The sports media research I was writing about in October was driving me to a conference in Ottawa, Canada at the beginning of November.  My boy and I left temperatures in the 70’s, and landed in temperatures in the 20’s and 30’s.  We chose that Friday to sight see, and we picked the coldest day in Ottawa that year – highs around 21.

We flew up on a Wednesday, and the first thing we learned is that you should NEVER take a cab in Canada.  I’ll admit I am a stupid American when it comes to the metric system, so I didn’t fully understand the price structure.  I did instantly notice how fast the meter was ticking on the cab.  Our 8 mile drive to the hotel – at midnight, in about 10 minutes – cost us about $30.  Ouch.

My boy presented his paper on Thursday morning, and did very well.  He got lots of compliments, questions and business cards, and I was very proud of him.  I had an informal interview with a professor that was there from a University I applied to for a job, and we spent almost 2 hours talking.  We sat in on a few more panels that day, and rapidly decided this should be our ‘vacation’ conference.  This conference has a 1 presentation limit – so even though you can submit more than one paper, you’re only allowed to present one.  This makes for a much more relaxing conference atmosphere than I’ve been accustomed to in the past couple of years.

That, and next year’s meeting is in San Diego in November.  Yes, please.

Friday we decided to tour Ottawa.  As I mentioned, it was in the 20’s.  I had briefly looked at my ski cap before we left B’ham, and thought “Nah.”  Our first stop on our sight seeing tour?  A store to buy hats.

The man at the front desk in our hotel told us to buy “teques” (tewks, aka hats), we should try this uniquely Canadian store called Roots.  Upon entering the mall in which Roots was housed, we quickly realized that the mall was a little out of our student budget.  Then we spotted an Old Navy.  That’s cheap, right?  Not as cheap as the “Cheap for a Buck” store next to it.  We bought two hats for under $5 at the cheap store.  For fun, we stopped at Roots.  Hats there ran about $29 a piece.

Granted, they’re not the sexiest hats ever, but for less than $5?  They did the job perfectly.

We walked the streets, my boy commented that the frozen river was abhorrent to nature, and we ended up at Parliament Hill.

Ottawa is the capital city of Canada, so this is the official place of government for the country.  It was really neat.  We got to sit in on a meeting in the House of Commons, and tour a good bit of the building.

I even sat in Parliament for a bit.  Like it’s hard.

A lot of the inside we were not allowed to take pictures of.  The biggest shame in that was not being allowed to take pictures inside the library.  It was gorgeous.  Beyond gorgeous.  Here is the outside though, as taken from the Peace Tower.

When we were on our way to get our hats, we came upon museum workers who were protesting. They gave us forms to mail in.  When we stopped for lunch, we decided to fill out the form and send it in.  We both selected names of representatives that sounded good, and mailed the forms.

Look!  I’m a protester!

After Parliament, we went to the Basilica Notre Dame.

It was very beautiful.  I wish we had had time to actually go to a mass here.

After that, we wandered over to a market-y, shop-y place, but it was cold, and we’d been outside all day, and I still had to prep for my presentation the next day.  We had some Italian, and turned in early.

As a side note?  Sleep number beds are horrible.  They are a glorified air mattress.  At one point on Friday,  I was playing around, and flopped down on the bed.  The mattress was just soft enough that my flop caused the mattress to lurch, and my boy to literally fly off the bed and land on the floor.  Oops.

My presentation went well on Saturday.  I was extremely nervous, as the person chairing my panel was also the faculty member I met with on Thursday, as well as someone I cited about 16 times in my paper (no pressure at all, right?).  I tried a new technique with my notes, and I think it actually worked really well.  Even I was pleased with myself, and I am never happy with my presentations.  Note made for the future!

I attended a few more panels that day, and then we headed back to the hotel to change for our evening out.  Being in “the land”, we were heading to an Ottawa Senators game.  How could we go to Canada and not see hockey?  They played the New Jersey Devils, which is a team near and dear to my heart.

The NHL apparently has a rule about ‘no cameras with detachable lenses”.  Lame!  My boy got his camera confiscated, but no one checked my bag, so I was able to sneak a couple of shots.

The Devils won (yay!), but the Senators managed to get their shots in when they could.

We also learned that night that the bus is the way preferrable way to travel in Ottawa.  Much cheaper.  We secured the bus schedule for the next day for our trip back to the airport.

