Tag Archives: team

The Ever Evolving Saga of the Philadelphia Flyers Ice Girls

by LavadaGrattan Posted on October 2, 2014

Mother Jones

The NHL’s Philadelphia Flyers have been embroiled in controversy over the past few days—not because of anything hockey-related, but because of the team’s treatment of its ice girls, the women who clean the ice in crop tops and short shorts during stoppages in play. After the Flyers’ ice girls were replaced with “ice men” earlier this fall and fans booed relentlessly, the team announced Tuesday that the ice girls would be reinstated.

A little background: For years, several NHL teams have employed women who, in addition to shoveling ice, are responsible for things like greeting fans at the doors and leading cheers on the sidelines. Earlier this year, after writing an article about how five NFL cheerleading squads had sued their teams for labor violations (examples include having to pass a “jiggle test”—more on that here), I received an email from a former Flyers ice girl. “Speaking from personal experience,” she wrote, “ice girls are treated very similarly.” I went on to speak with three ice girls from the Flyers, and four from the Los Angeles Kings, who were then competing for the Stanley Cup.

Read more from MoJo about life as an ice girl.

The Flyers ice girls had mixed experiences overall but corroborated a few disturbing trends, which I wrote about in a June article. They were paid $50 per game, with their game-day duties lasting about seven hours. They got cold when greeting fans at the doors in skimpy uniforms, but were told that they couldn’t put jackets on. In 2012, when the Flyers hosted a three-day outdoor festival called the Winter Classic, they walked around in shorts, wearing two pairs of stockings, in 20-degree weather. They weren’t allowed to eat in public, despite the long hours and cold.

When I asked both Kings and Flyers ice girls why they continued to do the work, the response was unanimous: Despite the working conditions, there was something uniquely thrilling about being the center of attention on the ice, about being icons to a community of fans.

At the team’s first preseason game of the year, on September 22, the Flyers surprised fans with a change: The ice girls had been eliminated, and in their place, a team of men in bright orange jackets cleaned the ice. The team gave no reason for the change, and as the video below suggests, fans weren’t too happy about it.

At the game three days later, more booing:

In the meantime, I spoke with a couple of former ice girls about the team’s reactions. “The ones that actually wanted to try out weren’t too happy that there wasn’t going to be a team this year,” said one. “They thought it was unfair. I couldn’t care less. I don’t know why you’d want to go back to that abusive relationship.”

One veteran acknowledged that the issues from my June article were valid, and “sometimes it sucks that we have to stand outdoors in the cold.” But still, she had been thinking about trying out for the team again, and she was frustrated with herself and her teammates for having complained: “I’m sure you talked to some of the girls that do come back every year and they shot us all in the foot by expressing their unhappiness. I’m also guilty of that. Look where it got us.”

The Flyers maintained their radio silence until the third game, on Tuesday night. As fans started to boo the ice men, a sign appeared on the scoreboard announcing tryouts for—you guessed it—a new team of ice girls. Fans roared in approval.

On the ice team’s website, candidates are encouraged to submit a photo and résumé and come to auditions this Sunday with “professional-looking hair and make-up.” Applicants will be judged, among other things, on their ability to skate, turn, stop, do crossovers, and “push a wheel barrel on/off the ice surface”

Still, the response to the team’s announcement on Twitter wasn’t entirely enthusiastic. A sample of reactions:

Of course, the fans’ reactions, and the dozens of articles about the Flyers ice team, stem from bigger, messier questions: What should we make of ice girls and cheerleaders in 2014? What about the women who want to cheer? And what happens if those women also happen to have some complaints about the job?

Regardless, it seems that most reasonable folks would support simple changes, like paying ice girls more than $50 for seven hours of work, and maybe even letting them put layers on if they’re unbearably cold. But when I emailed Ike Richman, the VP of public relations for the team, to ask if the ice team’s working conditions or pay would change this year, he simply replied, “The organization has declined to answer any of your detailed questions. Thanks.”

