Readers Up #10: The Lady is a Jock
There are truisms in any community--chestnuts tossed out at intervals, increasingly predictable as familiarity grows. A race is 90% horse and 10% jock. Pound for pound, jockeys are the strongest athletes. Racing is the only sport where men and women compete together at the highest levels. If only that last happened with any regularity.
The Lady is a Jock arrived in 1973, just four years after Kathy Kusner’s historic lawsuit; as with its cousin No Easy Trip, not much has changed. By now, there's no proving left to do: Julie Krone and Rosie Napravnik have cracked the ranks of Classic and Breeders’ Cup races, made millions, entered the Hall of Fame. Turf is a playing field leveled by the efforts of Patty Barton, Robyn Smith, Barbara Jo Rubin, and the rest of the “jockettes” populating Lynn Haney’s chatty, vivaciously second-wave biography. The funny thing is that many of the vanguard of female jockeys were more analogous to Carol Cedeno than Napravnik--they were working-class, grinding out their trade at mid-level tracks rather than netting rose blankets and fancy pedigrees, in it for the long run. The long run is, say, Tammi Piermarini, who began riding in 1985 and is still riding, a career comparable to that of Kent Desormeaux and Joe Bravo. The long run is Rubin appearing at Aqueduct fifty years after her first win at the Big A, the first win of any woman rider in New York, flanked by Angel Cordero, Jr. and a coterie of beaming men (only men that day, the Wood Memorial, when Katie Davis had been in New York the weekend before). The long run is not the past five years' worth of men named on Triple Crown mounts but fans naming Cedeno "Queen of Delaware Park." The long run is where systemic change is measured.
The long run usually isn’t very sexy.
Haney’s book (which came to fruition after a suggestion from her editor. Can you imagine? Truly the ideal. Editors, call me!) frames the position of women in racing in age-old terms. Female jockeys either embrace (hetero) femininity as a shield and palliative, or they transcend gender toward androgyny (which just so happens to look and act like hetero masculinity). Even the packaging of The Lady is a Jock leads the reader in this direction; the front cover features Mary Bacon, blond and mugging in blue eyeshadow and pigtails and a purple pom-pom balanced on her helmet, while the back cover centers Robyn Smith on the dirt carrying her tack, with a horse and groom in the distance. The twin spheres of early female jockdom: the glam publicity shot and the workaday action shot. The biggest and most successful of the sixty-odd female riders working in the early 1970s functioned as advertising to varying degrees, some of them more enthusiastically than others, although juries were sometimes out on what exactly was being advertised. Bacon gained notoriety after posing for Playboy, while years later Chantal Sutherland would echo this in a slightly more rarefied publication.
Incidentally, the only American jockeys to be featured in a Sports Illustrated “Body” issue are Alex Solis and Mike Smith.
“I take that makeup off and pull back my hair and put that helmet on and I’m really a man,” says Bacon. “I think I’m a female impersonator.” And then-bug girl Jennifer Rowland: “I have thought of arriving at a strange track and pretending I’m a boy.” And Donna Hillman: “If I could be a boy for two years, I’d be the leading rider in the country.”
Quotations like the above are given for nearly every jockey featured... but no one wonders if, perhaps, they could dispense with femininity and masculinity altogether. There's a bare hint of queerness (shout-out to a few Aqueduct dykes flirting with Bacon over the fence), not that the sport has progressed much in that conversation either. Instead, the focus remains on apparently-innate differences and how these manifest in the flesh. The book is obsessed with the assigned-female body--lavish descriptions of Bacon, Smith, Barton, and the rest abound, an overt curiosity about their girlish faces and boyish bodies set within a matrix of evidence reinforcing male-level prowess on the dirt. Even the best among them, as assessed by men, are only as good as men. Once Rubin is out of the sport, her body becomes curvaceous, ripe, expected, appropriately feminine. It’s theorized that round bottoms and full breasts might throw off a rider’s center of gravity and affect their game. The body has always been a major concern in racing, but never does The Lady is a Jock suggest that assigned-male bodies are as acted upon in the sport as female ones. Haney doesn't ponder the possibility that gender does not immutably stem from sex (though since she’s writing through a rigid lens of second-wave feminism, I suppose a lack of more overt transphobia is laudable). The text's main function is introductory, compiled in breezy editorial style and stocked with risque tidbits like Bacon's tumultuous marriage and Smith's fabricated personas; it's not here to consider intersections of sex and race, gives tragically little time to Cheryl White, and the notion of the White male American jockey diminishing is stated as set dressing, rather than examined in context. If it’s true that the initial waves of female and immigrant backside personnel arrived because White men were no longer willing to work long hours for little pay, that says more about the industry than about its employees.
Given its publication date, the book can be forgiven an intense Freudian gaze which grates on current sensibilities. Much is made of the mystical girl-horse link, the stereotypes that women riders have a "way" with horses that men may not, that the light touch of a gallop girl in the morning is superseded by the take-charge boy jock in the afternoon. If the site of male riders' power and effectiveness is the chest, that of female riders is the sacral chakra (be sure to read through the final chapter, where a couple of psychiatrists hold forth on female masturbation and virginity). The racehorse becomes a locus of frustrated power fantasies, both for women damaged by abuse or familial trauma and non-normatively masculine men. Penis envy! How, shall we say, quaint. If racing has no longer has gender-based provisions, then the proud statement that men and women compete together is meaningless. Ideally it would go without saying, because Kusner's lawsuit made it implicit. Since then racing has had an opportunity to be truly transgressive--emphasis on the trans--to grow out of dull cliches and tired mores, to create a proving ground for pure competition. Social baggage and agreed-upon fictions restrict this in any setting. Is it that we are in fact "beyond the days of being boycotted"? Or is it that racing has always capitalized on fragmentation and ephemeral transactions? Isolated bodies become vulnerable, blank, open to projection.
Haney suggests that racing is a world in which people of a particular class "cling strongly to cultural stereotypes regarding the roles of men and women"--yet, in our day at least, this seems most arguable when looking at the uppermost tiers. Women riders have had more lasting success and impact at mid-tier and blue-collar tracks, Turf Paradise and Delaware Park and Fair Grounds, with the obvious signifiers of triumph remaining elusive or flash-in-the-pan. If any war between the sexes continues to play out on the turf, it originates with the image racing wishes to sell, is perpetuated by participatory nostalgia. Within a sporting culture of strictly gendered and classed bodies, the figure of the jockey is non-binary, rather than androgynous, and in constant motion across the social spectrum.
Waving a copy of Judith Butler,
Diana