Cairene Mysteries & Clijsters Win + Equal Prize Money Rant

No hyperlinks because those more than anything else deter me from posting (it's hard with slow connections to find all the relevant links for you guys!), but two quick things:

CAIRENE MYSTERIES

This is probably the fourth time I've seen CNN footage of protests in Cairo that I was totally unaware were going on and have no idea where/when they could have possibly occurred. In response to Mubarak's landslide 88.6% electoral win (with 23% turnout) in Egypt's "first open election," installing the incumbent President for a 5th consecutive 6-year term (30 years as President...doesn't that make you a king?), there were protests downtown today in Cairo, and I can see from the newscast on CNN that they were downtown in Tahrir Square, which is where my university is. The weird thing is that I went to AUC early this AM and was there all day, walking around, getting lunch with my friend Termite Queen (she likes the name!), and there were NO protests. So odd. How was I walking around Tahrir in total peace and quiet (read: the normal traffic and chaos of Cairo's most important traffic circle) only to return home and see on tv these MASSIVE protests? So odd.

Cairo's invisible protests (as I said this isn't the first time this has happened) shall be added to a growing number of Cairene oddities (mysterious phenomena, myths, etc.). Two more are: the myth of horrible late afternoon traffic during Ramadan, and the myth of 6th October bridge's fantasticness.

Now, as some of you may know, we have a yearly holy month in Islamic countries that I'll talk more about when it comes this October, called Ramadan. The most visible difference between Ramadan and other months is that during Ramadan, people fast between sunrise and sunset, and break-fast (iftar) at sunset. The MYTH in all this is that you really shouldn't go outside in the hours after noon because the traffic is awful as people struggle to get home for iftar. Now, I don't know if this is a self-perpetuating myth, where, since everyone listens to the advice and stays home, no one is on the street to see that they aren't that busy, but they aren't! Last year I totally ignored this rule, and my only observation about Cairene traffic changes is that in the few MINUTES before iftar, it's really dangerous to be on the road because people are speeding like CRAZY to be at the dinner table in time for the call to prayer and the break-fast. The roads at that time are almost empty, though, and it's more about speeding drivers than traffic.

Myth number two is that the 6th October bridge (maybe later I'll update with a map or something), that connects the Zamalek/Gezirah island in the middle of the Nile to downtown on the Eastern Bank (and which then continues as a freeway north) is the best thing since sliced bread (or, to make a gratuitous pharaonic reference: the best thing since embalming fluid). As Desi can confirm, I have this odd curse that, no matter where I am in Cairo, every taxi driver I encounter has the uncontrollable urge to drive me on the 6th October bridge. This has actually been witnessed by Desi, and it is my daily annoyance when I go to school. Part of this is a fear of traffic on other bridges, which leads many taxi drivers to drive on an unimaginable convoluted path that is 5 times as long (and therefore wastes more gas and doesn't save any time in the end) in order to get to a bridge that has only slightly less traffic than other bridges (to the untrained American eye, it would all look like gridlock), but part of it is totally inexplicable...drivers taking me on 6th October when it is not in any way a logical alternative to our route. In any case, I want to just say for all the world to hear that 6th October bridge is not "all that," and I have had probably a dozen drivers, now, express surprise when, after I insist that we do NOT take that bridge, but instead drive on the dreaded (because they think it's a traffic mess) Tahrir Street (not to be confused with Tahrir Square, of protest fame) and see that it has the same amount of traffic, but less stops, and is SO MUCH MORE DIRECT than making 15 turns to get on a bridge that is out of the way, inconvenient, and still congested.

TO SUMMARIZE:
* People protest in Cairo, but they are not seen or heard (I guess we knew that) -- even by people like me who are apparently too absorbed in their stuffed crust Margherita pizzas at Pizza Hut to see what's happening on the street immediately outside
* Traffic in the afternoon hours before iftar during Ramadan is not as bad as people think it is
* The 6th October bridge should be torn down and its concrete recycled to patch the chunks of building that fall on you when you walk around, here

CLIJSTERS WIN

Congrats to Kim Clijsters on finally winning a major final (in her 5th try), by defeating Mary Pierce to capture the US Open title just a few hours ago. I think Kim has amazing maturity and perspective (she's almost ethereal at times), and minus the PR blunder of her father criticizing my EVEN MORE favourite player (also Belgian), Justine Henin-Hardenne, has been an extremely positive sports icon.

On to prize money --> the winner gets a check for $1.1 million dollars. Nice, right? Plus there is a promotional campaign to encourage the tour-tattered players to play the summer lead-up events to the Open whereby the best performer in a series of US Open warmup tournaments is offered double the prize money of whatever they get when the Open starts. Kim also won that, which means that by winning the US Open, she collected, for a single tennis tournament, a paycheck of $2.2 million dollars. VERY NICE. The historic thing (which I was glad they announced at the ceremony, because I think it's important) is that this is the biggest single prize ever awarded to a female athlete. So she blew it in her first 4 majors, but when she won, WOW did she win!

This brings me to equal pay for equal work, and continuing debates over the few remaining tournaments that do not offer equal prize money for men and women, and the ongoing debate over competitiveness in the women's game and the length of matches men and women play.

To breakdown the argument in favour of paying men more, people argue two things: first, that in major tournaments, men play best of 5 set matches, and women play best of 3, so men are playing more, and should be paid more (equal pay for equal work); second, it is argued that the men's game is so much more competitive than the women's (wherein many of the top players coast through the early rounds of tournaments, spending about 30% as much time on court as the men do) even if the men and women are playing the same number of sets -- another variation of the equal pay for equal work argument.

These arguments suck for obvious reasons, but I'll tell you explicitly why. First, as we glean from the logic of the competitiveness argument just discussed, the "work" you put-in on the court can't be measured (if at all) by the number of sets you play; if Roger Federer breezes through three sets against Lleyton Hewitt and Sania Mirza spends longer on court to win in two against someone else, then how does the equal pay for equal work argument apply, there? It's ridiculous to even try to quantify effort in that way. Second, and this is my GENIUS (not) realization from the other day, the competitiveness argument should really be used to justify equal pay, not fight against it. One of the reasons that women's tennis is (some would say) less competitive than men's is that women were either barred (for social/cultural reasons) from playing (and still are), or were paid so little that it was not a viable income path. Only when sponsors started putting Anna Kournikova in smaller and smaller dresses did it make it incredibly lucrative to be the #4 ranked player in the world (WHICH SHE WAS), and I don't think that commercial endorsements and modeling contracts (which have, some argue, contributed to the very tragic disordered eating and physical injuries sustained by certain former-top 10 players, as well as the exclusion of other less traditionally-attractive world number one players from earning as much as their lower-ranked bombshell cohorts) should necessarily be the way women get paid as much as men as professional athletes. The more the sport plays, the more women will join, and the more competitive it will become. Womens tennis is very competitive DESPITE a history of gross discrimination (when you hear how little women like Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova made in their dominant primes, it's really unbelievable), and will only get more and more competitive as women are encouraged by equal pay campaigns to participate in the sport.

Sleepy :)

VC