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The Ever Evolving Saga of the Philadelphia Flyers Ice Girls

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"Support the Player and Be Quiet": What It’s Like to Be an NFL Wife

by AntoniettaHuie Posted on September 12, 2014

Mother Jones

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Editor’s note: Tracy Treu worked at Mother Jones from 1998 to 2006 and is married to former Oakland Raiders center Adam Treu, who played 10 seasons in the NFL.

I’m so fed up by people blaming Janay Rice. We’re asking for incredible bravery, and we’re giving little compassion to this woman. Because it’s so easy to say: “Well, she’s the fool who married him. Why doesn’t she just leave?” There are just so many components to it that people aren’t aware of.

The NFL is a culture that values secrecy. When you’re with an NFL team, the message to you is clear: Don’t fuck anything up for your partner, and don’t fuck anything up for the team. Don’t be controversial. Don’t talk to the media. Stay out of the way. Support the player and be quiet.

I saw this firsthand. The Raiders didn’t formally sit us down—they’re not structured like that as an organization to sit the wives down and school them, and say, “This is what we ask of you.” But it is definitely passed down by the veteran wives in the league. The veteran wives will talk to the rookie wives. So will the administrative or coaching wives. It’s made very clear to you, and not in a hateful way, by any means: “Let’s work together for this one common goal: to win the Super Bowl.” That will mean, for the coaches’ families, that you’re not going to get fired and you’ll get to stay here for another year. And that might mean, for some of the marquee players, that they’re going to get a better contract.

They really don’t want anything to be a distraction from that goal. I remember getting a lot of grief for planning my first pregnancy poorly because I had our daughter during the season. You only have babies in the offseason. There are lots of informal rules like that.

And the media is the devil—the enemy. I had my husband come home and tell me, “Don’t ever talk to the media.” Guys would get teased; they’d rib each other if they were in the news, or if the wife got mentioned. There was a sportswriter for the Oakland Tribune whom I’d sometimes see at games, and Adam would be like, “What’d you say to him? Were you talking to him? Don’t talk to him.” And that’s not just Adam’s personal preference; that’s what he’d been told. I don’t know everything that was said in meetings, but that’s how it came down to me: “Did he call you? What did he say to you? What did he ask you? Don’t tell him anything.”

It’s motivated by this you-versus-the-world mentality. You know: People are going to try to take us down. People are going to try to distract us. Do not let anybody distract us from our singular goal. Looking through past notes and playbooks, a lot of coaches use a lot of war analogies and wartime quotes—they liken it to going to war. They use that to build camaraderie, and they want the wives to build camaraderie amongst each other to support the players.

Adam was the kind of player who was just hoping to make the team year to year. So it was like, don’t fuck this up for him in any way. “Don’t give them any reason to cut you,” he’d always say. But my husband was never a marquee player—he was the long snapper. So, you know, he was very anonymous. Ray Rice is in a premier position. He’s not a long snapper. He’s a running back.

And I’m sure that sort of thing was going through Janay’s mind: If I tell, and if I take away their best running back, and they lose on Sunday, that’s my fault. I did that. I set that ball in motion. This is what she was risking: embarrassing the Ravens, embarrassing her family, screwing his teammates out of their prized running back, losing money, losing security. Janay was under an incredible amount of pressure. She probably thought to be quiet was to make this go away. Because she needs it to go away.

Janay met Ray in high school. They have a daughter together. So we’re asking her to walk away from this, and it’s like, “How?” This is all she’s ever known. A lot of these wives don’t work. They can’t. They’re only living in a place for six months. Maybe the guy is playing on a new team every two or three years. He wants her home. You know, he’s not coming home and cooking himself dinner. When Adam played, I don’t think any of the wives worked. So what’s she going to leave and go do?

To be blunt, the money pads that a little bit. You get this paycheck coming in every week and you suck it up. I worked at Mother Jones when he played, and I needed that totally separate outlet. But many of these women move into town for six months during the season, and they do whatever they need to do to help their spouse win. (Which, you know, you really can’t do much. It’s not up to you.) Then they go back to wherever they’re from for the offseason. Then they repeat.