But first, we stopped at Tim Horton’s.  This is Canada’s equivalent to Dunkin Donuts, but WAY better.

Then it was off to the airport, through a very easy customs check, and on our way back to the States.  Unfortunately, we learned in Chicago that the flight that was supposed to take us back home to B’ham was grounded in Charlotte with mechanical problems, and we got stuck in O’hare for almost 6 hours.  That was pretty awful.  If I had known that, I would have called our friends to come meet us and have bad airport food.  We finally made it home though.

It was a really fun trip!  I didn’t get many new paper ideas, but I got a couple that I’ll mull over.

And I’ll definitely submit something next year.  Because who doesn’t want to go to San Diego??

This comment popped up in my inbox yesterday from this post:

“maybe we aren’t “demeaning” anyone–maybe being sexy is a positive thing, not a demeaning one. Too radical a notion?”

This is in reference to elite and professional athletes being portrayed in highly sexualized manners.

That’s more than one question.  What are  the questions then?  Are we demeaning athletes, is being sexy positive, and is that too radical a notion?

Is being sexy positive?  Yes.  It is.  It’s positive to be sexy, and attractive, and beautiful.   There’s no disputing that.  Literature tells us that attractive people get more positive things in life – greater recognition, more job opportunities/promotions, better benefits, etc. etc. etc.  Is it bad to be sexy?  Not at all.  The problem comes when we hold every woman up to a sexy image, and say that image is the ‘ideal’ for women.  It’s just not possible.  In body image research, one of my personal biggest critiques is that body image research tries to fit every woman in to one ideal.  Why do we only get one?  Why can’t there be more than one?  In my personal life, I emulate a lot of different ideals.  So to bring it around to athletes, if the images that young girls see most often is a sexy image of a pro athlete, is that a positive?  I don’t think so.  There’s a difference between glamour-ing it up and sexing it up.  It’s a tricky line, but I think the dominant images of pro and elite female athletes should be of them being athletes.  Not tricking out in bikinis to try to gain viewers.

So are we demeaning athletes? In some instances, I say yes, we are.  Dara Torres, the swimmer, has accomplished amazing athletic feats in the sport of swimming.  4 Olympic games, winning medals in all four, competing against people that weren’t even born when she was in her first Olympics.

Yet…

Yeah, yeah, she’s in a pool, and she’s a swimmer, and she’s wearing a bathing suit.  What’s the problem?

Tell me.  Are you thinking about her Olympic accomplishments?  The hours upon hours she’s spending in the gym, sweating, and pushing her body to the athletic max?  Do you think a young female swimmer is going to think of that?  Or is she going to look at this amazing athlete, and think that all that is important is how her body looks, and how sexy she can be?

The fact that we even have to ask that question to me says that yes, we are demeaning our athletes.

Being sexy isn’t a radical notion.  But put it in context.  This isn’t talking about how these women might look for a night on the town, for a VIP event, or how they might look to go out to a concert one night.   This isn’t talking about how I might want to look for my husband when we go out sometimes.  This isn’t talking about the models we see in Cosmo or Glamour.

This is talking about what an athlete is best known for, and how an athlete is portrayed by the media.

Call me crazy, but I think they should be known for being an athlete, and not solely a sex symbol.  And that young girls should have a role model to look up to that’s not sexed out in a bikini.

The recovery is still going.  It seems like in the past week, I had a sudden surge of healing, and I’m feeling much more like my old self.  At least stamina-wise I am.  I seem to have my normal energy back and that’s a good thing!! Physically I’m still not there yet, but I’m (still) trying to be patient.  I am thinking I might go back to the gym this week.  I think all I’ll be able to manage is walking on the treadmill – and walking slower than normal – but it will feel good to get back and do something.

I also realized last week just how behind I got in my schoolwork.  I knew I was going to get a little behind, but when I actually sat down and looked at what needed to get done, I had a huge “Oh, shit!” moment.

My boy and I are heading up to Canada in another week ago to a big sports conference.  I’m really excited to go to it, since it looks like there’s going to be a lot of interesting panels and presentations.  I mean, it’s a whole conference that revolves around sports – how can I not like it?  I’ve also never really been to Canada.  I say ‘really’ because I did go to Niagara Falls a few years ago, and walked to the Canadian side of the falls, but I don’t count that as legitimately going.  This time I need my passport.

