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news-mashable-yahoopartner-blog · 6 years ago

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The complex allure of cursed images

Everyone has a guilty internet pleasure.

Some spice up their time online by watching porn in an incognito browser, others find solace in binge-scrolling through pages and pages of their co-workers Twitter likes to determine if they have decent morals. And there are hundreds of thousands of people who get their internet kicks by willingly exposing themselves to a daily dose of repulsive, cringeworthy images.

While recreationally staring at photographs of shit-filled toilet bowls and insultingly tone-deaf stock images might not necessarily have been considered a socially acceptable practice pre-internet, over the past few years accounts like @darkstockphotos, @scarytoilet, and @cursedimages have made celebrating cursed images a common and even somewhat conventional pastime.

SEE ALSO: Alpaca accounts are underrated social media treasures

As dedicated meme-lovers may know, cursed images began gaining attention on Tumblr back in 2015. But after the original @cursedimages Twitter account was created in 2016, the concept of allowing oneself to be openly amused by cursed content started to become more widely embraced.

Over several months, @cursedimages exposed thousands of Twitter timelines to a fair share of visual nightmares, and though the creator stopped posting photographs on Oct. 31, 2016 — with the exception of a single image tweeted in 2017 — they inspired the creation of other accounts that are dedicated to sharing cursed content, such as the photo of Ryan McFarland's DIY guacamole doll serving dish shown below.

cursed image 9192 pic.twitter.com/fuT6bSjZKO

— cursed images (@cursedimages) October 18, 2016

The masters of cursed imagery on what inspired their craft

Shortly after the exhausting 2016 presidential election, fans of @cursedimages began to notice that the beloved account had gone dark. A little over a month later, in hopes of regaining that small and strange, but bizarrely uplifting space online, one brave soul decided to take action.

"After the 2016 election, my Twitter timeline was a depressing mess," Sarah the 39-year-old who created @cursedimages_2, explained over email. "It made me realize how much I looked forward to their [@cursedimage’s] posts… and after a while I decided to attempt to pick up where they left off."

"I was an instant fan of the original account. The images were weird and creepy and I loved the idea of the ‘cursed image’ being numbered, as if it'd been pulled from some deep, classified archive," Sarah said. So she set out to share her own cursed images, starting with cursed image 7285 — a girl and her doll.

cursed image 7285 pic.twitter.com/X54JvWMrtA

— cursed images (@cursedimages_2) December 27, 2016

While Sarah was busy posting photos of culinary abominations, nail art fails, creepy costumes, and NSFW optical illusions, a man named Andy Kelly was inspired to throw his hat in the cursed imagery ring. In June 2017, after years of finding amusement in the absurd collection of stock images on sites like Getty and Shutterstock, Kelly decided to create @darkstockphotos — a place where he could share the especially confounding stock images he stumbled upon with the rest of the world.

"In the depths of these sites, 30 pages into a search, I started noticing images that weren't like the others; images that were darker and more disturbing, illustrating some really heavy subject matter, but still fundamentally absurd," Kelly explained. "And so I decided to start collecting some of the weirdest, darkest, and most bewildering I found and posting them on Twitter."

pic.twitter.com/6LRutwVfzS

— Dark Stock Photos (@darkstockphotos) October 2, 2018

Now, more than 360,000 followers subscribe to see Kelly's curated timeline of stock photos that attempted to visually represent violence, addiction, depression, and a slew of other serious topics, but gravely missed the mark. He's even published a book.

Much like Kelly, personal experience is also what inspired Phil, the 24-year-old behind @scarytoilets to create his cursed accounts. During his time at university in May 2018, after using the restroom at "a particularly bad nightclub," Phil was compelled to start the Toilets with Threatening Auras Facebook page. Shortly after it gained an impressive amount of traction, he started a Twitter account.

pic.twitter.com/54ct63PFQw

— Toilets With Threatening Auras (@scarytoilet) August 11, 2018

"When I set it up it seemed quite funny to explore something so incongruous," Phil said. "And when I delved into the wealth of images that are relevant to the topic is [it] just became even more entertaining."

Turns out Phil’s obsession with whimsical, creepy, and downright repulsive porcelain thrones was contagious. And there are apparently so many cursed facilities in the world that he now gets the majority of the images he posts from direct messages.

The unusual charm of the cursed image

By nature, many "cursed images" are not meant to be enjoyed. Oftentimes the content they contain is intrinsically repulsive, and therefore, shouldn’t necessarily trigger delight within us. Yet, somehow, so many of them do.

In a 2016 article, New York Magazine’s Brian Feldman noted that the subjects in the images aren’t always what provokes a lingering double take, rather sometimes it’s the poor quality of an image that leaves onlookers with a cursed vibe.

Feldman argued that “Cursed images draw their power not from the actual objects pictured, but from the fact that photos like these are bygone products of antiquated technology.” And while that’s definitely true in certain cases, if you were to show me a photo of a hairless cat staring into a pot of raw chicken, a cloven hoof inexplicably sticking out of a toilet bowl, or a sobbing child holding a gun, I would consider each of those images "cursed," even if Annie Leibovitz shot them using the world’s most expensive camera.

cursed image 594 pic.twitter.com/N3ciIqa3zw

— cursed images (@cursedimages_2) January 4, 2019

pic.twitter.com/JI7R1SyZaO

— Toilets With Threatening Auras (@scarytoilet) January 11, 2019

While there are definitely exceptions, the majority of cursed images shared by these accounts do seem to be at least lightly fucked up. So what is it that makes people feel it's totally and completely OK to smash the like button on them?

For all three of the account creators I interviewed, the main draw to cursed images is humor, albeit very dark humor.

“Social media can quickly get depressing and it really does help to break it up a bit with other types of content,” Sarah of @cursedimages_2 explained. “For me, the cursed images posts provided an unexpected moment of comic relief. And I think cringe-y stuff kind of makes us feel a little better about ourselves… in a harmless schadenfreude kind of way."

Kelly agrees, adding that the dark stock photos he shares stray so far from reality that he can’t help but find them comical.