I don’t really think that’s changed much over the years. If a player has a partner, that partner needs to not be controversial. I don’t know if teams do research on players’ partners—I’d assume they do, but I don’t know. “Be seen and not heard.” That’s the assumption. Well, that and, “You’re just lucky to be here, so shut up.” He’s making great money, so you support him and shut your mouth. You’re put in a subservient position financially. He’s the star. Keep him happy.

And, in the end, why not just show up and shut up and be supportive? After all, Adam and I felt damn lucky to be in the NFL. He was a walk-on at Nebraska. Playing pro football was a dream. It made me incredibly happy to watch him play.

Most of the girlfriends and wives feel the same gratitude and happiness, and I encourage them to be supportive of the team. But that quiet support stops the second you are abused. Speak up. It’s not a secret worth keeping.

I wonder now what the Ravens will do for Janay and her daughter. And I wonder, with the league’s new, stiffer penalties for domestic violence, how many abused women will stay quiet—because that means the end of a career, the end of the insurance, the end of it all.

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"Support the Player and Be Quiet": What It’s Like to Be an NFL Wife

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3 Ways the Baltimore Ravens Completely Screwed Up the Ray Rice Mess

by RalphIsabel Posted on September 8, 2014

Mother Jones

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This afternoon, the Baltimore Ravens released running back Ray Rice in response to a video released by TMZ showing Rice knocking his then-fiancée (and current wife) Janay Palmer unconscious in an Atlantic City elevator in February. Rice has been the subject of intense scrutiny since the NFL suspended him for two games—earlier today, it suspended him indefinitely—but some had given the star running back the benefit of the doubt after he claimed he was simply defending himself. (Indeed, both Rice and Palmer were charged with assault following the incident.)

This new footage, though, clearly shows that wasn’t the case, and as outrage mounted today, the Ravens had little choice but to take decisive action against Rice. But we should hardly be praising the team. If anything, the Ravens have been defending Rice and victim-blaming from the very beginning. For example:

1. In May, the Ravens decided it’d be a good idea to sit Rice and Palmer in front of the media and have them publicly address the Atlantic City incident. The result was a complete PR disaster. Rice began by apologizing not to Palmer, but to senior Ravens management and coach John Harbaugh. Rice also chose his words poorly, defining failure as “not getting knocked down, but not getting back up.”

2. Even more tone-deaf than the press conference itself was how the Ravens presented it. The team had a staffer live-tweeting the spectacle, and the team’s official account sent out this unbelievable tweet, straight out of Victim-Blaming 101:

The tweet was deleted today.

3. After Rice’s two-game suspension was handed down in late July, people were outraged that occasional pot smokers got harsher punishments from the NFL. The Ravens PR machine thought it was the perfect time to start rehabilitating Rice’s image, releasing a glowing dispatch from his first major public appearance after the punishment. The article, posted on the team’s website, says Rice got a “standing ovation” from fans who “showed him a lot of love,” even though he had been under “national scrutiny.” After noting that he showed his “usual fun-loving side,” the piece observed with remarkable subtlety that “Rice jerseys sprinkled the crowd, worn by both males and females.”

The NFL has earned much-deserved flak for toughening its domestic-violence penalties only when the national criticism ramped up. Today’s move by the Ravens should be seen in a similar light: Cutting Rice was the right decision, but it’s clear the organization has never taken his offenses all that seriously. It took an even-worse leaked video to make the Ravens finally act.

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3 Ways the Baltimore Ravens Completely Screwed Up the Ray Rice Mess

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Scientists Are Beginning To Figure Out Why Conservatives Are…Conservative

by CarolEllington Posted on July 15, 2014

Mother Jones

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You could be forgiven for not having browsed yet through the latest issue of the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences. If you care about politics, though, you’ll find a punchline therein that is pretty extraordinary.

Behavioral and Brain Sciences employs a rather unique practice called “Open Peer Commentary”: An article of major significance is published, a large number of fellow scholars comment on it, and then the original author responds to all of them. The approach has many virtues, one of which being that it lets you see where a community of scholars and thinkers stand with respect to a controversial or provocative scientific idea. And in the latest issue of the journal, this process reveals the following conclusion: A large body of political scientists and political psychologists now concur that liberals and conservatives disagree about politics in part because they are different people at the level of personality, psychology, and even traits like physiology and genetics.