I had one solo paper accepted, and we had one joint paper accepted.  The solo paper is the pilot study for what became my dissertation; I looked at how commentary during the 2008 gymnastics competition in Beijing might have a had a very nationally biased slant to it.  I found evidence of some bias, but I’m honestly surprised that it wasn’t bigger.  I still need to analyze the individual event finals, but I’m not sure I’ll be able to do them before we leave.  I’ll try, and if not, I think I have enough data to present with just the team and all-around competitions analyzed.

My boy and I did one where we analyzed the school newspapers of all the schools in the SEC to see if there was a gender bias in the coverage of sports.  I have almost all those numbers run, and there is about a 60/40 split that favors men in actual articles, but the word count of articles about men versus articles about women is just about equal.  The bias isn’t as big as it is in for-profit papers, but (I think) it’s still significant.  I’m excited for that one.

Plus, in the honor of going to a sports conference, I scored us tickets to the Ottawa Senators vs. the NJ Devils hockey game.  I LOVE hockey, and now we’re going to go to a hockey game in Canada.  It’s the land!  I’m a Rangers fan at heart, but I never get to see hockey anymore, so I’ll take the Devils too.  We’ve seen two MLB games so far when we’ve been to conferences, so going to hockey seems like a good fit as well.  One day we’ll have to go to a conference that enables us to hit up an NFL game.

It’s research, right?

Did you know that Sports Illustrated expanded their boundaries beyond the swimsuit issue, and did a feature on the 20 best looking athletes?

Want to guess how many men there were?  How many women?

I’ll tell you.  There were 20 women, and no men.  I guess that means male athletes aren’t attractive.

Surprising?  No.   Discouraging?  A little.

P.S. None of the shots of the 20 best looking athletes were of the women doing anything athletic.  If you’re going to call them hot, at least put a picture up of them surfing or snowboarding or whatever.

*Note: I don’t know why this post is formatting this way, and after 10 minutes of no success in changing it, it’s just going to stay the way it is.  Enjoy the half nude athletes anyway.

As I’ve travelled down the Ph.D. path, it took me almost two years to get to my current area of research, which is a little surprising to me.  In a nutshell, I’m studying media portrayals of athletes, including differences in gender.  In the spring I did a really fun paper where I looked at how female athletes were affected by the images of elite female athletes in the media.  Right now, our undergrads are apparently desperate for research participation abilities, so my advisor had the idea to revise something we did to try to get it through IRB asap, and hopefully take advantage of the willing participant pool.

So I started looking at my survey, and decided to do something in the vein of what normal, non-athletes think of how male and female athletes are portrayed.  Female athletes are generally sex objects, and we see them in the following ways:

Nothing really atypical, for what past research has shown for female media portrayals.

Then I started looking at images of males. And surprisingly, I found these:

Um, what?  And these weren’t even hard to find.  These were some of the first images that popped up on Google.

So sex sells.  We know this.  We may not necessarily like it, but in reality?  We don’t do much to stop it.

But these images of the guys?  (and yes, they are all pictures of athletes, not models).  FASCINATING.

So my question becomes – what does it mean?  What do people think of it?  Is it good?  Bad?  A positive for sports?  Or are we just demeaning athletes of both sexes now?

I love my job.

I’m in a wedding in a couple of weeks, and despite losing a bunch of weight (and keeping it off) for my own wedding, I decided to buy a Spanx bodysuit anyway.  It’s not that I even really need it for the slimming effect, but more because the top portion of the dress isn’t the most flattering on me, so I figured I’d just make sure all my lines were smooth underneath.

In the greater Birmingham area, there is one place to buy Spanx.  One.  Sak’s Fifth Avenue.  You know – the place that isn’t exactly student budget friendly? (Or any budget friendly, for that matter.  Budget and Saks do not go in the same sentence unless you are talking about your unlimited budget)  So this is not a place I frequent oh, ever.   I went in on Friday, and they asked me for my phone number or email address.  I picked the lesser of the two evils, and gave my email.

Today I received my first email.  I promptly clicked on the ‘unsubscribe’ link, and hopefully ensured that it will also be my last email.   I don’t know why I found that so funny, but I  did.  That’s a big marketing fail.  Maybe they should just not email people that only go in and buy one thing.  That might be a sign that the people a) aren’t really that interested, or b) don’t have the wallets that are being targeted.

