i am so sickkkkkkkk of people seeing misogyny perpetuated by a man and automatically going "well SOMEONE'S closeted" omfg you know that men hate women even when theyre attracted to them right??? why are you more interested in making fun of gay people than hating misogynists. you fucking freak
My final birthday (self) treat arrived! I commissioned @feketeribizli for a Galex-flavoured take on this piece of theirs, and it is the most beautiful thing mine eyes have ever beheld!!! Commission them!!
i fear i do not have very coherent through about the girl!lando and danica/bianca comparison beyond vibes and how all of them would say/have said or done stuff publicly that as soon as you see it you just know it’s gonna look horrible and set us back years, not completely their fault bc they are just human but holy shit where is your pr team.
i would like to hear your thoughts on what type of woman would be allowed on a big motorsport, do any of these resemble your interpretation of the fem drivers or any other actual girl drivers we know (ex: f1 academy ladies) (ps: i would also love your, if you have it, meta on the f1 academy girls)
your post have made me think on how the public and even fandom reaction to recent events changes if the drivers where all girls, the gax beef, ferrari flopping, red bull in general, whatever is happening to antonelli, liam lawson omg.
another funny thought is thinking of how the genderbent would affects the reputations of drivers the general public likes, like peak daniel..
(shoutout to girl!lewis, wherever universe she is i know she’s been needing a big hug…thinking of her treatment terrifies me)
You're absolutely right that every single motorsports personality would be perceived entirely differently by the media and the public. That is because personas—especially sporting personas of male athletes, in a male-dominated space—are inherently gendered. There fore if these athletes were women, their personas would be gendered in a fundamentally different way.
As for what sort of woman would be allowed in Big Motorsport — we don’t have to speculate much about this! A lot of scholarship has been written about women in motorsports, and most relevant to us, which sorts of women are admitted to that ecosystem. There are limitations to this: different motorsports series operate in different ways. A NASCAR driver is not gendered the same way as an F1 driver, ergo the bounds of acceptability would look different for women between the two series too. F1 hasn’t had a female driver since the 90s (Giovanna Amati), and not one who regularly qualified to compete since the 70s (Lella Lombardi).
That is to say we don’t have a real-life reference for what sort of woman would be allowed to drive full-time in F1 today. This isn’t so much a fluke but rather by design of the motorsports landscape. If F1 wanted women in a seat they could have a woman in a seat. In other words, what sort of woman would be allowed in F1? None.
Regardless, there are a few women who made it high up in other elite motorsports series that shed some important life on which women are able to reach those heights and the nature of that experience.
This article by John Sloop provides an insightful media analysis of Deborah Renshaw, the only woman in the 2002 NASCAR Craftsman Truck Series. Sloop says this of Renshaw’s ascension to elite motorsports:
Renshaw was being held forth as the ‘‘prototype’’ of female drivers by those in NASCAR circles who thought female drivers would be a way to expand the demographic of NASCAR’s fan base. In short, she was positioned as a marketable female, combining driving skills with ‘‘ladylike’’ attractiveness.
To Sloop, the following characteristics made Renshaw an acceptable woman for her NASCAR team to sign:
She was feminine and ‘ladylike’
Occupied a flexible but undeniable femininity based on context; she was well-spoken and respectable in off-track interviews, professional but nonthreatening at the paddock, and casual and easygoing around the other guys
Talented enough to achieve good results in feeder categories
Leaning into her own femininity while being vocally insistent that womanhood has neither helped nor hindered her. She overemphasized her own merit, maintaining that she earned her achievements and her seat through her own hard work and talent
Sloop doesn’t spell it out super super clearly, but I’d also add that a component to a lot of these traits is that women who call the generally conservative, patriarchal consensus into question in a major way also wouldn’t be quite so tolerated. Perhaps she occasionally uses feminist talking points, but she’s not quoting theory, she’s not making this a central part of her public persona. She has to believe, on some level, that she is the exception to the rule, that there is no real reason why she shouldn’t succeed (or at the very least, not publicly express otherwise).
These are traits that got her a seat in her NASCAR series, though these traits were not enough for her to face a backlash and retaliation significant enough to derail her career significantly.
Susie Wolff is probably the closest we’ve come to a woman in F1. She falls in line with a lot of Sloop’s observations of Deborah Renshaw: she’s feminine and ladylike, known for being attractive (and in particular petite and blonde); she’s well-spoken and has been for her entire career; she was talented in the feeder categories, and made it to F3 before an injury lost her her sponsorship and then her seat; and, at least for her active racing years, she’s been conservative with how much being a woman has impacted her career (and especially her racing ability and mentality).
Something that Susie adds is her candidness with the role of sponsorship in her career. As we know, attaining personal sponsorship, having connections to money, is one of if not the single most important factors determining success in a racing career. Aside from various physiological and cultural trends amongst women (less desire to race from a young age, on average less muscle mass than men, etc), access to sponsorship is a huge impediment to the progression of a female racing driver’s career. Susie herself encountered this when she lost her hard-won F3 sponsors after an ankle injury.
By her own admission, most of Susie’s sponsors would not have sponsored a man; they came to motorsport for Susie, to sponsor a woman. Susie often frames this as a positive: being a woman actually earned me x opportunity that men couldn’t get! Very glass-half-full of her. What Susie mentions less often is that this pool of woman-focused sponsors is smaller and less lucrative than the pool of sponsorship that her male peers had access to. It is not just that Susie had to rely on women-focused sponsors, it’s that they were the only ones she could rely on. She did not have access to other sponsors, because Susie is a woman, and these other sponsors were not interested in working with a woman.
The sponsorship available to women in motorsport is, or has historically been, brands or names interested in specifically using their femininity to advertise. It seems to me that a racer’s reliance of these sponsors would only increase as she made her way up the junior categories to more prominent, and therefore expensive, categories. That is to say: the sponsorship opportunities available to most women in motorsport rely on these women having marketable femininity. That is also to say: less marketable femininity would be less sponsorable. That is to say: I don’t think there is much space here for masculine women.
This is why I am so insistent that girl!drivers would not be able to be particularly masculine, at least not in any substantial public way, or at the beginning of their careers in elite motorsport series, when acquiring independent sponsorship would assume vital importance. Perhaps their persona could shift as their career evolves. I think a lot about Lewis Hamilton on this regard, how he was able to use his platform to overtly advocate for social justice once his place in F1 was unquestionable and undeniable. His persona evolved, and he was able to make his Blackness a more overt, public-facing element of it. My gut is to draw a connection to a hypothetical woman at the peak of motorsport: she’d be able to inhabit less digestible forms of femininity once her place in the sport was undeniable.
Hope this makes sense! Women in motorsport, in particular female motorsport personalities, is something that I’m very interested in, and hoping to do more reading about shortly.
convinced Aston Martin Formula 1 team is an illegal front for a money laundering scheme bc there's no way they got an upgraded engine and are still 6 seconds off the pace.
romaincrisis
amandla
kianamaiart
gracieabrams