"What I find so fascinating, and hilarious, about stock photos is how blunt and artless they are. These photographers will take something serious like, say, seasonal depression. Then they'll illustrate it by having a guy sit in front of a Christmas tree with a bottle of whiskey and a pistol,” he said. “The most serious subject matter is rendered absurd by the lens of the stock photographer, and that is an endless source of amusement for me. They don't reflect reality in any way: they're like some alien's twisted, third-hand approximation of the human experience.”

pic.twitter.com/kj5VtLFJWn

— Dark Stock Photos (@darkstockphotos) September 10, 2018

And though it's occasionally vile, Phil's toilet account also helps people flush away negativity. “I’ve been messaged a few times through both Twitter and Facebook… people telling me they like following because it breaks their timeline or newsfeed," Phil said. “I think it’s nice to see humour in something most people wouldn’t normally. The images usually aren’t really ‘threatening’ but just silly entertainment."

Cursed content gets personal

While humor is definitely a distinct part of the charm surrounding cursed images, the allure is different for everyone, and not strictly confined to a single factor.

John Fio, a 28-year-old explained via Twitter DM that what he likes most about accounts like @cursedimages and @scarytoilet is that "they evoke two eras" of the internet: pre-internet and early-internet.

“Because of the washed-out flash photography, old furniture, and wallpaper you often see, and grainy film quality which obscures the image in fun ways,” many of the images take Fio back to a time before the internet even existed. But sometimes he recognizes images shared on the cursed account from posts in the early 2000s, so they serve as fun throwback posts.

Meanwhile, Lala, a 33-year-old cursed content connoisseur, appreciates the fact that the images make her think.

"I think it's appealing because it speaks to the part of our brains that usually can only begin to imagine the kind of 'horrors' you see there, but they’re real!" Lala said over Twitter DM. "Some are funny, and some are truly disgusting, but most are something we'd never conceptualize in our own imaginations. Like if you asked me to make up a cursed image I think it’d be hard, you just know it when you see it. Almost like a Schrödinger’s cat type thing."

For Zoë, a 28-year-old fan of @cursedimages_2 and @scarytoilet, they feel cursed content "appeals to an organic aesthetic" they've had all their life.

"I grew up in a small town in the Rust Belt and spent most of my free time as a kid playing in old ruined buildings and finding weird shit at thrift stores," Zoë explained. "I think these things are very much art projects in a way and i think they began to appeal to a wider audience because of the cultural moment we're at in America and around the world, where it kind of seems like everything is falling apart... and 'cursed content' is kind of a sick, gallows take on consumerism in many ways."

How cursed is too cursed?

While they're far from the darkest spaces on the internet, cursed images and the accounts that share them can be seen as inappropriate to some. The creators are fully committed to posting all things weird and mind-boggling, but on occasion even they encounter lines they don't feel should be crossed. With great horror comes great responsibility.

"There are a lot of 'dark' stock photos that are just matter-of-fact portrayals of really horrible stuff. For example, there's an inordinate amount of images depicting violence against women on these sites. And there's nothing funny about it, so I avoid it," Kelly explained. "To make it on the Twitter feed, an image needs to have something surreal or absurd about it. A touch of the preposterous. And I do like that whenever I post an image that is more dark for the sake of dark, it gets a lot fewer RTs than the others. The readers of Dark Stock Photos are surprisingly discerning."

cursed image 1118 pic.twitter.com/9rOAzrk7r9

— cursed images (@cursedimages_2) November 22, 2018

Sarah of @cursedimages_2 agrees, noting she tries not to post any images that depict "someone getting seriously hurt" or "intentionally hurting an animal."

"There are always gray areas, but the bad ones are usually pretty obvious. In other cases, every once in a while the cringe factor may just be too strong. If I’m on the fence, I’ll text my sister with an image and ask 'too cursed?'" Beyond that, Sarah explained she's also against posting anything that's been Photoshopped because if it's not a real life situation it's not really that cursed.

The question of crediting images

Aside from a few careful considerations, owners of cursed accounts can pretty much post whatever they like, whenever they like. It sounds like a pretty sweet gig, but there was one concern that came up when talking to fans.

While @darkstockphotos often screenshots watermarked photography from websites, occasionally including some way to track down the original image, many cursed accounts seem to curate photos from the web without giving the original creators proper credit.

"I think that since a lot of the images are stolen... there is an interesting contextual question there about whether these accounts are ethical," Zoë said.

When the original @cursedimages was active it appears an @uncursedimages account attempted to provide attributions to as many of the cursed posts as possible. But nowadays, as most messages are sent from fans, or sourced from message board, the process of properly crediting has fallen by the wayside, which, if you ask me, sounds a bit cursed in its own way.

It's possible that in certain cases the sources of these images are intentionally hidden to protect the people in them or those who posted them, but in Phil's case, the choice not to credit images was a personal one he made when the Toilets With Threatening Auras Facebook page started to gain popularity.

"I used to give credit when some wanted, but I started getting others claiming that they took the photo and it became a bit of mess actually trying to authenticate who the pictures are really taken by," Phil said.

While he has taken several photos down after people called him out for not crediting them, he noted that "most of the time there is little complaint."

As for Kelly, he does his best to include some nod to each image's origin in his tweets. "I'm personally very sensitive to stuff being stolen and re-shared without credit online, so if I felt like Dark Stock Photos was crossing the line in that regard, I wouldn't do it," he said.

Kelly also noted the fact that he makes no money from the Twitter account, and that before making his Dark Stock Photos book, his publisher was sure to purchase licenses for around 100 images they included.

"Of course, if one of the photographers complained I'd take it down straight away," Kelly assured us. "But that hasn't happened yet."

Finding light in the darkness

Ultimately, cursed images are meant to challenge people to look beyond the often hideous exterior and find the humor within. Sure, sometimes the images are fucked up, but they’re fucked up in the best way.

We assume the majority of these cursed images aren’t being shared maliciously, which helps us justify laughing at them. And though the issues most dark stock photos attempt to visually portray are real and serious, we know the photographs are staged and the models aren't in any real peril.

