The bigger dance and reconciliation with feminist leanings

That's a long title for a short blog post. The Bigger Dance is the annual, more than a little bit sleazy, post-NCAA competition sponsored by local sports radio station KJR. Instead of pitting teams of collegiate basketball players against each other where the competition is decided by the games themselves, they pit female celebrities, celebutantes, swimsuit models, athletes, and actresses against each other where the competition is decided by people phoning in.

Let's talk about the people that phone in to talk shows. First, they don't tend to exhibit overwhelming balance in their lives. They like to either complain bitterly ("Mariners have never invested in pitching, I don't care what they say"), show off their amazing knowlege ("actually, if you look at the statistics, you'll see that the Gophers' 4th quarter shooting percentage from the field tends to go up when they are in a a come-from-behind situation, even as their free throws percentage drops"), or spout just plain nonsense. I've never understood how talk show radio hosts survive the inanity and idiocy of the callers. The only thing worse than radio show callers are the people who "talk back" to online articles and blog postings, where they have more perceived anonymity and less occasion to be heard by a boss or loved one as they rant. My own experience on that front still pains me. ("General Manager of Head Lice," whatever.)

So the Bigger Dance -- is it objectifying women? You bet. Are the callers, as they vote, representative of some of the baser qualities that exist in humans? Yes. Is anything I say or do going to make it go away? I mean, I could set up a protest, or get one of my techier friends to launch a DNS on their site to frustrate users trying to post their brackets, or activate the Wellesley red phone to get some sort of action going -- but Sports Illustrated isn't going to stop doing the swimsuit edition because it gets pulled from (most) every high school library upon impact, nor is being an irritant going to stop guys from discussing who is hot and who is not.

Instead, I look on the Bigger Dance as an opportunity to learn more about men. I've tried to "channel" man-think and submitted my own bracket. A lot of channeling man-think is trying to focus more on boobs, blondeness, and relative sluttiness than on what I would normally consider in looking at women, like age-appropriateness of ensembles and the cankle index. (That men don't see or don't care about Jessica Alba's cankles is one of my biggest frustrations in life--she has a pretty strong history in the Bigger Dance.) Plus -- actually winning the Bigger Dance gets you real prizes. It's like my own little sociological experiment with the opportunity to go to Australia and watch surfing for free.