My birthday was Saturday, and I had just the most perfect day ever.  I got to spend the whole day with my boy, no interruptions, no schoolwork, and no stress.  We stopped in Clanton for some fresh peach ice cream (which we hadn’t had in over a year) on our way to Auburn for the football game.  Despite the monsoon that delayed kick off for an hour-ish, it was a great game.  I say that now, because Auburn won.    I had my doubts during the first quarter.  We got home obnoxiously late, which left us nice and tired for a visit with our friends and their absolutely tireless four year old.  I couldn’t have asked for a better day!

I’m debating making some changes to the blog here, as I’m determined not to let it die, and it’s been pretty sad around here.  I’ve started in the past 6 months or so to really get interested in sports research, and I’m debating starting to talk about it on here.  It’s pretty interesting stuff.  To me, at least.  I’m pretty focused on gender differences in sports, and I’m tossing an idea around in my head for a new paper that I think would be really interesting, if I can get the right direction on it.

If nothing else, perhaps pictures of scantily clad male and female athletes will attract some attention.

I’m working on the revisions for the dissertation proposal.  My plan was to have it done by last Friday.  That didn’t happen.  Today I had to email my chair and say “If I’ve switched the experiment to this type of design, then that means all of my old independent variables are wrong, so are my new ones this and that?”

The fact that I’m writing the dissertation and I still don’t know for sure what my independent variables is just one example of why I’m having severe buyers remorse with my program.

My new hope is to finish up the revisions tomorrow.  They asked for clarification on a few things, and asked me to add a couple more things that I’m about convinced don’t exist in the literature.  But because I’m a compulsive overachiever, I’m going to kill myself looking for it.

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Tonight I took part in my first fantasy football draft.  It’s an all girls league, and I’m pretty excited.  How’s this for role reversal?  My boy is working late tonight, and I got to go drink beer, eat pizza, and play fantasy football.   Our life is good.

I have no idea how I’m going to fare in fantasy football, because I don’t really understand it.  In the 6th round, I apparently snagged a running back that everyone else was gunning for.  I wasn’t 100% sure who he even was, I just liked the way his stats looked.  It’ll be interesting.  At the very worst, my team will suck, but I’ll still go to the mid-season watch party.  More football and beer, oh darn.

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I’m having a complete failing when it’s come to working out lately.  We decided to suspend our Y membership to try to save money, figuring we’d alternate between the gyms at our respective schools.  So far, for me at least, it hasn’t been working out too good.  I’m apparently too battered and beat up to use most of the machines at my boy’s school, and my school is too far to just make a run to.  It’s so frustrating to me, because I was in a really good groove of working out.  Now I just feel lazy and unhealthy, and I hate it.  I wish I could figure out the magic answer.  If I don’t figure something out soon I’m going to be really cranky.

That, or I’m just going to take over the darn Y membership and pay it for my own sanity.

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In the bestest news (besides my ABD status), my friend WENNYBROWN has accepted a job with a big company and is relocating to Birmingham.  I am SO excited she’s going to be here.  She came over last weekend, we scoped out apartments, she signed a lease, and she moves in this weekend.  The best part of it?  She hired movers.  She’s smarter than we are. 

Don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten the alphabet. Yet.  ABD is how I will define myself for the next few months or so.  In the world of academia, ABD stands for “All But Dissertation”.

I defended my dissertation proposal yesterday – successfully!  Not the entire dissertation.  That will hopefully come in January.  The proposal stage is rumored to be the most difficult, because that’s where your committe gives you the go-ahead on actually doing your dissertation work.  You write the first three chapters of it (the intro – yes, that gets its own chapter – the literature review, and the proposed methodology).  Your committee reads it, rips it apart, and sends you along to clean up the pieces.

I have a really solid committee of really good scholars, and more importantly, they all play nicely in the sandbox together, and no one feels a need to trump anyone else, and there’s no ego battles in the room.  That’s good, because I’d hate to have to look at people older than me and tell them to grow up.  My chair and I had a strategy meeting on Monday to decide who would go first and set the tone.  We decided on Dr. C, who is just the most awesome professor.  He is very go-with-the-flow, not a boat rocker, and I think he likes me so much because I have initiative and he doesn’t have to hold my hand.  We figured he’d be my lightweight committee member who would throw out a suggestion, and that would be it.