For those reasons, we allow ourselves to enjoy these incredibly fucked up images with the same grotesque delight we feel when watching Dr. Pimple Popper make pus volcanically erupt or a rat drag a slice of pizza across the floor of a dirty New York subway station.

The accounts are definitely not for everyone, but if think you might be able to find even an ounce of joy from looking at a cursed image through the comfort of your computer or phone screen, give it a shot.

WATCH: Ariana Grande's tattoo flub continues to get roasted in hilarious internet meme — All the Memes

Stock image credits:

[Weird rock twins: DonNichols/Getty Images][Spaghetti twins: harpazo_hope/Getty Images]

#_category:yct:001000002 #_author:Nicole Gallucci #_uuid:908e282c-3297-35f3-babe-f75e72766d6d #_lmsid:a0Vd000000DTrEpEAL #_revsp:news.mashable

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theconservativebrief · 6 years ago

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The major takeaway that many people gleaned from a recent paper by Morten Bay, a research fellow at the USC Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism’s Center for the Digital Future, was that the seemingly massive backlash against The Last Jedi, the latest chapter in the Star Wars saga, was driven by Russian trolls and bots.

Trolls and bots were, indeed, part of Bay’s research. But his study further concludes that much of the backlash was driven by political opportunism from the American alt-right, particularly members of that movement who were deeply involved in 2014’s anti-feminist and proto-alt-right Gamergate movement in the video game community.

Meanwhile, it found that while many believe the dominant response to The Last Jedi was overwhelmingly negative, the preponderance of bots and trolls on social media only made it seem that way. In reality, most viewers of the film seem to have liked it. (Vox’s sister site, Polygon, has more.)

But what Bay’s study really got me thinking about was how strange it was that Russian agents would focus on Star Wars, of all things, in what seems to be a campaign to spread dissension throughout America, dating back to before the 2016 election. Whether or not a Star Wars movie is good or bad has little bearing on the overall twists and turns of global geopolitics, and yet here was evidence that somebody in Russia sure disagreed.

Maybe the Russian bots that Bay identified are all extra-governmental, built by trolls with spare time on their hands and a grudge against Lucasfilm. Or maybe Bay’s findings are yet another example of how thoroughly Russian intelligence has zeroed in on the idea that white nationalism is central to driving a wedge into American society.

If the latter is true, then what’s most unnerving about Russia’s intelligence strategy and its connection to Star Wars isn’t what that strategy says about Russia, but what it says about us.

I don’t know if you heard, but there was a bit of a backlash against The Last Jedi. Lucasfilm

Whomever you believe is behind movements like Gamergate and the pushback against The Last Jedi, what they reveal about America in the 2010s feels a little hard to swallow at first: At this point in history, a lot of us — and especially a lot of young, white men — are centering their identities and their senses of right and wrong on pop culture artifacts, sometimes with a near-religious zealotry. Call it “fandamentalism.”

The most obvious examples are linked to the aforementioned movements, like how much of the early anger driving Gamergate stemmed from a number of essays that besmirched the “gamer identity” as one that was largely young, white, male, and obsessed with overly sexualized digital creations. But fandamentalism is also endemic in the anger that so many of these young men feel at the very idea of giant, well-established franchises evolving to be more inclusive of women and people of color. Indeed, the initial backlash to The Last Jedi’s predecessor, The Force Awakens, was driven by only a handful of people but based entirely on the film’s male lead being black.

However, it’s not as though there aren’t ample examples within more progressive communities as well. There is undoubtedly an increased desire among consumers to see massive movie franchises and other pop culture behemoths reflect the diversity of the world, not only because representation matters (and it does) but also because it creates a kind of virtue by proxy: I like this thing that makes the right progressive moves, and therefore, I am a good person.

All the while, massive entertainment companies turn representation and inclusion into excuses to make more money. That they’ve increasingly bet on diversity being the best way to rake in lots of cash is heartening for progressives in the sense that the entertainment companies believe that progressive causes are the “winners” of these crude economics. But there’s an empty cynicism to their choices all the same; a company like Disney sees diversity as a worthy goal second and a potential money machine first.

In and of itself, the idea of looking for meaning and a reflection of one’s own life in pop culture is perfectly fine. I would even argue that it’s the first step toward digging deeper into a work of art, because it leads us down a path of critical thought and invigorating discussion with friends — and maybe even a little bit of self-examination.

But here’s where things have flipped on their ear in the 2010s: Many fans of a work aren’t just looking for meaning in the work itself, but for the work to impart meaning upon them. Too often, they ask pop culture to fill the role that religion, philosophy, or psychology once did.

But pop culture is never going to be an easy fit for that particular task, because much of it is too dedicated to the pursuit of distraction — a worthy goal, but not one that’s going to give many people a better understanding of themselves, or a higher purpose.

And while I think there’s a lot of value in considering pop culture on a level deeper than, “I liked it!” (which is literally part of my job), the danger of fandamentalism comes from the ways in which it turns some pop culture properties into a belief system, into something so central to one’s identity that it becomes inextricable from the self. Once that happens, if somebody criticizes, say, “gamer culture,” it ends up feeling less like pop culture criticism and more like bigotry or bullying to the people who consider themselves part of gamer culture. It’s fandom as religion.

That’s what makes our online debates about pop culture susceptible to outside interference — and it’s why Gamergate has always explained the rise of Donald Trump and the divisiveness of the 2016 election better than almost anything else.

Some people really, really love the president. Ethan Miller/Getty Images

What’s been eerily notable about the last several years in American political discourse is how thoroughly everything about being a Republican or Democrat now flows through the model of fandom. Many people have equated politics fandom with sports fandom — you have a political “team” you root for, and you get upset when the other guys win — but I think pop culture is almost more useful as a lens.

Pop culture, after all, is largely built around stories, and stories have always been a way that we organize our various moral principles and ideas about the universe. The same is true of politics, in which a party’s platform is meant to stand in for a whole virtue system. No matter which party you support, it’s unlikely you support all of its policies, or even know that much about all of them. You probably have a handful of issues that you consider most important, then pick the party that most closely aligns with your beliefs on them.

