We have something special here for our readers. As our fans know, WomanUp is freerolling discussion where "women from all over the map blog on politics, culture, and any other darn thing." As you've probably guessed, we often keep right on sharing opinions with each other via email even when the conversation is not being published. Recently, after 21-year-old New Mexico soccer player Elizabeth Lambert was televised roughing up an opposing player, Bonnie Erbe wrote here about violent women. As we continued to wonder about the fairly recent post-feminism phenomenon of un-sportswoman-like players, Christine Wicker and Joann Weiner both weighed in. Lambert apologized publicly for her behavior but offered that "It's a game. Sports are physical." Joann wondered in an email whether men, long accustomed to testosterone-driven play, let physicality "translate into the greater political and business world. Are there more male political leaders and CEOs because they have been more aggressive than women ever since they kicked their first soccer ball at age 3?"The only person carrying a Y chromosome on our email chain, Carl Cannon, deputy editor of Politics Daily (our home planet), helpfully responded. We think his perspective is so rich we've put our first male writer on WomanUp to share it with you.

A female colleague asked me, as the only male on an email chain, about about females and the influence of athletics in aggression. I admitted to her that my thoughts on this subject were all over the map, but I will say a couple of things: First, Elizabeth Lambert from the University of New Mexico acted like a thug in that now-infamous soccer match, and should have been thrown out of the game by the referees long before she got a yellow (!) card. Kind of makes you wonder what you have to do to get a red card in the Mountain West Conference. Were the refs blind?

As to the larger point, in my mind her behavior is not a gender-specific issue: any male college soccer player caught punching, kicking, gouging, and pulling the hair of opponents would certainly have been suspended as well. It was the reaction to this incident that was so telling. Would a male player have been an Internet sensation? I wonder. It's as though we expect women to play fiercely competitive sports -- like men -- and yet retain some of the traditional notions of femininity (not feminism, mind you . . . interesting how a simple suffix can so alter the meaning of a word) while competing at an elite level.

But that's an understandable desire on the part of society. I am old enough to remember when a woman in a newsroom was a rare sighting. (As a measure of how much that has changed, not only do I currently work for a female editor-in-chief, at my last job -- Reader's Digest -- the jobs of CEO, publisher, editor-in-chief, executive editor, managing editor, and associate editor were all held by women.) It was said with some optimism back in those early days that women would leaven newsrooms . . . make them more humane, collegial, family-friendly, and the like. For the most part this did not happen, and I, along with my friends, both male and female, have wondered why.

I'm not sure of the answer. Some of it must relate to the culture of newsrooms, which were both hierarchal and cutthroat. But as a former jock, it often seemed that the women who were easiest to work with came from large families or had played team sports in high school. A generation ago, unfortunately, family sizes had shrunk, and not many women of that generation had gravitated toward athletics -- for one thing, the opportunities for girls and women in sports were so much less than existed for boys and men.

That is not the case nowadays, however, and I think the Millennial women are much more cooperatively oriented than the women of their mothers' generation, and for the most part that cooperation crosses gender lines. I don't know how much of that attitude comes because so many more women grew up playing team sports, but I do think that girls playing competitive athletics is a good thing -- good for women, good for men, good for society.

And I also think the violent behavior exhibited by Miss Lambert in that now-notorious soccer match against BYU is the exception, not the rule. I hope for her sake -- and, remember, she's only 21 years old -- that it's aberrant behavior for her as well.

One problem with all this wonderful technology is that a youthful lapse can mark you for life. As a wise person once said: "Nothing digital ever dies."

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