The Essentia Sphere

I have to admit that I haven’t followed car racing very closely for some time—I do believe the death of Dale Earnhardt caused me to lose a lot of joy for the sport. And I never followed the Indy circuit like I did NASCAR. But this editorial caught my eye.

Now, let’s be fair. He does write:

However, to her and her team’s credit, a win is a win no matter how you get it. And Patrick did execute the team’s strategy perfectly.

Her skills and courage behind the wheel of an Indy car is not in question. It takes considerable amounts of both to enter Turn 1 at the Indianapolis Motor Speedway with your foot to the floor.

But the rest of the piece is just full of unexamined sexism. Now, she didn’t win the race with an exciting race to the finish line with only inches separating the cars. And man, those races that end that way are awesome. But you know what? They happen less often than you think. Lots of men have won races without racing full-out to the finish line–and I don’t believe I’ve read too much about how their wins needed to be put into perspective.

It instead was more a battle between the race engineer’s computers on the Andretti Green team and that of her rival Helio Castroneves’ Penske Racing team. It was a matter of who would get the best fuel mileage in the final handful of laps of the 200-lap race.

Well, of course. You see, for those of you who don’t watch car racing, there are so many people involved in getting a car around the track. You have the race car driver, the spotter, the crew chief, the pit crew, etc. They all win the race. But you know what? It’s Dale Earnhardt, Jr. or Mario Andretti who have their names remembered. And yeah, they’ve both (as well as many other men) won races based on fuel mileage and when they got their tires changed. But . . . their wins weren’t dismissed as anomalies that were ” . . . subject to scrutiny.”

Now, the cherry on top of this sexist sundae—which is really one of those situations where you have a bad taste in your mouth but you just can’t point to what caused the taste. It’s obvious that the author of the piece isn’t trying to be sexist and I doubt very strongly that he’s a bad person. This is just another example of how misogyny pervades pretty much everything in our lives and how it is so hard to see it sometimes.

But, back to the cherry.

And after tiring of fending off questions about when she would win, she distracted her detractors by posing in swimsuits and making suggestive ads for her sponsors.

Patrick’s victory may temporarily quiet her critics, and likely will help draw much-needed attention to a sport that at one time in its history was more popular than NASCAR and didn’t have to rely on a pretty face to garner headlines or cash in on the notoriety of a driver who is known more for winning a dancing contest on television than his two Indy 500 wins (see Helio Castroneves).

To her credit, Patrick remains a model for young women everywhere. It may be a model of how persistence, a pretty face and the willingness to take the heat can pay off in the end.

Oh, yes. You read that correctly. He mentioned her “pretty face”. That’s right folks! She’s out there forcing a massive amount of metal around a racetrack at speeds that’ll make you’ll hair go gray but this man sums her skills up as persistence (like a little puppy!), willingness to take the heat (guess what? any woman stepping into a “male” arena does that) and her freaking pretty face.

But that’s OK. Her “lone victory” is a “marketing executive’s dream”—they’ll just play up her sexiness to sell products. Of course, if she didn’t do that, then she’d get called “butch” or “manly.” But since she does do it, she’s dismissed as silly. See the trap? She’s wrong no matter what she does . . . because she’s a woman. And I’m betting the emphasis on “team” in her case and not in the case of so many male victories has to do with . . . her being female. Really, if you’re going to downplay her victory, shouldn’t you downplay every car racing victory achieved in the same way? Or wait . . . did those guys just not have “pretty faces” like Patrick?