Stories are also the likely reason for why pop culture has taken on a sort of religious significance to so many: Religion, too, is a series of stories meant to provide moral guidance and the like. But the underlying goal of religion is to take a stab at pondering or even providing answers to some of the deepest questions about the universe, and the best pop culture — the best art, period — is rarely so didactic. It finds more fascination with the process of questioning than it does any of the answers it might arrive at. Art and religion swim in the same pool, to be sure, but they practice different strokes.

Where all of these movements dovetail is in the eternal human yearning for easy answers, of the sort that suggest that a fundamentalist fervor for “the right” belief system will unlock the correct path. And many of the most ridiculous Gamergate memes, which celebrate the strength and resilience of gamers, don’t strike me as that far off from the sorts of fundamentalist Christian slogans I grew up with, reinforcing the idea of a chosen identity (centered on an interest or a passion or a religion) being oppressed by the larger culture, even if that chosen identity is part of a larger moment that dominates the culture. They’re all a seemingly self-evident hack toward righteousness.

This is where the genius of Gamergaters or Russian operatives or alt-right trolls comes in. They’ve transformed our natural desire for those easy answers, our natural desire to feel like we are right and everybody else is not, into a way to build a new belief system around everything from a political party to a Star Wars movie.

This approach seems to have found quite a bit more success on the right, which is more prone to authoritarian or fundamentalist movements. But it’s not as if the left is completely immune, not when the slightly more diverse casting of a major franchise movie is treated as an act of tremendous moral weight on the part of the corporations who make that decision.

I’m not suggesting that we need to completely change how we think and talk about pop culture. Arguing about pop culture is fun, and there are important discussions to have about how it reflects our own world back at us. But pop culture can’t replace a moral code or a belief system. There has to be a way to disentangle our feelings about the things we love from our self-worth. Religious wars might provide meaning in the short term, but in the long view of history, they almost never turn out well for anyone involved. Let’s not ignite a new one over pop culture, not even online.

Original Source -> Russian trolls used Star Wars to sow discord online. The fact that it worked is telling.

via The Conservative Brief

#IFTTT #The Conservative Brief

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junker-town · 7 years ago

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Soccer’s ugly sexism is keeping women from coaching the beautiful game

by Stephanie Yang | June 27, 2017

Amanda Cromwell is one of the most well-known names in women’s collegiate soccer. But, she says, you wouldn’t know it from the way male NCAA referees have treated her.

“The refs go to my male assistant coach before the game assuming he’s the head coach,” Cromwell says. “Still now. Last year. After winning a national championship and everything, the refs will go to the male assistant or go to the male on the staff.”

At 47 years old, Cromwell has been a head coach longer than some of her UCLA women’s soccer players have been alive. She’s got 14 NCAA tournament appearances and a D-I championship under her belt.

“I had a game in Memphis years ago,” Cromwell went on. “Fifteen minutes into the game there was a bad call, and I dropped the F-bomb and the ref came over. The center ref didn’t even hear it. The sideline guy was going crazy ... The center comes over and gives me a straight red 15 minutes into the game. Meanwhile the other coach ... he’s like Mister F-bomb. My players afterwards told me, that coach was cussing the whole game and didn’t even get a yellow. It’s like oh, ‘Don’t yell at me missy,’ and come over with their card or something. It’s like a blow to their ego that a female coach is yelling at them.”

Illustration: Brittany Holloway-Brown

The soccer landscape in the United States is expanding for female players. There’s a burgeoning youth system, including a new U.S. Soccer developmental academy, a top-flight women’s professional league that finally beat the three-year lifespan of its predecessors, the growing prominence of NCAA soccer, and of course, the ballooning popularity of the senior national program. But that growth is not equally reflected in coaching opportunities for women. Although the U.S. Women’s National Team has a female head coach, men dominate the coaching ranks at every other level of the sport.

Of the 10 teams in the National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL), only one team — the Seattle Reign — has a female head coach. Out of the top 50 ranked D-I women’s programs in 2016, 14 had female head coaches. In 2015, across all divisions, 338 women’s soccer programs out of 1,047 had female head coaches. The National Soccer Coaches Association of America has a membership of over 30,000, but only 15 percent are female. In USSF’s recent pro A license course, this picture from its pilot course of all men, mostly white, pretty much speaks for itself. The sequel wasn’t much better; out of 17 participants, only one was a woman: USWNT head coach Jill Ellis.

Participation rates of girls in soccer from youth to college level have been robust for the past 10 years, showing that a large pool of interested, talented players who are educated on the basics does exist. According to U.S. Youth Soccer, the gender breakdown of 3.14 million registered players in 2008 was 52 percent boys and 48 percent girls. That same year, 23,357 women and 21,601 men participated in NCAA soccer across all divisions.

Illustration: Brittany Holloway-Brown

Soccer is growing, but not for everyone, and that’s a problem. The ugly truth of the beautiful game is that bias, cultural expectation, and lack of opportunity keep it out of the hands of women who want to help it flourish.

“Nothing’s going to change unless we keep talking about it,” Cromwell says. “That’s how years and years of inequality and social injustice happen and people are silent. You’ve got to talk about it. You have to bring things to the forefront.”

Long before Lori Chalupny was a gold medalist and a two-time World Cup participant for the USWNT, she started out as a 5-year-old whose abject shyness disappeared on the pitch playing against boys. Chalupny rose through the U.S. Soccer system to earn 106 caps and seven years of professional playing experience. Now the soccer lifer says her coaching career, unlike her playing days, has been mostly self-guided.

Photo by Brian Bahr/Getty Images

Chalupny is currently an assistant coach at D-II Maryville University, where she will assume head coach duties after the 2017 season. But even with a USSF class B license, the path she has taken toward becoming a head coach has been crawled at a measured pace, dictated in part by her limited resources.

“[The USSF] B license itself was pretty costly,” Chalupny says. “And it’s a 10-day course, so you have to get a hotel for 10 days and fly out to California. It was a pretty costly endeavor, but definitely worth it.”

