{"id":3189,"date":"2012-05-01T18:37:16","date_gmt":"2012-05-01T23:37:16","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/citings\/?p=3189"},"modified":"2012-05-02T09:46:27","modified_gmt":"2012-05-02T14:46:27","slug":"female-olympians-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/2012\/05\/01\/female-olympians-part-ii\/","title":{"rendered":"Female Olympians, Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"May-Treanor<\/a>
Photo by mario_d via flickr.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

As the Summer Olympics draw near, all sorts of messages about women are surfacing.<\/p>\n

Some messages pertain to female participation. \u00a0In March, we cited an article<\/a> that noted this year might be the first time each country sends female athletes to participate in the Summer Olympics.\u00a0 However, a recent New York Times<\/em> article<\/a>\u00a0explained that Saudi Arabian women may not be allowed to participate after all.<\/p>\n

Other messages are about what women will wear or how they will behave rather than if or how they will perform.\u00a0 For example, officials of the International Amateur Boxing Association suggested that women try wearing skirts in competition.<\/p>\n

The man in charge of the association—they are always men—said he had received complaints that spectators could not tell women from men beneath the protective headgear. Instead of referring these spectators to optometrists, he referred the boxers to the Ring Magazine<\/em> spring collection.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Skirts will be optional, not mandatory, as women\u2019s boxing makes its debut in London, though.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s an interesting time for women,\u201d said Janice Forsyth, director of the International Centre for Olympic Studies at the University of Western Ontario. \u201cThe more they become involved in sport, the more it seems people feel the need to market female sexuality. It\u2019s a tough bind for women—they have to look good and be attractive to the public, presumably a heterosexual male public, and be good athletes. That same standard doesn\u2019t necessarily apply to men.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Women\u2019s athletic gear is being reconsidered on other fronts as well.\u00a0 The International Volleyball Federation will permit more conservative outfits for beach volleyball, including shorts and sleeved tops, due to cultural and religious sensitivities.\u00a0 FIFA (soccer\u2019s governing body) is also reconsidering its ban on the hijab.<\/p>\n

However, it remains to be seen whether Saudi Arabia will also reconsider the messages it’s sending by continuing to disallow women participants, something some defend by claiming that sports lead to immoral behavior and that virgin girls are too affected by jumping required by sports.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat women in vigorous activities will upset their wombs, reproductive activity and menstrual cycle—it\u2019s amazing they can put forth these arguments and be accepted with the science we have,\u201d said Forsyth, the Olympic scholar. \u201cMy students laughed at that. They were shocked. That\u2019s something we saw a hundred years ago.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As the Summer Olympics draw near, all sorts of messages about women are surfacing. Some messages pertain to female participation. \u00a0In March, we cited an article that noted this year might be the first time each country sends female athletes to participate in the Summer Olympics.\u00a0 However, a recent New York Times article\u00a0explained that Saudi […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":337,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[39074],"tags":[39114,497,50,190],"class_list":["post-3189","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-sightings","tag-gender","tag-olympics","tag-sport","tag-women"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3189","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/337"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3189"}],"version-history":[{"count":14,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3189\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3204,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3189\/revisions\/3204"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3189"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3189"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/clippings\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3189"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}