That's What She Said

I don’t know how to say this, so I’ll just come right out with it: there’s a lot of soccer mom porn on the internet.


Who knew, right? I clued in when I checked my blog’s statistics and found that strangers are googling variations on the phrase ‘hot soccer moms’, along with some, er, more dodgy stuff and finding my blog. (Examples: ‘old women squatting’ and ‘clown sex’ have brought them to me. Sniff. So proud....) I was wondering if my blog might have accidentally seeped into a pornographic genre, since, after all, you can read the subtitle in a pretty suggestive way– Stories from a Different Kind of Soccer Mom could mean anything, really - so the other day curiosity finally got the better of me and I decided to google the phrase ‘soccer mom porn’ to see if my blog came up. (For the first time ever, Steve offered to help me with research for my blog! How thoughtful. )

I declined, however. I figured I could probably handle this on my own. Nervous, I googled, and then I only opened one eye and peeked at the screen. That phrase did bring up over 5 million hits. Mercifully, there were no pictures (since I didn’t follow through and click on anything), but I did read some charming introductory sentences about coaches helping teach soccer moms how to score and how some soccer moms get punished in intriguing ways for not remembering to bring oranges at halftime. Many were really descriptive, pointing out that soccer moms have all different colours of skin and hair and come in all sorts of shapes, with uh, soccer ball sized, uh, attributes. And did you also know that some soccer moms are grandmas?

So...even though my blog appears to be safe for the time being, I’m playing around with some different blog headings. Scroll up and check out my new title and subtitle. [Kick (a soccer ball): Stories from a different kind of (fully clothed) soccer mom] Thoughts? The brackets might be a little too much. When you say it all together, it’s a bit of a mouthful. Jeez, this is really hard.

Crap. Everything sounds pornographic when you think about it.

The Internet is Scary, or, Cristiano Ronaldo calls Soccer Mom ‘Douchebag’ after Sideboob Incident

I want to talk about my blog. I realize that technologically, I’ve always been a late adapter and that blogs are considered passé. It’s all about ‘the Twitter’ now. But blogs might not be dead yet: in Saturday’s Globe and Mail, in a review of a book that grew out of a popular mom blog, columnist Leah McLaren said she felt ‘wistful for the (blog’s) cyber verbiage of yesteryear’ when writers posted entries of more than 200 words. Then Sunday’s New York Times Magazine mentioned that the most prominent sportswriter in America is Bill Simmons, a blogger who sometimes posts up to 6000 words on some topics, and that his blogs are downloaded an average of 600,000 times each. Of course, these are actual writers writing about relevant things, not just navel gazing in soccer cleats, as I have been known to do— but reading about these popular bloggers made me curious about my stats. Who reads me? And then I discovered a button on my blog that can tell me just that.

Don’t worry. I can’t see individual people and I don’t know if you are ignoring me. But I do have a button called Stats that tells me which countries people are viewing my blog from. It’s totally addictive. Why? The other day I checked it to see who was reading me and it turns out my blog had already been looked at 19 times in the Ukraine since that morning . That’s more than the 12 Canadian readers I had in the same time period. The Ukraine? (Oh dear. Given my dodgy grasp of geography, I’m ashamed to admit that if I was handed a blank map of the world and forced to pinpoint the location of the Ukraine, I would kinda wave my hand over one general area, hesitantly, and I might be wrongish.) I’m also inexplicably read by a fair number of readers in the BRIC countries (other than China, who doesn’t give a damn about me.) I even have 1 reader in Zimbabwe.

Naturally, this makes no sense whatsoever.

Luckily it can be easily explained by another kind of statistics my blog gathers for me: the keywords people google which help them find my blog. Of course, there are the expected ones—people who know me and google me by name. But yesterday someone found my blog by googling ‘garbage cans that go up stairs’, because of a piece I wrote about my physiotherapist that mentioned both stairs and garbage cans.