Most coaches get certified through the National Soccer Coaches Association of America or U.S. Soccer, which develops coaches through an eight-level training progression from USSF F license (which anyone over 16 can complete online for $25) all the way up to the Pro license (only open to current MLS, NWSL, NASL, USL, or U.S. National Team coaching staff). At every stop, the requirements expand into clinics with rising costs — $1,000 for a Class C license; $4,000 for Class A — both in terms of time and money.

Photo by Kim Klement/Getty Images

Any player with five years’ playing experience “on a FIFA recognized 1st Division professional team,” can go straight to the Class B, but not all players are aware of that option. Chalupny says she didn’t know about the option until she began researching it herself. “Nobody ever told me that when I was researching getting my license,” she says. “I stumbled across a little asterisk that said that was the case. I think we have to make sure that people know that.”

Non-pros pour thousands of dollars in fees, travel costs, and missed work into getting licensed. “Very few of us can afford to be a club coach full time, and so you’re taking time off your own work schedule and doing vacation to go do this,” says Angela Harrison, who has been coaching club soccer in Portland for 20 years and is licensed through the NSCAA.

Sharolta Nonen is the new head coach of women’s soccer at Florida International University and a former Canadian international with 10 years of national team experience. She has a USSF C license. “I was actually in a class that had quite a few females,” says Nonen, but “quite a few” women wasn’t very many at all. “I believe there were five of us. Which, for us, we were amazed that there were that many and super excited. So it was probably five out of 40 or 50 men ... and we were all amazed that there were that many of us.”

“That was without doubt the hardest thing, the most uncomfortable thing about the B license,” Chalupny says. “Now I did it, fortunately, with two other friends of mine that I played with, so there were three of us in the course with, what, 25 guys. It is a little bit intimidating.”

It wasn’t always this hard for women to break into soccer coaching. Perhaps one of the factors that most impacted the number of female coaches was Title IX, the landmark 1972 education amendment that decreed that federally funded institutions cannot discriminate on the basis of sex. Athletic programs had to provide equitable opportunities for athletic participation to their male and female students, including funding coaching staffs equally. The infusion of money into women’s sports caused a boom. According to The New York Times, in the year before Title IX was enacted, about 310,000 female athletes played high school and college sports. By 2012, there were more than 3.37 million.

As women’s programs began to grow in support and prestige after Title IX, men found coaching jobs more and more attractive. In 1972, women coached 90 percent of women’s teams. By 2012, that figure was down to 43 percent and hasn’t budged much since. Women didn’t cross over in equal measure: Only 3 percent of men’s teams are coached by women.

Illustration: Brittany Holloway-Brown

Dr. Nicole LaVoi, Co-Director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, gave a presentation on women coaches in soccer at the 2017 NSCAA convention, in which she discussed several of the reasons for bias in hiring.

Sparse media coverage conditions the public to associate sports with men. People in charge of hiring tend to hire people like themselves in what Dr. LaVoi calls “homologous reproduction.” And someone may simply have preconceived ideas about hiring women (or, just as problematic, no ideas about hiring women because the concept has not occurred to them).

Many women are simply made to feel like outsiders in their sport by the men in charge. “I can’t tell you how many situations I’ve been in,” Harrison says, “that have been super uncomfortable, where as a woman I’m with maybe one other woman but like 10 guys, and you feel like ‘I got to kind of keep up with these guys’ and you’re going out and you feel like you have to drink or you feel like you have to listen to these terrible misogynistic jokes and things like that because you have to be part of a network.”

Who are the federation board members, the college athletic directors, the team managers and owners, the club directors? Those responsible for hiring head coaches overwhelmingly tend to be men, and men tend to hire other men.

Nonen says she has definitely seen men get jobs she knew she was qualified for. “I’m fortunate because of my playing days I know a lot of not only former and current great players, but also great coaches,” she says. “So I’d ask my friends that were head coaches, what are the administrators looking for? What do they want? If they don’t want [me], what I see as professionalism and experience and all this kind of stuff, what do they want? And they all had the same answer: Nobody knows.

“One of the things that I believe is just that we don’t have enough representation at the administrative side,” Nonen says. “And there aren’t as many women that are ADs and therefore we’re not hiring as many female coaches.”

Illustration: Brittany Holloway-Brown

Men have better, more established networks in other male coaches, giving them the edge in mentoring and job placement. Without an obvious route in, aspiring female coaches have difficulty picturing themselves being able to break into the boys’ club, even when they’re as qualified as male applicants, as U.S. Soccer Women’s Technical Director April Heinrichs can attest.

Heinrichs was a two-time National Player of the Year at North Carolina and one of the first USWNT members. She captained the team that won the first-ever women’s World Cup in 1991 and coached the USWNT to silver (in 2000) and gold (2004) Olympic medals. When she scans the candidates for jobs within the U.S. program, she sees this discrepancy play out.

“[Women are] more confident on the surface, but when you scratch sort of a little bit below, there’s a lot of self-doubt,” Heinrichs says. “Men don’t have that doubt. They’re missing four qualifications; they still think they’re the best applicant for the job. I don’t try to be funny there; I literally have read applications where a guy has not coached one day in women’s soccer and they feel like he can translate and coach women easily. Or he’s never coached internationally, ever, at any level, and he feels like he could coach a youth national team program.”

Once women get their foot in the door, advancement can be just as difficult, at any level, as entry.

“What tends to happen [in youth clubs],” Harrison says, “is either they give up control and let a woman coach a team and maybe the results aren’t there right away, and so they get impatient and pull them off, or a woman starts to have a little bit of success with a team and pushes them up into a little bit of a higher level, and now the men in the club come in and take the team, because there’s a little bit more prestige in that team.”

The prestige that Harrison mentions is especially prevalent in the U15 and U16 age groups — kids who are getting scouted for college. Coaches in these age groups want to both impress scouts and make their own connections for future jobs.

