"Pretty Good For a Girl"
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Leslie Heywood's book Pretty Good For a Girl is the story of her early life, in high school and college, as a fiercely competitive runner with an obsessive need to be the best at any cost. As Heywood tells it, her sense of self was expressed only in her running; if she didn't run, she was afraid she would disappear. For Heywood, her body had no boundaries and she abused it both in over training and in exercising her body to the point where she finally became a victim of a disorder known as Female Athlete Triad, a condition that involves "eating disorders, exercise compulsion, leading to amenorrhea, loss of bone" (192). Giving up running, her reason for being, led Heywood to examine her life and motives as well as the arena of sports for women. She wrote on the subject, became a bodybuilder and an assistant professor of English. However, nothing Heywood achieved in later life compared with the power she felt as a champion female runner, beating the boys at their own game. Heywood also deals with the prevalence of sexual harassment against female athletes, although in her case there was a meretricious nature to her relationships with coaches and male athletes.Heywood admits that the motivating force behind her need for power and excellence in sports was hatred. She hates her mother's values, feminine girls, male athletes who look at her as just a girl, and manipulating, over demanding coaches. On the other hand, she seeks out demanding coaches because she wants to be p
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Rather, it was a case where the 28-year old, unethical coach basically blackmailed her into having sex with him. She chooses to succumb to him because she doesn't want to endanger her position as an athlete. She also has mixed feelings about the relationship, which turns out to be destructive for both of them. Heywood believes the relationship ended well because she turned out to be the one with the upper hand when he fell in love with her. "It's not like he held me down with a gun and forced me...We fought a good fight, and I won it in my own way." (130). TO Heywood, sex was a power struggle. One of Heywood's current arguments is that girls should not be afraid to speak out when they are victims of sexual harassment, and that they should not allow themselves to be blackmailed into engaging in sex. Girls with higher self-esteem that she had, she believes, will be able to deal with sexual harassment better than she did.
Another argument Heywood makes is that today's female athletes are better off than those of her school years. She "belonged to the first wave of women in sports after Title IX" (218) and was a victim of a fierce, all-consuming competitive lifestyle where everyone else had to be stomped out because you had to
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Some common words found in the essay are:
Title IX, English Heywood, Coach Luke, Pretty Girl, Athlete Triad, female athletes, male athletes, Leslie Heywood's, sexual harassment, Free Press, able deal, win races, athletes heywood, demanding coaches, coach luke, immune system, hopes girls,
Approximate Word count = 1366
Approximate Pages = 5 (250 words per page)
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