At the Margins of the Minors
75
can use i t . . . Baseball players are like, I dunno, like, just hot.
There are only a little group around here and they’re so damn
cocky I guess catching one’s a big challenge for me. I like
playing with them . . . getting them to want me, being able to
get him up and hard and wanting me, and then shut him down
cause I know he’s just gonna fuck some other girl tomorrow
night. That’s just the way it goes . . . I really don’t care what
they do except when they’re with me . . . I, um, I think mostly
it just makes me know that I have to be the one that needs to
decide if we fuck or not. I have to be the one to decide if I give
myself to him and, uh, decide if I am getting what I want from
him.
Similarly, Becky finds that teasing and having sex with ball players proves that
she is their equal.
Personally, I’m out here to have a little fun and fuck with
whoever I can. It’s not much, I guess, but I enjoy it. When
they come to me, they treat me as an equal or we don’t play.
Since players benefit from some control over the market for sex, which
is the most valuable commodity any individual groupie offers, bad girls enjoy
flipping the balance of power in relationships and the exchange network, if even
only for one encounter. Lisa and Becky reveal an understanding of the
inequality in their exchange relationships and networks with athletes, and their
responses to it represent the extremes of larger interpretations of their
exchanges. Becky, like sex radical feminists, claims that a woman alone owns
her sexuality when she exercises it on her own terms (Chapkis 1997).
Conversely, Lisa, in accordance with radical feminists, reveals the utter futility
of grabbing for fleeting power in imbalanced relationships and networks,
especially while ignoring the reality that their sexual exchange with baseball
players perpetuates the historical oppression of women (Chapkis 1997;
LeMoncheck 1997).
A more proximate and perhaps more salient influence on bad girls’
relationships with players is the ballpark community. Bad girls reject the
ballpark’s hypermasculine environment as a silly construction of people
jockeying for power and/or wealth, focusing their power games on more
immediate gratification. Consequently, bad girls typically prefer relationships
with visiting players, not because they are more exotic, as Gmelch (2001)
suggests, but because these relationships are more discreet, partially protecting
the bad girls from the scrutiny of the ballpark community, especially wives.
Becky finds:
Less bullshit that way. . . We all got the same thing between
our legs, but they [baseball players] feel like they have to
work for it to make it worth getting. It never fails to amaze me