Megan Rapinoe and her unapologetically sinewy colleagues make you forget politics and categories. These are no first-wave, third-wave, millennial, post-colonial, post-structural, modern-eco marchers, boneless and aggrieved. Protestors aren’t supposed to be this ungrim and prancing, are they? There was Rapinoe, exulting in her pure self-driven dynamism and radiant in her cause, striking that pose like Diana Prince discovering she’s Wonder Woman: “I have no father. I was brought to life by Zeus!”
It’s time to discard, finally, the nagging, jersey-tugging, chronic, small-minded doctrine that we must “contextualize” everything the U.S. women’s national team does as “relative” to the men’s game, and therefore they must be smaller, lesser.