to move about the world unimpeded by the opinions of men, knowing as we do that there’s an implicit bias in their perception of women they never question because they never really have to. You wouldn’t expect a great review of your movie if you showed it to a bunch of critics who, say, have the visual spectrum of a deep sea fish. For one, they are very sexist. Also, they won’t be able to see what’s even going on.
Since this is getting long, I will leave you with this: Liberation in all forms is a daily practice, not an end goal. The baseball meetings Garret is afraid I created with my “grenade” are annoying but they are necessary, and we will do them, and then we will do them again and again. Solidarity is a journey with no explicit destination, and we do a disservice to people we are trying to defend when we expect there to be. Literal shit analogy incoming— Checking out your own biases is like pooping, because you don’t get to a day where you have pooped for the last time unless you have died and I think you then also poop one more time? It’s maintenance, and so is self-acceptance. Every day, you have new challenges to your self-esteem, and sometimes the call is coming from inside the house. The cool thing is that you can pick up the phone, and be curious about what is there.