That’s a big deal. It challenges everything that we thought we knew about politics—upending the idea that we get our beliefs solely from our upbringing, from our friends and families, from our personal economic interests; and calling into question the notion that in politics, we can really change (most of us, anyway).

The occasion of this revelation is a paper by John Hibbing of the University of Nebraska and his colleagues, arguing that political conservatives have a “negativity bias,” meaning that they are physiologically more attuned to negative (threatening, disgusting) stimuli in their environments. In the process, Hibbing et al. marshall a large body of evidence, including their own experiments using eye trackers and other devices to measure the involuntary responses of political partisans to different types of images. One finding? That conservatives respond much more rapidly to threatening and aversive stimuli (for instance, images of “a very large spider on the face of a frightened person, a dazed individual with a bloody face, and an open wound with maggots in it,” as one of their papers put it.)

In other words, the conservative ideology, and especially one of its major facets—centered on a strong military, tough law enforcement, resistance to immigration, widespread availability of guns—would seem well tailored for an underlying, threat-oriented biology.

The authors go on to speculate that this ultimately reflects an evolutionary imperative. “One possibility,” they write, “is that a strong negativity bias was extremely useful in the Pleistocene,” when it would have been super helpful in preventing you from getting killed. (The Pleistocene epoch lasted from roughly 2.5 million years ago until 12 thousand years ago.) We had John Hibbing on the Inquiring Minds podcast earlier this year, where he discussed these ideas in depth; you can listen here:

Hibbing and his colleagues make an intriguing argument in their latest paper, but what’s truly fascinating is what happened next. Twenty-six different scholars or groups of scholars then got an opportunity to tee off on the paper, firing off a variety of responses. But as Hibbing and colleagues note in their final reply, out of those responses, “22 or 23 accept the general idea” of a conservative negativity bias, and simply add commentary to aid in the process of “modifying it, expanding on it, specifying where it does and does not work,” and so on. Only about three scholars or groups of scholars seem to reject the idea entirely.

That’s pretty extraordinary, when you think about it. After all, one of the teams of commenters includes New York University social psychologist John Jost, who drew considerable political ire in 2003 when he and his colleagues published a synthesis of existing psychological studies on ideology, suggesting that conservatives are characterized by traits such as a need for certainty and an intolerance of ambiguity. Now, writing in Behavioral and Brain Sciences in response to Hibbing roughly a decade later, Jost and fellow scholars note that

There is by now evidence from a variety of laboratories around the world using a variety of methodological techniques leading to the virtually inescapable conclusion that the cognitive-motivational styles of leftists and rightists are quite different. This research consistently finds that conservatism is positively associated with heightened epistemic concerns for order, structure, closure, certainty, consistency, simplicity, and familiarity, as well as existential concerns such as perceptions of danger, sensitivity to threat, and death anxiety. Italics added

Back in 2003, Jost and his team were blasted by Ann Coulter, George Will, and National Review for saying this; congressional Republicans began probing into their research grants; and they got lots of hate mail. But what’s clear is that today, they’ve more or less triumphed. They won a field of converts to their view and sparked a wave of new research, including the work of Hibbing and his team.

Granted, there are still many issues yet to be worked out in the science of ideology. Most of the commentaries on the new Hibbing paper are focused on important but non-paradigm shifting side issues, such as the question of how conservatives can have a higher negativity bias, and yet not have neurotic personalities. (Actually, if anything, the research suggests that liberals may be the more neurotic bunch.) Indeed, conservatives tend to have a high degree of happiness and life satisfaction. But Hibbing and colleagues find no contradiction here. Instead, they paraphrase two other scholarly commentators (Matt Motyl of the University of Virginia and Ravi Iyer of the University of Southern California), who note that “successfully monitoring and attending negative features of the environment, as conservatives tend to do, may be just the sort of tractable task…that is more likely to lead to a fulfilling and happy life than is a constant search for new experience after new experience.”

