Or, People Don’t Know Shit About Shit

If you read my about page, you’ll see that I mention sometimes getting vent-y. This is one of those posts. If you don’t want to read that, then don’t read this post :)

The Context

At the 2024 Paris Olympics, Breakdancing, also referred to as “breaking” was one of the new sports to be featured (I’ve seen some people refer to it as a “wildcard” sport?). The Australian women’s breaking competitor, aka “b-girl” scored pretty poorly and became a bit of a punching bag for many online who have rocks in their heads. The rest, as they say, is history.

The Misogyny

One significant component of the vitriol spewed by insecure individuals online was the misogynistic attitudes they have of women, particularly “middle aged” women, which apparently a 36 year old is these days. There’s multiple angles that people take, one is the “women must be perfect otherwise they’re a disappointment” with an eternally unattainable definition of perfect place conspicuously out of reach. The other angle is that of “she’s a daggy mum and embarrassing her kids” and implying the angle of her needing to be a mother and rear children to be of worth. The other misogynist angle intersects with the Australian fascination with tall poppy syndrome manifested as anti-intellectualism, which I’ll cover in the next section…

The Anti-intellectualism

Almost certainly tied in nicely with misogyny (i.e., “social sciences are for women and thus bad QED”) is the response to Dr Rachel “Raygun” Gunn being much smarter than all the people shittalking her online a PhD in cultural studies, with a thesis¹ on gender within the breaking scene in Sydney. I’ve actually read part of it, and it genuinely sounds quite interesting and up my alley. What it reveals is that Raygun is actually someone who’s been in the breaking space since well before it was announced as an “Olympic sport”. Also that she’s very much an academic² and knows her stuff. So people either take the angle of “she colonised a culture by studying it and only did it for the olympics!!!” which is wrong, or they take the angle of “she may have studied it but she doesn’t actually know how to put it into practice!” which is also wrong. There’s also this one take I saw where this person whipped out their thesaurus (or maybe it’s ChatGPcopiloTClaude these days) to sound smarter than they actually are and suggested that Raygun picked a niche for her doctoral thesis to rapidly climb the academia ranks. Which is fucking hilarious because they clearly don’t realise that’s how postgraduate research-based study works. In order to even get a postgrad place you need to be contributing new knowledge to your field of study. And how would you achieve that? Be niche! I’ve actually been to university – I’ve had postgraduate degree holders openly say that to me.

The Instant Experts

Now, the final section I will dedicate to my lil’ homies who suddenly are experts in a niche subculture thing and spout hearsay that is downright untrue and very easily verifiably untrue. Again, I’ve actually read part of Raygun’s thesis.

• No, she’s not just some ballroom dancer that colonised breaking or whatever, she’s been around breaking since 2008 and started competing a few years later³
• No, she didn’t rig the competition and Bradburry her way into qualifying. Australia just doesn’t do so well at this particular activity – check the results of the other people who attended the comp she qualified via.
• No, she does know what she’s doing – she actually does know how to breakdance, just watch her previous work.
• No, she’s not from outside the culture, she’s literally an active member of the 143 Liverpool Street Familia crew who’ve been breaking since 2005.

Conclusion

Big thanks to everyone who stuck through that rant. I really needed to get that out instead of letting it live in my head rent free. Now that it’s words on paper I can evict it and rehome it on my Blog™️

Hopefully next post will be something more interesting ha