Realizing Gender Differences in Sports

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When I was younger, my best friend’s name was Harry. He lived up the street, and as the product of wealthy parents that had no other children, Harry had a plethora of toys and sports equipment. During the summer months, we hiked up to the field near his house, bat and baseball in hand, and set up bases around the field. With barely enough players to suffice as a “team,” our fathers played outfielders, and it was more about how powerful Harry or I could hit the ball, or if we could potentially achieve a home run. I loved baseball. I was only eight years old and hadn’t realized—yet—that I lived in a society that more or less prevented girls from playing the sport, instead making them join softball teams where the ball was literally softer, perhaps suggesting more delicacy for the “weaker” sex. This was one of the pivotal moments in my childhood that gave me a better understanding of men and women’s roles in athleticism.  I don’t really remember ever playing baseball again, but I was housing a deep anger within my veins that was never quite extinguished—who was it that ultimately “decided” women couldn’t play baseball? Why was I so upset? Was this the moment, my development into adolescence, that would forever separate me from enjoying athletics with my friends like Harry?

From what we have read recently in class, there is a lot of commentary on the body in terms of male and female performance in sports. I wanted to explore this area of research in this blog because in my opinion, sports reinforce the binary of male/female, thus excluding other attributes, and furthermore hit very close to home in terms of favoritism of male athletes. Author Erica Rand, in “Court and Sparkle,” writes that:

underexamined notions about gender criteria pervade sport, beginning with the principle on which policies and debates about the participation of transgender athletes most publicly rest: that sex segregation is the foundational criterion of fairness in competitive, and often even recreational, athletics…this principle is unfair from the start because…it erases and excludes people who do not fit into one of the categories. (439)

Though I’m not specifically discussing transgender athletes as Rand did, I did think her quote was important to add in this blog because she discusses the “segregation” of the sexes that so often unearths itself when it comes to athletics. It seems as though there is a clear, divisive line between male and female athletes, and I cannot help but wonder why this is still true today. In sports, males are stereotypically thought to be broad, strong, muscular, and enduring, while females are perceived as nimble, fast, and lean, but this only helps to reinforce gender binaries. Rand states that “…gender sorting simply does not account for all human variation relevant to sport. Males are not always tall. Height does not help in every sport. Numerous physical advantages—eyesight, hemoglobin levels, and many, many more—do not map onto gender anyway” (440).  More mystifying is the fact that female athletes are discussed in terms of what outfits they wear while on the field, whereas dress code usually never surfaces when commentating on men. In agreement with this is the difference between ESPN's magazine covers featuring men and women. Usually, men are photographed as being strong and professional, while women who make the cover are incredibly over-sexualized, or if they are not sexualized, their athletic ability is not at the foreground as men's usually is. So why are we, as a society, so obsessed with differentiating between male and female athletes, and why are these the only two categories that can exist within this realm? 

            Beyond experiencing a fit of anger upon discovering I could not play baseball as a girl, I had to experience the utter sexism and disapproval of my gym teacher from first to fifth grade. I have to admit I was excited to talk about sports and gender in class because this was something I had grappled with during my youth, but never fully got to analyze. Obviously, one could argue, my gym teacher, we’ll call him Mr. M, favored boys because he perceived them as being stronger and more able to fulfill their “potential.” Maybe this is due to the fact that men typically exert all of their energy when playing sports, while women are less “aggressive.” Marion Young, author of “Throwing Like a Girl,” explores this by asserting that men “[engage] in sport generally with more free motion and open reach than does his female counterpart. Not only is there a typical style of throwing like a girl, but there is more or less a typical style of running like a girl, climbing like a girl…” (143). This term “like a girl” has pervaded the media as well as young children’s mindsets for years. When I was younger, to “throw like a girl” was to throw weakly, passively, without any passion or enthusiasm—to suggest that as a girl, I’d rather be shopping or painting my nails than exerting any energy in sports. I learned, after the baseball fiasco, that sports were mainly for boys. There were always more boys on my Dynamo soccer team, always who took the lead and asserted their dominance over me. A few of the girls from my fifth grade class took over a small field space to play soccer, but eventually Mr. M kicked us out and lent that space to the younger boys so they could toss a football around, while the older boys kept the only other open space on the asphalt to play kickball. It was a constant battle of boys coming up dominant in the world of sports, and, eventually, I quit altogether when Mr. M displayed me in front of my gym class after track tryouts to point out how “weak,” “skinny,” and therefore undesirable I was.

            This was the moment in my life that I became truly conscious of my body—and as Young suggests, “women often approach a physical engagement with things with timidity, uncertainty, and hesitancy. Typically, we lack an entire trust in our bodies to carry us to our aims” (143). That was just it. I had lost all confidence in my body, especially after being called weak, and did not feel as though I could put my best foot forward and try again. Why? Because I had nobody telling me that I could do it. Mr. M told a lot of the boys that if they tried harder, they would succeed. But he didn’t tell any of the girls—he didn’t tell me. In that way, he failed all of us. However, I, too, failed myself. I internalized the bad rhetoric behind being a girl and refused to fight it—instead, I played along. I never would have realized this had it not been for the readings and the exploration we did as a class in terms of sports and gender. While I did not specifically discuss transgender athletes like Rand, I still came to a better understanding of my own childhood and experience with sports, which I feel is important as the world of sports, gender, and athleticism continues to garner discussions and debates. What I have ultimately learned is that next time, I won’t just play along. Next time, I’ll make sure to fight it.  

works cited: 

Rand, Erica. "Court and Sparkle: Kye Allums, Johnny Weir, and Raced Problems in Gender Authenticity." A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, vol. 19, no. 4,                  2013, pp. 435-463. 

Young, Marion Iris. "Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality." Human Studies, vol. 3, no. 2, 1980, pp.                  137-136.