At the pro level, women get yanked when the results aren’t there, while male coaches get more leeway. Lisa Cole was head coach of the Boston Breakers in 2013 but was unceremoniously fired after about eight months on the job. The Breakers finished fifth that year, one spot out of playoff contention. Yet her replacement, Tom Durkin, spent two years with the Breakers. His team finished eighth out of nine teams in his first year, then dead last in his second. Randy Waldrum of the Houston Dash finished ninth, fifth, and eighth out of 10 over three seasons. Waldrum was only fired when he went 2-5-0 in 2017.

“I know women who have gotten out of coaching because they can see that all they’re going to be given are the younger teams or the very oldest teams and not given the chance to develop a team through the middle part of the age groups,” Harrison says, meaning the prestigious college-scouted teams. Women simply aren’t given the same chances to succeed or fail as men.

Family is a career hurdle for women more often than men because the expectation of child-rearing is largely placed on mothers in American society. In a 2008 NCAA survey, 73 percent of female coaches agreed with the statement that “careers in athletics conflict with family duties,” and 58 percent of them said family commitments were the main reason women decide to leave careers in coaching.

Illustration: Brittany Holloway-Brown

Female head coaches with young children are not the norm, but former USWNT player Marci Jobson has four children under 7 years old. She was head coach at Baylor but transitioned to volunteer assistant coach to spend more time with her children, with her husband assuming the head coach role in her place. For Jobson, the extreme time commitment of being a head coach forced her into tough choices. “You have to make the decision of traveling all the time,” Jobson says. ”If you’re not traveling, somebody else is traveling. Some other program is going to get that recruit.”

According to Jobson, Baylor’s support allowed her to keep working in the program. “My children have come on the road at different times ... they’ve allowed me that freedom at times to do that. It’s not a big deal if I have a sick kid and I have to bring them up to the office for a day or I maybe can’t get a babysitter or something like that. They’re very flexible and supportive in that facet.”

Heinrichs mentioned another problem with coach retention that ties into family: fatigue. “I have found unfortunately that a lot of women step away from coaching around 40 years of age,” she says. “I think that 40 years of age is kind of a threshold for a lot of women. If they decide to have children, they’ve done it up until they actually have kids and now their kids are starting to play soccer and starting to be that soccer mom. I think if you decide to not have kids, then it’s just fatigue from saying yes to everything because you felt like you had to say yes to everything.”

Jobson was aware that what was provided at Baylor isn’t necessarily the case for all universities, and that, depending on the timing of a pregnancy, it can be logistically difficult to take a true maternity leave. “You got to keep getting your team better, you got to keep improving things, you got to keep your recruiting, all those things. So it’s really hard to just say, ‘Oh, I’m going to take two months off and kick back,’” she points out.

For all the problems that exist in the hiring and promotion of female coaches, they’re worse for black female coaches. There aren’t many women in the game at the highest levels as players, coaches, owners, or administrators, and that problem is even more acute for women of color. A 2015 NCAA report said that “ethnic minority females,” not just black women, accounted for less than 7 percent of administrators and coaches across all three divisions. According to NCAA demographic data, in the 2015-16 season, 4.5 percent of all NCAA female soccer players were black, making low minority participation in the sport a continuing problem across all levels.

The high price point of participating in elite soccer contributes to the dearth. But as players are more likely to grow up to be volunteers, assistant coaches, or grad assistants before they become head coaches themselves, that scarcity means the pool for black female coaches is quite limited.

Former USWNT starting goalkeeper Briana Scurry was the most visible black player during the ’90s runs, which ignited grassroots soccer participation. She made the save before that Brandi Chastain penalty kick that won the 1999 World Cup and was a founding player in WUSA, America’s first professional women’s soccer league.

Photo by David Madison/Getty Images

The seeds that Scurry herself planted during her playing career from 1994 to 2008 have only now come to fruition, as the girls who saw her play are now professional players in their own right. Scurry helped lead the way for increased numbers of black women in the national team pool, among them Christen Press, Crystal Dunn, Mallory Pugh, Lynn Williams, Jess McDonald, and Casey Short.

“I’m disappointed at how long it took for more African-American young women to feel like soccer was an option for them,” Scurry says. “These things do take time, and right now you’re taking a snapshot and you’re seeing some change occur right before your eyes, but you’re not going to see a whole lot of African-American women coaching soccer at the highest collegiate levels for another five or 10 years, maybe longer.”

The lack of access for black women is compounded by a lack of outreach. “I don’t think that USSF or high-level programs are particularly trying to increase diversity within the game,” says Kia McNeill, head coach of women’s soccer at Brown. “I have seen no real evidence of that, and I continue to see a lack of diversity in soccer at the highest level. I think that you are starting to see more minorities in the game these days because the game itself is growing and there is a lot more exposure around it.”

That 2015 NCAA study reinforces the importance of visibility. The No. 1 response when asked why more “ethnic minority women” weren’t in leadership positions: “lack of ethnic minority women in leadership roles.” You cannot be what you cannot see.

“I think that right now there are just so few of us that are even looking at this as a possible career path,” Nonen says, emphasizing the importance of visible diversity. “When I’m recruiting kids now, if they’re black kids, they say, ‘Oh, Sydney Leroux.’ That’s their favorite player. They know Sydney Leroux. She’s the only one. Older players might remember Bri Scurry still. But younger players, they see Sydney Leroux and decide they want to be like Sydney Leroux.”

The rise of future Lerouxs might be more attributable to the growing black middle class than to soccer programs making their ranks easier to access, a fact that Scurry also noted. But with the attrition rate for female coaching candidates already high, the list of high-level black female coaches who make it from player to coach is embarrassingly short.

The women surveyed in that 2015 NCAA report agreed that perceived bias in hiring prevents some women of color from applying to jobs in the first place. Only 19 percent of “ethnic female respondents” agreed with the statement: “The most qualified applicants are being hired in athletics regardless of race/ethnicity”; 18 percent agreed with “the most qualified applicants are being hired in athletics regardless of gender.”

Nonen described attending a Alliance of Women’s Coaches meeting, with roughly 100 women present. “It was a sort of the same makeup in the coaches as it was in the administrators, where of those hundred, there were maybe 10 of us that are black.”

Illustration: Brittany Holloway-Brown

As Scurry has pointed out, many of the problems with hiring and promotion will take time because they stem from ingrained cultural attitudes toward women and people of color. Cultural shifts don’t happen overnight.

