Sports Culture Will Never Care About Women

I was waiting for the 64 tram to Caulfield on a Friday afternoon, the one I catch most weeks to go to Shabbat, and it came ten minutes late. Grumbling to myself about Swantson St traffic, I got on and was visually assualted by bright orange pamphlets strewn all over the tram reminding commuters about changes to tram timetables on Friday 28th September due to the public holiday. Ah yes, it’s labour day or something. As the tram trundled through Flinders St Station, I was confused by the masses of bodies in either black and white or yellow and blue swarming the CBD streets. They were all headed east, ah yes, there’s a big footy game or something. And then two and two finally made four and I realised that the entire state of Victoria gets a public holiday on Friday in honour of the AFL grand final (which I later found out was in fact played on Saturday so I’m still unsure what the fans at Flinders St on Friday were actually doing). Labour day makes sense; workers’ rights are pretty cool. But I couldn’t shake the slight discomfort of that fact that my tram ride, my weekend, my entire university semester timetable was centred around a football game.

A football game.

A handful of men running around an overpriced patch of grass kicking a ball in front of a stadium of fans who either paid exorbitant memberships or committed a mid-tier crime to nab a ticket. Whenever I complain about the footy I’m met with eyerolls about Sydneysiders or boring women or filthy feminists or some other significant aspect of my identity. Footy’s great! And anyone who disagrees is an imbecile who doesn’t appreciate Melbourne culture. And if you’re worried about the whole gender thing - which you shouldn’t because that’s dumb and annoying - it’s ok because there’s a women’s football league and some people are actually slightly interested in it!

But you cannot separate AFL from gender. You cannot separate sport from gender. There have been increasing measures taken to equal the literal and metaphorical playing field in recent years in regards to pay rates and women’s leagues, but feminising sport is a weak attempt at squaring the circle of an inherently masculine activity. Because with the current cultural standard of what we perceive as “good sport”, women will never be as good as men. Their games will never be as interesting to watch and the crowds will never pay the same amount for a ticket.

Whilst acknowledging the incredible biological diversity within one binary sex, as a generalisation people with XX chromosomes develop less muscle than those with XY, have shorter limbs, smaller hands and feet. Stepping outside of biological essentialism, women’s physical bodies are heavily affected by sexist socialisation. If you’ve been told your entire life that smallness is the epitome of feminine attractiveness, your mind will internalise this to the point where you feel unable to reach outwards into space to catch a ball because you subconsciously know that space does not belong to you (further reading: Throwing Like A Girl, Iris Marion Young). Saying that women are less able to play sport well unfortunately isn’t so much a misogynistic comment as simply stating the truth. However the factor missing in any conversations about women’s AFL, the Matildas or the Hockeyroos is that women’s subpar performance on the field does not at all reflect poorly on femininity. Rather it is our fault for glorifying activities in which only men are actually able to do well.

A quick Wikipedia gander reveals that sports probably originated as military training exercises, both in terms of fitness and team bonding. Rifling through my own limited general knowledge on the history of sports brings to mind the Ancient Greek Olympics, and that one story of how Oedipus accidentally killed his father with a discus and then had sex with his mother. Either way, it is pretty clear to see that sport was literally invented by and for men. Women were only included in the Olympics in 1900, and only in tennis and golf. Sporting activities were created specifically to cater to men’s abilities - long legs are good for running, big hands are good for handling balls, testosterone is good for lifting weights, and so these are the skills most cherished in sport. We’ve created the standard for “good sport” exclusively around what men can do, which coincidentally is what women aren't so great at. When the cultural consensus is that the best bit about cricket is hitting big fours and sixes, and the biggest talent in basketball is dunking balls, naturally we are less interested in women’s games where female bodies struggle to meet these expectations. If we as a society decided that the most coveted ability in cricket is constant blocks, with minimal opportunities for a score, perhaps we would value women in the Ashes. But this is not the case; we assume the standards of sport are objective and genderless, which places shame on women for being unable to match men in activities specifically designed to suit male bodies.

The glorification of sport directly translates to the glorification of men. At the expense of women.

When the biggest global event is the soccer World Cup, when the Olympics costs more than the annual budget of the United Nations, when an entire state has a public holiday for a single football game, we reiterate that this society values men’s physical abilities above all else. Giving women equal pay for equal play or supporting their leagues is a bandaid solution for a much deeper problem - femininity can never be desirable in sport; the best female players are the ones who most closely resemble men in their physical capabilities. The only viable option is to lessen our mindless worship of sport, to recognise that we teach ourselves to hate women when we laud a culture that will never value female participation.

My response to this idea is to remove myself from sporting culture, to shrug off the AFL and politely decline when someone offers to explain the rules to me. I stick to physical activities that value my body - gymnastics, circus, dance, rock climbing, yoga and pole. Occasionally I am a Bad Feminist, and sit in my undies with a bowl of ice cream watching the Ashes, but ideally this too will be removed from my life. Sporting culture hurts women. Hurts our ability to be taken seriously, to be valued as contributors to a national culture, to have our bodies respected. The grand final public holiday is shameful, and reducing the value of masculinity in sport should be our obligation.

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."

Comment below xx

Hannah