All of this matters, of course, because we still operate in politics and in media as if minds can be changed by the best honed arguments, the most compelling facts. And yet if our political opponents are simply perceiving the world differently, that idea starts to crumble. Out of the rubble just might arise a better way of acting in politics that leads to less dysfunction and less gridlock…thanks to science.

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Scientists Are Beginning To Figure Out Why Conservatives Are…Conservative

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LeVar Burton Wants To Bring His New "Reading Rainbow" to Low-Income Kids for Free

by SimaCTRkbhrzxi Posted on May 28, 2014

Mother Jones

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LeVar Burton wants to revive his acclaimed educational show Reading Rainbow, and has started a Kickstarter campaign to do it. The 57-year-old actor and his team are looking to raise $1 million to launch an online version of the series, which originally aired on PBS from 1983 to 2006.

But here’s the really cool part (via TheWrap):

Burton’s “Reading Rainbow” campaign will create a new version of the show available to any child with access to the internet.

He also plans on offering a “classroom version” of the program for teachers and is spearheading a not-for-profit that will give copies of “Reading Rainbow” away to low-income schools for free. The campaign offers various rewards for donating, including potentially getting to wear his famous “Star Trek” visor.

“So lets do it this, y’all,” Burton said. “Together we can create and deliver a proven tool for encouraging the love of reading to millions of children. We can genuinely change the world, one children’s book at a time.”

As of writing this, the campaign has 14,367 backers, and $652,622 has been pledged. There are 34 days left in the crowdfunding campaign.

“I believe that every child has a right, and a need, to be literate,” Burton’s Kickstarter page reads. “We have a responsibility to prepare our children… and right now, the numbers show that we, as a society, are failing in that responsibility.”

Watch the Kickstarter video here:

(H/t Jeb Lund)

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LeVar Burton Wants To Bring His New "Reading Rainbow" to Low-Income Kids for Free

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These Women Are Tired of Being Nice. Read Their Badass Letter About Sexism in Tech.

by CorineFethersto Posted on May 22, 2014

Mother Jones

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It’s no secret that the tech industry can be a brutal place for women trying to work there. The parade of offenses continues: the social coding giant GitHub came under a firestorm of criticism earlier this year after one of the company’s few female developers quit, alleging a pattern of sexual and gender-based harassment. And a website called “CodeBabes” launched, offering to teach bros how to code under the tutelage of virtual strippers. It seems there’s no end to this type of news; in fact, there’s a whole site devoted to tracking these flareups.

On Thursday, a fed-up group of women technologists and leaders published an open letter about how women are treated in tech, and ways to do better. It was published it in Model View Culture, a startup media site that covers issues of culture and inclusion in tech. The cosigners include Divya Manian, a product manager at Adobe, Sabrina Majeed, iOS designer at Buzzfeed, Angelina Fabbro, who is on the developers tools team at Mozilla, and Jessica Dillon, a software engineer at Bugsnag, a San Francisco-based startup.

As the women put it, “We are tired of pretending this stuff doesn’t happen.” The whole letter is absolutely worth a read, but here’s an excerpt:

Our experiences? They’re just like the stories you hear about. But maybe you thought because we weren’t as loud, that this stuff doesn’t happen to us. We’ve been harassed on mailing lists and called ‘whore’/‘cunt’ without any action being taken against aggressors. We get asked about our relationships at interviews, and we each have tales of being groped at public events. We’ve been put in the uncomfortable situation of having men attempt to turn business meetings into dates.

We regularly receive creepy, rapey e-mails where men describe what a perfect wife we would be and exactly how we should expect to be subjugated. Sometimes there are angry e-mails that threaten us to leave the industry, because ‘it doesn’t need anymore c**ts ruining it’…

We’d rather be writing blog posts about best practices for development, design, and tech management instead of the one we’re writing now. We are tired of pretending this stuff doesn’t happen, but continuing to keep having these experiences again and again. We keep our heads down, working at our jobs, hoping that if we just work hard at what we do, maybe somehow the problem will go away…

Imagine if you were the only person like you on your team and when you left your computer and came back there was very graphic porn on your screen (a specific example that we have experienced)…

Read the full letter here.