In the meantime, there are actionable steps toward improving the pipeline for female coaches. The women are there, getting licensed and learning despite the barriers inherent to the licensing system. FC Kansas City’s Yael Averbuch is doing her best to start up a licensing program through NWSL, where players can take a course that works with their schedule. With the league’s help, they were able to set up an E license course open to all FC Kansas City players who came to their field and spread out the course requirements over a longer period based on their in-season schedule.

“There may have been one or two [players] in the room who didn’t necessarily think, ‘I want to be a coach,’ but after going through the license realized, ‘Oh wow, I see how this works now; it’s something I’d be interested in continuing to learn about,’” Averbuch says.

That improved access is important for female players, who are the best resource for growing the coaching pool but don’t always have the time during their playing careers to devote to long coaching courses. It’s also critically important that players are made aware of their resources. U.S. Soccer needs to be especially proactive in reaching out to women of color. It’s telling that neither Scurry nor McNeill perceive U.S. Soccer as particularly working toward more diversity.

Illustration: Brittany Holloway-Brown

“[They] don’t make us aware of what we can do,” Scurry says about Chalupny having to figure out the shortcut to the B license on her own. “It’s sad that she didn’t know that because she’s a brilliant soccer mind, too. ... U.S. Soccer needs to be more proactive with stuff like that because having players like Chalupny and [Averbuch] and all these women who played on the national team being active in the soccer community after they’re playing is a good PR thing.”

U.S. Soccer may want to consider flexibility in its licensing, as well. Both Cromwell and Harrison were dissatisfied with USSF not accepting equivalency from NSCAA coaching courses as they once did. Some coaches find NSCAA more accessible than U.S. Soccer in terms of both time and money. U.S. Soccer wants to maintain certain standards, and it’s understandable that it wants a particular style of coaching to maintain consistency across all its teams. But there must be some aspects of coaching that translate between courses, and a little bit of flexibility helps ease the burden on coaches who have finite resources.

What many female coaches really need is for people in hiring positions to expand their job searches beyond the usual pool of white male candidates. Could that mean a Rooney Rule or something similar for hiring in some circle of women’s soccer? “A lot of these clubs are private [or] non-profit organizations,” Harrison says. “The ECNL (Elite Clubs National League) can’t necessarily mandate when a coaching director position comes open in their club. They have to interview just as many qualified female candidates as they do men. I don’t know that legally they can do that.”

But as she pointed out, they can encourage it, and NWSL, the NCAA, and USSF can certainly mandate that coaching searches must include diverse candidates. Right now, that doesn’t always happen. “When there’s a male in charge of the search, they often don’t do that,” Heinrichs says. “If you really want to find a woman, all you have to do is commit to it.”

Photo by Robert Cianflone/ALLSPORT

Above: USSF Technical Director April Heinrichs

Heinrichs also encourages women to ask their employers for the resources they need to better themselves as coaches, including having their clubs or colleges pay for their coaching licenses. “They’re going to be an investment,” she says. “So it’s paying for the license is an investment that will give back to their club, their team.”

Dr. LaVoi suggests several other methods of keeping women in the hiring loop, including using gender-neutral language for coaching positions of both boys’ and girls’ teams and a “succession planning list,” an organized plan for when a coach moves on, which includes women in the queue.

“I have a few coaches around the country, I’d say they know they can reach out to me and give them some insight and advice and I love that,” Cromwell says. “In the end, the women have to help the women and encourage them and promote them and try to hire them as much as we can, and in situations recommend them for jobs and all that.” Her former assistant coach, Louise Lieberman, is now head coach at San Diego.

It’s an uphill battle to push the people in charge of hiring to become more inclusive of women in their job searches and promotion decisions. But many of the women interviewed for this piece heavily emphasized the power of mentoring and being examples for the next generation. Dr. LaVoi says that a commitment to hiring diverse coaches as role models would lead to tangible benefits to players, including increased self-perception, positive self-esteem, and insight and advice from someone who knows their background. And of course, diverse coaches are role models, showing players like them that coaching is a possibility.

Nonen was looking for a way to remain close to the game when she decided to retire, but she didn’t feel confident about coaching. “I didn’t feel that I was anything like even the good male coaches that I had. I just didn’t see myself in them,” she says.

However, she encountered her only female head coach during a stint in Denmark — Eli Landsem, head coach of the Norwegian women’s team from 2009 to 2012 — who “ended up being one of the best coaches I’ve ever had.” Landsem’s advice and example helped put Nonen on the path to becoming a head coach.

The visibility and presence of women can help influence attitudes toward their place in sports and how their work intersects with their personal lives. Between men taking on more equal shares of responsibility in child-rearing and more child-friendly attitudes in the workplace like the one Jobson described at Baylor, it’s possible that the 40-year wall that Heinrichs described will start to come down.

Changes can be built from both the bottom up and the top down to help make a real, pervasive, and lasting difference. But people in positions of power have to want it, too. Women are already trying to get over, around, and through the barriers in their way. Clubs, schools, and federations should be doing their best to tear down the walls. They are, after all, the ones who put them there in the first place.

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Puck Daddy Bag of Mail: Expectations for Rinne; Shattenkirk's final destination

ANAHEIM, CA – MAY 12: Goaltender Pekka Rinne #35 of the Nashville Predators takes a drink from his water bottle during a break in play of Game One of the Western Conference Final during the 2017 Stanley Cup Playoffs at Honda Center on May 12, 2017 in Anaheim, California. The Predators defeated the Ducks 3-2 in overtime. (Photo by Harry How/Getty Images)

Hey everyone, with the NCAA season over, it’s time to roll out a new feature for the summer. It’s a mailbag column. People love those.

Okay it’s another mailbag. Things are chugging along in the conference finals, and crazy as it is to say we’re really very close to the season being over.

That always fills me with a weird kind of existential dread, I have to admit. If I’m not watching hockey most nights, what am I even doing? I imagine that’s what, like 75 percent of Canadians feel like, once they all get off the Ottawa Senators bandwagon.

