Summer Reading Project: The Smart Girl's Guide to Introductions

The Hab It Her Way Summer Reading Project is my way of sharing the misery that is reading The Smart Girl's Guide to Sports, which cost $2. Let's laugh at this together.

My introduction to the Summer Reading Project didn't include a summary of the book's introduction, because, well, I could probably write a series of posts on the introduction alone. The author has the best of intentions, but then again, so do grandmothers when they try to set you up with the nice young man who works at the grocery store. Or at the bank. Or at the pharmacy. Or... well, luckily those are the only places my grandmother goes.

The introduction starts with a story, wherein the author talks about how saying a random sentence about last night's football game immediately won over one of her male co-workers and suddenly they became the best of friends! You see, before she had mustered up the courage to say something about how good Jerry Rice was at sports tasks, he thought she was just another dame coming into his workplace and interrupting his scotch-drinking. But she's cooler than all those other women who didn't say a sentence about sports that day!

Now, I have a similar story, wherein someone from my office didn't like me very much when I started working with her - I was new and still learning the ropes, and this girl is insanely good at what she does, so she had no time for me to make beginners' mistakes. I thought she hated me. A few months later, our office had a karaoke night. I sang a Destiny's Child song and suddenly she was on my side! We've been getting along very well ever since. Maybe I should write a book called The Smart Person's Guide to Beyoncé.

If you liked it then you should've put a championship ring on it

Basically, the author implies that the only way to combat sexism, whether in the workplace or elsewhere, is to buy into it. You'll "instantly win respect" by knowing one thing about whatever sport the men are talking about, and then you can "drift out of conversation and go back to thinking about what you're going to wear tomorrow." Knowing about sports will make you better than other women and help you knock the ball out of the park and straight through the glass ceiling, apparently!

No, thanks. I choose my outfits in the morning, anyway.  Now, I'm no scientist (because that's another thing that's for boys, right?), but apparently you "don't need scientific evidence to know that men have a sports gene." I think what I love most about this book so far is that it was written by a woman, but it rarely sounds like it. I didn't know that mansplaining could also be done by women! What a great accomplishment for us all. Who run the world? Girls! (But only the ones who are smart enough to talk to men about sports and then write a book about it.)

She ends her intro with some "Hip Tips To Enjoy Sports!" Her first piece of advice? Find a player who you find attractive. Because being a smart girl is nothing if not giving in to the biggest cliché that female sports fans find themselves fighting every day.

So, let's get ready to read the rest, and release the sports goddess within us!

(That's an actual thing she says in the intro, so something tells me this woman owns hardcover copies of the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy because they're super well-written and romantic.)

Every time I finish a chapter, I'll summarize it and tell you about the legitimate advice, spelling mistakes, gender-based stereotypes, and everything else that a smart girl would need to know about sports.