Why Do Women Suck at Sport? Embodiment of Female Gender Roles

"Dude, you throw like a girl."
"You catch like a girl."
Run like a girl, play ball like a girl, hit like a girl. These phrases stem from what appears to be a true stereotype, where the majority of girls and women tend to throw/catch/run with a lack of skill and power. Although elite athlete women are undeniably on par with their male counterparts, we still see a very strong trend of amateur and recreational sport completely dominated by men, with limited display of female talent. Even in your average PE lesson, most boys will get into the game of ultimate frisbee whether or not they have particular skill, while very few girls will actively participate, or participate well.

At first it seems acceptable to attribute these differences to biology - men's testosterone levels create more muscle, making them better suited to physical exercise. However this doesn't even come close to accounting for a seeming pandemic of female disinterest in sport, or the fact that "boys" perform better and more enthusiastically than "girls", even when there is a larger diversity in body shape and ability within each (binary) gender, than between genders. The impact of biological factors as a significant contributor to "girl-throws" is also negated by women's very real ability to achieve extremely high levels of physical excellence - hello Ellyse Perry. So then we arrive at an awkward conclusion. Somehow, girls develop "feminine" physical attitudes towards sport.

In the recent boom of revisionist feminist sociology and philosophy, the cause of this phenomenon has been identified and named as "embodiment". Wikipedia gives a nice definition: "Embodiment may be defined as the ways in which cultural ideals of gender in a given society create expectations for and influence the form of our bodies." Basically, when a body exists in a society with certain cultural norms, it will subconsciously adapt to those expectations regardless of biological factors. For example, in Western society it is the norm for women to wear skirts. There are certain ways you must hold and use your body when wearing a skirt, such as crossing legs or pushing your knees together when you sit, bending over slowly and somewhat awkwardly when picking something off the ground, or walking carefully to avoid tripping on the hem. Over generations of attributing skirt-wearing and skirt-related-behaviours to one gender, these movements become inherently "feminine", and are then publicly portrayed as typical of all women, no matter what they are wearing at a certain point in time. If you grow up in a society which accepts this as an undeniable "truth" of gender expression, then you will come to embody that cultural expectation. Even if a girl wears nothing but pants her whole life, her physical body will be conditioned to sit with knees together and bend over slowly by the overwhelming social assertion of what being feminine is.

Iris Marion Young's ground-breaking essay Throwing Like a Girl identifies how women suspiciously lack the spatial awareness which boys appear to naturally grasp: "...the space available to our movement is a constricted space. Thus... [in softball] women tend to remain in one place more often than men, neither jumping to reach nor running to the approaching ball." Young attributes the root cause of this social conditioning to women's inability to break from the patriarchy's control over the state of their existence. This is the part where we have to delve into some pretty heavy 20th century existentialist philosophy. French philosopher Jean Paul Sartre (simplifying to the extreme) characterised "radical freedom" as the ability to transcend a socially constructed world. Sartre's friend/lover/fellow philosopher Simone de Beauvoir then applied this to gender, saying that women are trapped in a world where they are objectified and limited to being props in men's lives. Therefore, while men can achieve the independence and the power to pull a Sartre and "transcend", women are stuck without the ability to free themselves. Young proposes that this constant tension between the need for freedom, and the inability to achieve it makes women extremely vulnerable to negative gender embodiment; our bodies echo the strain between the need to free themselves and move in space, and the conditioned restrictions that tell us we do not belong in the space around us.

The problem extends beyond sport. When women live in a restricted bubble, the clear message is that women don't deserve to take up space. A social doctrine of femininity = smallness beckons in body image issues, eating disorders, and a feeling of disempowerment as the female psyche is forced to turn inwards physically and emotionally to take up less space. And it's not only women who subconsciously notice their lack of control over their surrounding space. This mindset makes it easier for men to assume they can invade women's personal spaces, and own their bodies.

Basically, it is true that women often throw weakly, catch uncoordinatedly and run with flailing limbs. However the idea that these traits prove a biological essence of femininity is entirely false. Gender is expressed in specific ways only because society has built a system where physical idiosyncrasies of the gender binary are drilled into the subconsciousness until we embody them, and they become "natural" bodily functions. Simone de Beauvoir understood that "one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman."

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Hannah