Just kidding. No one cares about the Senators. Anyway, question time:

Rian Shaefer asks:

“Is it harder to obtain a No. 1 D or a No. 1 center?”

Obviously this comes with the caveat that they are both difficult to acquire, but it’s all about the scarcity of the resource.

While there are technically 30 No. 1 centers and defensemen in the NHL, players who meet the various criteria we think of as being No. 1s are obviously harder to come by. Is Rasmus Ristolainen an actual No. 1 defenseman in the vein of a Zdeno Chara or even Hampus Lindholm (who still doesn’t get as much credit as he should for being an elite defender)? Obviously not. Is he a No. 1 defender because Buffalo doesn’t have anyone better? Yeah.

Same for centers. Travis Zajac was New Jersey’s No. 1 pivot, but any half-decent team would at least have him on the second line, if not deeper in the lineup.

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With all this in mind, I would say it’s probably harder to get a No. 1 center because at least with defenders you can get a guy with a lot of talent on either side of the ice, as long as you’re not trying to fill a need. Those guys just don’t get traded (unless they’re P.K. Subban) or hit the open market (unless they’re Chara).

Defensemen are such a hot commodity in the NHL these days that you need to trade Taylor Hall to get an okay No. 2. It’s wild.

TJ Peterson asks:

“What should we expect from Rinne in the rest of the playoffs?”

People seem to have gotten a bit scared by Game 2 against Anaheim, in which Rinne gave up four goals for the first time in these playoffs. It was only the third time in 12 games he gave up more than three.

And hey, it happens.

I think we can all agree that he’s probably not going to keep going .940-plus for the rest of this postseason, but even if he settles down quite a bit in the next handful of games, going from outstanding to merely very good, that’s going to keep Nashville in a good position to win this series.

Let’s be honest: Just about everything went right for Anaheim in Game 2, and that’s not likely to continue either.

As long as Rinne is .920 or so, the Predators are going to be in a good position to win. Let’s not forget, John Gibson was only .909 and the Ducks got outshot by a decent margin in that game (minus-6).

This is a Preds team that’s good enough to win even without top-flight goaltending, so the odds Rinne completely tanks it are slim.

Paul Lang asks:

“Will Jim Benning see out the rebuild?”

Most GMs don’t see out their rebuilds when they’re the ones who started them, and the Canucks really do seem to want to win sooner than later even despite this newfound commitment to maybe not being good next year. On purpose this time.

With Benning in particular, though, it doesn’t seem like he’ll be around for much longer. He wasn’t brought in for a rebuild in the first place. This organization thought he would make them competitive. It’s tough to see how he lasts long-term since they thought he’d be getting into the playoffs every year.

John Payerchin asks:

“How should the Penguins handle their goalie situation? Do you see any landing spots for Fleury?”

You gotta get rid of Fleury. He’s older and more expensive. I know he’s Sid’s buddy but that can’t be any sort of guiding principle for the franchise.

The obvious move is to hope he gets claimed in the expansion draft, but if that doesn’t work (which I still think it will) you have to find a trade partner. Does Calgary want him to be their 1a the next two years? I can see that. Maybe Winnipeg?

The weird thing is that most teams all of a sudden seem fairly locked-in goaltending-wise, so there just aren’t as many options as there were even last summer when it comes to teams shopping for help. You probably can’t even pawn him off on a team like Arizona that would normally delight in taking on money to hit the cap floor in exchange for a pick or a prospect.

With that in mind, I can see the Penguins just kind of figuring they’re stuck with him for next season, unpleasant as that might be. That would obviously hurt their chances to re-sign a bunch of guys (they need defense badly) but it might be what they’re stuck with.

WASHINGTON, DC – MARCH 23: Kevin Shattenkirk #22 of the Washington Capitals skates against the Columbus Blue Jackets during the second period at Verizon Center on March 23, 2017 in Washington, DC. (Photo by Patrick Smith/Getty Images)

Matt asks:

“Where do you think Shattenkirk is going to land, and can he be a No. 1?”

The problem with this question is that a lot of teams who would need a player like Kevin Shattenkirk either have too much money committed to defensemen right now (the Rangers, for example), or will need to give out huge contracts in the next few years (Toronto and Edmonton).

But to that end, one team I think would be a great destination for him has a need on the blue line, a relatively solid core coming back without too many guys to re-sign, and relatively little in the way of long-term commitments. They also happen to have a new GM who will have cash to spend and whose old team was apparently in heavy pursuit for Shattenkirk’s services before the trade that took him to Washington.

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Yeah, the Buffalo Sabres could really use a puck-mover. Shattenkirk would instantly be their best defender.

And I think they can make the money work unless the player asks for the moon here. They only have $50 million committed for next season, with only a handful of RFAs to re-sign this summer, and only Robin Lehner should be particularly expensive. Yeah, you have to cut Jack Eichel a big contract for 2018-19 and beyond, but other than that, there’s not a huge hurdle to overcome here.

Buffalo should absolutely do this. Wonder if Shattenkirk, who by the way is from New York originally (but like, Westchester), would be interested.

David asks:

“What should Vegas’ real goals be with their expansion draft? Should they be good enough to draw fans, have cap room to trade, get vets for three years, etc.?”

Yeah I think they should try to acquire a veteran core that’s signed for the next few years, but that also kinda sucks and therefore is going to guarantee them a few high picks in the next few years. The fans will be there because it’s Vegas and one imagines attendance absolutely won’t be a problem, or at least, selling tickets won’t be.

The goal here should absolutely be to take bad contracts afterward, via trade, to accumulate the assets to build a meaningfully competitive team through the draft and prospect trades. No team is going to let you get an actual good player, which is why I think this team will kinda suck. That should be the goal anyway.

The NHL’s insistence on making this team Competitive right away was always confusing to me. The goal for this team should be to lose every game 3-2 or 4-3. You’re right there but you’re still not good enough to get anywhere except the draft lottery.

Ryan Lambert is a Puck Daddy columnist. His email is here and his Twitter is here.

(All stats via Corsica unless otherwise noted.)