Obviously Danica Patrick struggled in her NASCAR debut.

After finishing 6^th in the Lucas Oil Slick Mist 200, a race to “get comfortable,” she crashed at the Daytona International Speedway (finishing 35 out of 43 drivers), finished 31^st (three laps behind winner Kyle Bush) at Auto Club Speedway in California, and crashed again in Las Vegas trying to pass Michael McDowell.

For now, Patrick is back driving Indy Race cars (they look more like toy racers than regular cars; quick video here on the difference between Indy and NASCAR).

The message to her crew after Daytona? “Thanks guys,” she radioed. “Sorry I sucked today. But I’ll figure it out.” Her point in a USA Today story was that she was at the start of a learning curve. “You know what? This is a whole new ball of wax for me, and it’s all different. I have to disconnect from my results for quite some time because they’re probably not going to be what I’m used to.”

What I like about Patrick is that she’s coming back. After Annika Sorenstam played a spectacular first round at the PGA Colonial in June 2003, but failed to make the cut in the second round, she curtsied, and ran for the exit:

“I’m glad I did it, but this is way over my head,” she said. “I’ve got to go back to my [LPGA] tour, where I belong.”

Danica gets that when you compete at a high level, you may not come out on top your first time out. She knows she must learn, adjust to the equipment, conditions, and competition. In other words, the problem is NOT that she is a female in a male-dominated sport.

Maybe this is a valuable lesson (and not just at elite levels of play): It is not always about gender. Sometimes it’s a matter of practice.

No one will forget how well Sorenstam played under tremendous pressure (her participation was cast as an updated “Battle of the Sexes”). Imagine if she would have done what Danica is doing? Who’s to say she couldn’t hone her short game tools to play in a run of PGA events? (I bet they’d love to have her now).

Um, earth to FairGameNews.com readers! Did no one read Laura’s post on Monday? (Actually our tracker shows they did). Then, why no comments to tell her she was talking crazy? C’mom — you’ve got to keep us on our toes!

I read it and nearly came through my computer screen. This is one of the issues on which Laura and I (respectfully, of course) disagree.

Personally, I couldn’t believe that this White House basketball thing made front page news. I saw it, read half of it, and became so disgusted by how PC we’ve all become that I didn’t even make it to the end.

I mean – really? At what point did it become the President of the United States’ (or, as Laura and other have so eloquently put it, the POTUS’) job to ensure gender equality on a pick-up basketball court?

Healthcare, social security, our ongoing wars in the Middle East… these are all things that demand his time and attention. Rallying the women of the White House to the b-ball court? Not his job.

I have a difficult time believing that any female White House staffer who showed up dressed to play ball would be turned away by the President.  He’s a husband who continues to date, adore, and showcase his ‘buff’ wife and a father to two burgeoning female athletes. Oh, and by the way, he just won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work in bridging divided groups. There is simply no reason to suspect he’s being prohibitive when it comes to women in any kind sports – informal or otherwise.

So if we don’t get to blame the President for the lack of women in b-ball, who can we blame? Hate to say it ladies, but it’s no one but ourselves. As long as we women wait for a special invitation, we’ll be missing the action. If the reality is that deals and decisions get made out there, then we better start working on our finger rolls and jump shots.

Let Danica Patrick, Michelle Wie, and Brittany Ryan serve as a lesson to us all: sports are no longer exclusive – unless we, as women, continue to play the part of the excluded.

Lauren Taylor is assistant lacrosse coach at Yale, a former three-time college All-American selection, and and 2009 graduate of the Yale School of Public Health who now works for the Yale Global Health Leadership Institute.

By Laura Pappano

Of course being hot helps. Good-looking athletes get our attention, whether we’re talking Danica Patrick or Tom Brady. It doesn’t make them any better on the racetrack or the football field, but it does attract fans and sponsors.

I get that.

But there’s trouble when we consider the broader implications of who gets a hearing and some respect in our society – whether it’s on the field – or on a campaign trail or in a boardroom.

Do we need sex to sell women’s sports? Do women have to be attractive to be listened to? Unfortunately, women are forced to occupy a very narrow cultural space in our society (bitch, bunny, or mom?) that’s tightly tied to our bodies.

Michele Obama may be smart and accomplished, but we are most comfortable talking about her outfits and messages about organic gardening and family nutrition. That’s not as scary as hearing what she thinks.

Isn’t it obvious that we need to expand the depth and breadth of female public images? We need women pioneers (more females on Supreme Court, in Congress, in executive suites, on Little League teams, represented as artists in museums, as directors in Hollywood, etc…). In other words: Normalize female leadership so it’s not FIRST about how you look.

Artist Lillian Hsu has just launched an art action and held a mass event last weekend in which supporters placed 8.5 X 11 posters reading “Beautiful Just the Way You Are” in front of magazine covers featuring all-too-familiar representations of glam-only objectified female bodies. Her point:  Intervene and interrupt the auto-absorption process that makes smart women feel inadequate if they aren’t skinny with perfect teeth and skin.

As Hsu puts it: “Before we are ten, and then without pause throughout our lives, we internalize the lesson that our bodies are how we will be first judged as individuals, and that there is a body type that we must attain to be judged worthy of attention.” And the judging of bodies she is talking about isn’t about what athletic feats those bodies can perform, but how hot they are doing it.

I’m not burning my bra  (‘specially my sports bra!) or throwing out the lipstick. It’s all right with me if Danica Patrick takes a Madonna-like command of her sexuality. But just as everyone knows that because Tom-Brady-the-model is pretty, doesn’t mean Tom-Brady-the-football-player isn’t tough, we need to extend that flexibility to women.

While we’re at it, let’s lose those tramp-victim-slut ads for jeans and perfume and popularize the scent of real female power.