OTL Should Be Left Alone As SD’s Top Summertime Party Event
It’s not the Over-The-Line tournament that’s out of line, but rather a group that entered a lawsuit against it and, in particular, one lady named Lori Watson.
I’ll get to the lawsuit in a second, but first my attention must go to Ms. Watson. She is identified in a Los Angeles Times article as an “associate professor of of philosophy and director of women’s and gender studies at the University of San Diego.” Here’s her quote in the Times about the OTL:
“Women displaying their breasts to crowds of drunken, raucous men is very dangerous.” This leads, Watson philosophies, “to the ‘sexualization of girls at a younger age’ and a stigma aimed at women who are unwilling to disrobe” according to the Times.
First of all, I wonder if Ms. Watson has actually ever been to the OTL. Or does she just assume that there are “crowds of drunken, raucous men.” She could not come to such a conclusion if she had been there and made any neutral observations of the event. These are not high school kids let loose on Spring Break for the first time; they are respectable members of society who like to cut loose now and again.
This is the kind of hearsay that has all but spiked the Manhattan Beach 6-man, an event similar to OTL except that it’s based around volleyball not a kind of softball game. She was responding to reports that a few girls lift up their shirts to show off their breasts. Well if any girls DO that, then they do so voluntarily because it’s certainly not a rule of event entry by any means.
Second of all, I have sent a pair of girls – PubClubettes – to cover the OTL on a couple of occasions and I can tell you that these lovely and attentive ladies did not feel any “sexualization” whatsoever and one, Chelsea, even wrote a very nice story about the Miss Emerson bikini contest, the highlight event of the OTL. Of course, you can judge for yourself by CLICKING HERE to read Chelsea’s story.
Personally, I feel Ms. Watson is off her rocker and just wants to take advantage of this situation to get her name in the news, and I doubt she’s witnessed anything she was complaining about in the first place. If she were to go to the OTL, she would see it for what it is – a silly event of otherwise mature adults having fun on a beach in San Diego for two weekends in July (the 13th and 14th and 20th and 21st in 2013).
Thanks goodness cooler heads prevail when it comes to the OTL, including members of the San Diego City Council. In the same LA Times article, the former chief of staff to then-Mayor Dick Murphy, an obviously reasonable gentleman named John Kern, said, “Over-The-Line is the child in all of us who forever yearns to be immature.”
Well put, Mr. Kern!
Now, about this lawsuit. There’s a group that feels the City Council gives the OTL benefits of the beach other events can’t have so, this being America, they have contacted attorneys to take action against this alleged injustice.
A compromise will likely be reached and it’s not that the group wants the event to end, they just want to have the same privileges. Which is to say they probably want to be able to drink beer on Fiesta Island for their event. But at the same time, if all goes haywire, it and the surrounding publicity could start the wheels turning to shut down the event in the future.
And that would be a real party pooper.
No, it’s not the OTL that’s over the line. It’s those who are trying to challenge it.
Cheers!
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