Wrong.  It was his turn, and he said “How much time do I have?”  If your ‘easy’ person makes that statement, then that should be a sign that things are going to go downhill quickly.

Thankfully, they did not.  He tore my methodology apart, but not in a bad way.  I knew it sucked, and he, along with the rest of the committee, made some great suggestions.  Hell, they told me to cut half of it, and simplified the other half.  They told me to do less.  I like that.

They approved, they signed the form, and I’ve successfully defended my dissertation proposal.  I finished the copy edits and minor revisions today, and now I’ll go through the list of “Must-do’s”.  That will get sent to the graduate school.  I’ve now crossed over the line from being a doctoral student to being ABD.

Next stop, Dr. Annie.

You know what is stupid?  I mean, really, really, really stupid?  I did my comp exams, and like a responsible person, I talked to all my committee members in advance.  They asked me what I wanted to do my dissertation on, and three of them tailored their questions specifically to my dissertation.  Great, right?  So I take the comps, and when I defended them we talked about my dissertation, and two of my committee members told me congratulations, you essentially have your dissertation proposal written.

So the other day I went to see if I could take the disc with all my answers on it and copy it to a flash drive.  Sounds reasonable, right?  Then I could just copy/paste the relevent parts into the proposal, and add where things needed to be added. Right?

Wrong.

I was told “No”.  Because apparently ‘they’ did this in the past, and past students shared their answers with other students taking comps.  Because apparently some professors just use the same questions, so students were essentially just re-writing the answers of other students.  So to combat this, they stopped giving students their answers on discs.

But guess what?  I have hard copies of my answers?  So what the frig does that solve?  I could still hand out hard copies of my answers to anyone that wanted them.  Not that it would do them much good, since my answers are so specifically tailored.   And also, because professors don’t make up new questions, I have to get punished by this?  LAME!

So right now I’m re-typing my comps answers into the proposal.  This is SO stupid.

In positive news, I’ve already got 20 pages in, and I haven’t even written the methods section yet.  I’m estimating by the end of this week, I’ll essentially have 60 pages, with the need to fill in a few portions.  And then, the proposal will be done.

Does anyone want a copy of my answers?  Because now I just feel compelled to hand them out to anyone that wants them, just out of spite. 

I have done almost nothing school related since I got back from the conference in Chicago.  I only just tonight started to feel guilty about it, which must be the subliminal part of my brain telling me that I needed the break.

I’ve had a couple minor frustrations with school as I start the dissertation process, and the beaurocracies and politicing that goes on with that.  Nothing earth shattering, but annoying enough to get under my skin.  It irks me that some people have waaaaaaaaay more power than they should.  And it irks me when I bring up something related to my dissertation, and said people tell me “Oh, you don’t want that.”

Really?  Not to sound obnoxious, but why don’t YOU not tell ME what *I* want in this process?  Mkay, cupcake?

Minor.

I started working on my master list for the wedding.  The one that every time I thought of something over the past couple of days, I thought ‘Crap, I should have a list to write all this down on so I don’t forget it’.  I finally started that last night, and it’s easing some of the stress that was building up in my head. So I’ve broken it down by day, and what needs to get done per day, and instead of seeming overwhelming, it suddenly seems easy and managable.

Ahhhhh.

In the most fun wedding news, yesterday we officially booked our honeymoon!  Due to the fact that my boy is taking classes, and I’ll be teaching them in July, and then a conference in August, followed immediately by the start of school, and so on and so forth with other school things peppered in, we knew we were going to end up delaying our honeymoon.  We discussed different options, different things to do, and in the past couple of days the stars seemed to fall in line for one thing.

Next May, we’ll be going on a cruise of Italy, Greece, and Turkey.   I am over the moon excited.  Of course, by that point it will end up being a “Happy Honeymoon/Happy First Anniversary/Happy Graduation Annie” trip, but we’ll keep it simple and call it the honeymoon.  Our travel agent arranged for us to have a celebratory cake on the first formal night of the cruise.  I wonder if I could get us another one by saying it’s also our first anniversary?

So I need to pick up my poor, neglected camera, and spend some time getting re-acquainted with it.  Because there is no way in hell I’m going to travel to that part of the world and not be in top picture taking shape.

But first, I have a school goal.  My newest goal is to get my dissertation proposal (approximately 60 pages or so) written before we leave to get married.  So about a week and a half.

You all love me because I’m ambitious.  I’d hate to disappoint now.