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These Women Are Tired of Being Nice. Read Their Badass Letter About Sexism in Tech.

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How the Iraq War Influenced the "Godzilla" Reboot

by Roxie6891no Posted on May 16, 2014

Mother Jones

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You might have already heard that the images of destruction in the new Godzilla movie (starring Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Elizabeth Olsen, Ken Watanabe, and Bryan Cranston) were largely inspired by real-world disasters. “As we were writing the film, the horrible events in Fukushima where a tsunami caused a nuclear meltdown happened and we had to make the decision: Do we stay away from that or do we acknowledge that you’ve opened this Pandora’s box of nuclear power, and when it goes wrong, it really does go wrong?” director Gareth Edwards told the Daily News. (The original Godzilla film, Gojira, was cleverly critical of US nuclear testing, and the critically maligned 1998 Godzilla, directed by Roland Emmerich, blamed Godzilla’s wrath on nuclear tests in French Polynesia.)

The 9/11 attacks and Hurricane Katrina are also given visual nods in Edwards’ version of Godzilla. Furthermore, the director drew on the horrors and devastation of modern warfare. Edwards says that he and his crew revisited images from Iraq, Afghanistan, World War II, and other conflicts.

“You sit down on Day One with all of the different heads of department and you say, ‘OK, let’s take this seriously, let’s do this realistically,'” Edwards tells Mother Jones. “There’s never really going to be giant monsters that come out of the ocean and smash a city and cause a tsunami and things like this. But, there are events that smash cities and cause tsunamis within nature and war, and so you don’t have to think very hard to recall that imagery. It’s so scarred in our minds that as we are creating the movie, we are getting all of those reference images and it’s nearly impossible not to be influenced by them.”

One of the first things Edwards did when he started this project was he went out and bought photography and history books and then studied them closely with his team. “We literally sat down and had a hundred different books,” Edwards says. “A lot of war books, a lot of aftermath, whether it be terrorist or natural disasters; just because people are so familiar with that imagery that…now we have a reference for what it’s supposed to look like when a giant monster comes…Science fiction is not really about the future. It’s about the time today when it was made and it’s reflecting the things of the moment.”

Here are a couple shots from the film that have a wartime or natural-disaster vibe:

Images courtesy of Warner Bros.

The Department of Defense cooperated with the filmmakers, which gave Edwards and his crew access to aircraft carriers and US soldiers, some of whom appear in the movie as extras.

If you’d like to check out a full transcript of the roundtable discussion a few critics and I had with Edwards, click here. Now, here’s the trailer for the latest Godzilla:

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How the Iraq War Influenced the "Godzilla" Reboot

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Are Breakfast Meetings a Sign of Hopeless Incompetence?

by RoxanaSaunders Posted on January 20, 2014

Mother Jones

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For most of my career, I was blessed with bosses who almost never insisted on holding breakfast meetings. I hated them and rarely found them very productive because half the group was still trying to rub the sleep out of their eyes. Today, Paul Krugman provides his own theory of breakfast meetings, based on his stint at the CEA in 1982:

I can understand why busy, productive people might sometimes want to meet at 7 AM. But what soon became completely clear was that the people who insisted on those early meetings were precisely the least competent and productive guys — the economics team at the NSC, which was totally hopeless in the Reagan years, the team at Agriculture (ditto), and so on. (No offense to current personnel, who I hope are in a completely different class; there were a lot of really strange people allegedly doing economics in the early Reagan period.) It was hard not to conclude that they were making a show of being incredibly busy and hard-working; they probably went back to their offices after breakfast and read Ayn Rand novels or something.

Meanwhile, people at USTR and the Fed, who really did know what they were doing, showed no similar fetish.

Perhaps it’s not a coincidence that for most of my career I was also blessed with bosses who were pretty competent folks.

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Are Breakfast Meetings a Sign of Hopeless Incompetence?

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