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Jonathan Kieran's avatar

Cthulhu help us all. Wilson. You’ve got high-‘n’-low comic nuggets of genius strewn in a multitude of places over the years. I didn’t discover your Salon columns until 1997 and the purchase of a BIG Mac. Before that, I’d squealed with delight at an advice column in one of the SF papers.

Every freakin’ sentence here is pregnant with acrobatic hilarity … unlike the dour, stunted ‘Murica Moppets whose ovaries were cattle-prodded into raisin-form in the name of literal Twistedness as public athletic entertainment.

Best of all (and as usual) you were dazzlingly ahead of your time in this lampoon of dysfunctional Lady-Diminishment that was really only a few ladder rungs higher than itty-bitty girl beauty pageants.

I hadn’t read this one. Insanely, laser-pinpoint hilarious AND prescient. Wilson, you are the sexy djin who keeps on granting favors even after I think I’ve asked for (and seen) everything.

You’re worth every dollar, Ms. Cultural Lobotomatrix. You always have been.

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Cynthia K. West, Ph.D's avatar

I was a gymnast from age 5-20. I can tell you that I only had 7% body fat. For that reason puberty was delayed to the point where I didn't really get my period until I was 17. I grew 2 inches in height after high school and filled out.

At age 16, I worked in a gymnastics academy in SoCal as a coach. There was an academy side that would feed the team side. The team side was a feeder to Junior Olympics and Olympics. On the team side, the girls worked out 10 hours a day and were home schooled in the gym. Girls my same age were socially stunted, as they spent their days in the gym. They had the maturity age of 12 years olds.

This way of being, not going to a regular school, and sheltered from social interactions, leads easily to the kind of abuse we saw from Larry Nassar and other monsters. USA Gymnastics did not take any of those situations seriously and needs to be re-org'd entirely.

In order for a girl to make the 'team,' the coaches looked for physical attributes of size, big hands, big feet, etc. If a girl was talented but her parents looked too tall, too fat, or other undesirable trait, then the girl was not advanced to the team side.

When people tell me their girls are in gymnastics, I say, it's the girls version of football. Very hard on the body. I recommend swimming instead.

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