UKC

Eva Lopez has repeated Potemkin, 8c+, at Cuenca, Spain, for her first of the grade.
The 42 year old is the woman behind the famous transgression board, and her training philosophy certainly seems to be work well for her!
According to Kairn, the route was in fact bolted by Eva a long time ago, and...

Read more at http://www.ukclimbing.com/news/item.php?id=68417

In reply to UKC News:

what a fantastic achievement!! massive congratulations to Eva for such a sustained effort.

lost

In reply to UKC News:

Good for her. Wonder how her femininity is coming on?

The famous transgression board isn't so famous that I have any idea what it is. Anyone know?

jcm

In reply to johncoxmysteriously:

Come on, keep up John

http://www.jmclimbing.com/index.php/en/products/boards/transgression

In reply to JLS:

Golly. Thank you.

I don't think I'll be getting one of those.

jcm

In reply to johncoxmysteriously:

We're trying to suss out the meaning of that 'wonder how her femininity is coming on...'

Was it a simple jibe or are we missing an obvious joke?

Is Eva working on a femininity project at the moment that we missed the publicity for?

Not that we are all being overly sensitive or anything, we were simply confused by the 'good for her' versus the aforementioned statement. Please advise and end our turmoil.

Now to investigate the transgression board....I had not heard of it either.

In reply to The Climbing Hangar:

Not a jibe at all, at least not at EL.

A sideways reference to this thread and its preoccupations with some, imho, rather tedious issues which I doubt trouble EL much.

http://www.ukclimbing.com/forums/t.php?n=566318

jcm

In reply to johncoxmysteriously:

EL strikes me as a lady who is troubled by little, fiercely hard climbing and forums included.

Thanks for the response and link to the forum thread, I am certain the forums will remain alive and kicking with debate on contentious issues.

Issues that concern dominant discourses within communities (ie climbing) such as structural prejudice caused though how something was constructed, as opposed to person A being nasty to person B based on a prejudicial perspective, will never be debated with any rigour or depth in an online forum.

The male/female thing drags people into common tropes of shallow reasoning instead of identifying that how a game is designed has a massive impact on who benefits. Basketball and the height of the net is a good example. How different would the game players be if the net were 5ft high? Clearly we don't design the rock, but we do design better ways of doing climbing and being a climber and these favour some groups/preferences/personalities over others. It's not really a controversial point; design influences outcome. But if the balance splits along racial or gender lines, dang does the topic get hot.

In reply to The Climbing Hangar: How do we design better ways of doing climbing? Surely as long as you start at the bottom of the climb and finish at the top without using any points of aid then no one is going to criticise your ascent.

In reply to John2:

Sport/trad for a start, I guess. Bouldering instead of routes. Using oxygen. Using chalk/sticky shoes etc.

Some of those would have more impact on gender balance than others, I imagine, but all designing the game in a way.

Games Climbers Play, innit?

jcm

In reply to johncoxmysteriously: Sport / trad I'll give you, I guess but I thought we were talking about rock climbing - not bouldering or mountaineering. As for sticky shoes and chalk, surely they are part of the equipment rather than part of the rules of the game.

Forgive my shallow tropes, but I don't see what relevance any of these have to the gender of the climber.

In reply to John2:

Well, one might think, perhaps, that with better gear and hence the increase in safety, more women might be inclined to participate.

Or that might be, as you say, a shallow trope.

Indeed, on a micro-level, I suppose one is designing the game by choosing this route as a project rather than that one.

jcm

In reply to johncoxmysteriously:

And then there's style of ascent, of course. We design the game by onsighting or headpointing, for example. It might be true, for example, that women's standards lag further behind in onsighting than in redpointing. Or vice versa. I'm not sure what that would tell us, but it would be ever so slightly interesting if it were so.

jcm

In reply to John2:

I can only assume you have never read any UKC forums.

In reply to The Climbing Hangar: I'm sorry, but I have difficulty in discerning any interesting meaning in your posts. Why do you assume that I have never read any UKC forums?

In reply to John2:

I presume the climbing hanger was making a jokey comment on the irony of your statement. When you suggested that no one would criticise an ascent. There's often plenty of (frequently well placed) criticism of different styles of ascent on ukc.