perfidy

This summer while watching the Olympics, I was stunned to be reminded that the women's marathon event was a recent addition, and that as recently as 1984 there was heated debate over whether women should run marathons-- indeed whether women were actually physically capable of doing so.

When women's marathoner Gabrielle Andersen-Scheiss approached the finish line in Los Angeles in 1984, a half hour out of the lead, she was staggering horribly as if on the edge of death. Doctors very nearly removed her from the race, partly out of medical opinion, partly out of a vestigial chivalry that Title IX has almost completely obliterated.

Today, in the wake of Title IX, it is literally unthinkable that such a debate would take place. Doctors let atheletes tell them when they're done, and chivalry, where sport is concerned, is thankfully dead. Women run the hell out of marathons now, doing the murderous Boston course in 2:20 flat. The way the world works has changed so much in twenty years-- all of which I've been alive and sentient for-- that 1984 is in many ways totally unrecognizable. If you want a real future shock moment, watch "9 to 5" again, and look for the rooms full of secretaries-- all women-- at typewriters. You don't see that real often any more.

I only bring this up because I often wish I was born thirty years sooner than I was so that I could have rocked it like this:

You just can't do that any more, unless it's Halloween or you're Snoop Dogg. Something important has been lost.