A surprising number of people also google Cristiano Ronaldo and end up on my page. Why? Because a year ago I posted a fake interview I pretended that I had done with Ronaldo. Also, people that googled the word ‘sideboob’ found my blog because of a piece I wrote back in March. ‘Soccer Mom’, and another popular key word, ‘douchebag’, have also landed people on my page in reference to posts I wrote or a friend guest wrote, in the past. Does the title of this post make sense to you now? Cristiano Ronaldo is probably perfectly nice and did not do anything wrong; but, rather, my title might just be the tiniest shameless attempt to increase traffic to my blog. (It’s pathetic, I know. The New York Times Magazine article I referenced earlier has Simmons quoted on others sports blogs as saying “The worst thing that’s happening now is that people are writing things just to drive traffic and get attention.” Oh yeah? Suck it, Simmons, with your 600,000 readers and your ESPN masthead.)

Now I almost wish I didn’t know these statistics at all because it makes me wonder what to write about. In a ridiculous attempt to appeal to my newfound Ukranian readers I actually googled ‘soccer pierogies’ to look for a picture I could use- because pierogies are one of the only Ukranian things I can think of- but sadly, Google Images came up with nothing. (I did find a race where men dress up like pierogi mascots and run on a field {see above}, but there was no soccer ball, so that’s out. I also found a Jesus pierogy that a woman discovered one Easter in her frying pan and sold for $1775 to Golden Palace, the same people that bought the Virgin Mary grilled cheese a few years ago for a much higher price.)

The last stat I discovered is the hardest one to face: my most popular blog ever, by a wide margin, is the only one I did not have a hand in writing. Yup, my friend Frank’s An Open Letter to Soccer Douchebags is my (his) most popular blog ever, having been looked at hundreds of times. Dang.

To console myself I’m going to try to scrape the pentagram shapes of a soccer ball into an uncooked perogy so I can hopefully sell it and make millions. I clearly won’t be making any dough (pun intended) from my writing. Except, perhaps, in the Ukraine. (Wherever that is.)

Soccer Mom II

Stereotypes suck. People don't like to be placed into oversimplified categories of others who are supposedly just like themselves. I like to imagine, for instance, that there are cops who don’t care for donuts, or Mexican folks who do not wear sombreros. As a soccer player and a mom, I am particularly troubled by the stereotype of the Soccer Mom.

Now I know some political pundits feel we probably need a patronizing term describing white, middle class suburban moms whose main duty in life is to drive their kids to after school activities in a minivan, but can’t they be called something else? Minivan Moms? At least that has alliteration.

In my last blog I posted the Family Guy clip in which a soccer mom is mistaken for a man, perhaps due to her deep gravelly voice, hairs sprouting from her chin, or the way she knocks Peter’s beer out of his hand. If you look hard enough, there are definitely some other dodgy profiles of soccer moms you will find in pop culture. Some examples:

• there is a Soccer Mom movie starring Emily Osment (the lesser known sister of Haley Joel Osment of Sixth Sense fame). I can’t necessarily give this movie a definite thumbs down because I refused to rent it after reading in its review that it was “warm-hearted”, and its story was a “wacky charade”. Sounds terrifying. I think we can all agree that things that are described as ‘wacky’ should be avoided whenever possible.

• I found a book of soccer mom poetry (!) called “Suburban Antacid: Poetry for Soccer Moms”. The blurb called it ‘the perfect cure for….those with spouses who don’t replenish the toilet paper'. Barf. It had a wacky (see above) cartoon of a driving mom on the front. I believe used copies were available to buy on Amazon for 1 cent each. Shocking.

• There is a minor character in a Tom and Jerry’s cartoon whose name is Soccer Mom. She describes her ‘likes’ in life as casseroles, gardening and Thomas Kinkade paintings. She then drives into quicksand and is unable to make any decisions about how to save herself without her car’s Onstar system. Unfortunately if I were to be drawn as a cartoon, I would look exactly like her. Here she is (see the resemblance?) , and in case you are lucky enough not to know about Thomas Kinkade, here is one of his paintings:









So I move that we get rid of the negative stereotype of the soccer mom. Can we still call it soccer mom, but have some actual soccer associated with the term? I’ll go first:

I'm a soccer mom! My 'likes' in life are:
- kicking things (if it can’t be a soccer ball, I also don’t mind kicking either casseroles or Thomas Kinkade paintings)
- ranting when things don’t go my way
- sleeping.

You?