sports

Alex C. sent in an example of the belittling of men by men in the context of sport.  Two teenager fans of the Red Sox found themselves verbally assaulted by Yankee fans for the sin of sitting amongst them.  They surround the boys and sing, aggressively, to the tune of YMCA, after a mostly indecipherable lead in:

Why are you gay!
I saw you suckin’ it, D-I-C-K.
They have every size, you’re about to enjoy.
You can hang out with all the boys!
Why are you gay!
I saw you suckin’ some D-I-C-K.

It should be clear to everyone that this behavior represents a sick society. Team affiliation follows the rules of the minimal group paradigm: humans appear to be willing to form meaningful groups based on just about anything.  Sports just happens to be an arena in which hypermasculinity is rewarded, even demanded.  This makes it acceptable to be cruel to one another and makes it inevitable that that cruelty will take the form of hatred towards gay men (deemed masculine failures) in the form of homophobic slurs.  It’s not even that they think the kids are gay, but calling them gay is good for a laugh and a great insult.

This is what it’s like to be a man under patriarchy: moments of inhumanity in which men accept and reproduce hatred against others and moments of victimization when other men aim that hatred at you.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

An NPR photo essay by Hugh Holland offers a fun glimpse into the evolution of skateboarding. Holland explains that a drought in mid-1970s Southern California led to the mass draining of swimming pools. Kids with skateboards took one look at the empty pools and invented vertically-driven trick skateboarding as we know it today. According to Wikipedia:

This started the vert trend in skateboarding.  With increased control, vert skaters could skate faster and perform more dangerous tricks, such as slash grinds and frontside/backside airs.

Ah the serendipity of cultural innovation.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Larry Harnisch (of The Daily Mirror) and Jimi Adams sent in a story in the New York Times about ESPN’s plans to roll out espnW, a brand aimed at women. The brand will apparently mostly consist of a website, Facebook pages, and the like for now, with possible expansion to TV in the future.

Responses have been mixed, with some excited at the idea of women’s sport, and female sports fans, being taken seriously, and others fearing it’ll be a condescending attempt that will serve to segregate those groups from “regular,” i.e., men’s, sports and fans.

While women may be interested in watching women’s sports in particular, the article also notes that women make up a minority, but significant, portion of the viewership of the NFL, NBA, and MLB, as well as a number of sports-related websites:

From the article:

Women make up 44 percent of football fans, 45 percent of baseball fans and 36 percent of professional men’s basketball fans, according to research conducted by the sports leagues. During the 2009 season, an average of 4.2 million women watched the N.F.L. on ESPN, according to the network.

The NYT article includes a link to a study by Michael Messner, Cheryl Cooky, and Robin Hextrum shows that over time, ESPN’s coverage of women’s sports during SportsCenter, its headline sports show, has gone down, generally remaining well below the portion devoted to women’s sports on broadcast news sports segments (the report includes a full description of the methodology):

Women’s basketball gets the most coverage among women’s sports:

On the upside, since the total coverage of women was down in 2009 compared to previous years, the researchers found less ridicule of female athletes and fewer sexualized joke stories (i.e., a story about a bra that unfolds into a golf putting green). So, you know…woo! If programmers just completely erase women from TV, they can’t ridicule, sexualize, or belittle us! We’ve found the answer to negative portrayals of women!

El sent in a really interesting example of the re-fashioning of a real body into one believed to be more appealing to consumers. In the video below, real footage of gymnast Shawn Johnson is shown alongside the video game designed to allow Wii players to “play” her. El notes:

…the video Shawn is significantly thinner and long-limbed whereas the real Shawn has a short muscular body. The real Shawn’s leotards are red and blue, while the video image is wearing a pink leotard. In addition, the hair of the video version is blonder.

There has been a clear effort here to feminize the image of Shawn and to make her body conform to less athletic ideals… While Shawn’s name and fame is used to sell the video (presumably primarily to little girls), the video sends the message that Shawn herself must be altered, even though I would guess most people buying the game are fans of Shawn, know what she look like, and admire her as she is.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Stephanie L. and Amie A. both sent in screen shots of the MSN tabs “for him” and “for her.”   It’s not particularly surprising that MSN segregates its content by sex, but the gendered themes were interesting, especially given that Stephanie and Amie captured two moments in time.

First, notice that the information MSN chose as relevant to him is almost always leisure related:

The two lists above include how to build a man cave (where men escape daily responsibilities), the new Nikes, technological innovation and great inventions to read about, sports news, dating advice, and wacky stories about cocaine, $100,000 dollar bills, catching lobster, and urine.  Except for a non-leisure-related, health story, all are either about leisure activities or a way to provide leisure with wacky, weird or fun news.

What about for her?

Her stories are about work (male careers), sexual harassment, babies (breastfeeding and baby talk), teenagers, the economy, and food (superfoods and allergy labels).  The video on wildlife, the story about Chelsea Clinton, the piece on Mad Men, the new hospital gown design (???)  can be interpreted as leisure-related in that they’d be fun to read.

Overall, then, the material aimed at men is almost entirely related to leisure, whereas the material aimed at women is heavily tilted towards her responsibility for work and the family and serious topics like sexual harassment and the economy.   Perhaps MSN knows what it’s doing.  In fact, men do have more leisure time than women.  So this is a structural problem related to how we organize work and family, as well as a cultural problem in how we represent and relate to men and women.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Etan B. sent in an interesting case of both stereotyping women (generally as annoying) and interpreting everything they do through the lens of gender difference. Dan Steinberg posted an article on D.C. Sports Blog, a blog of the Washington Post, about comments yesterday by Rob Dibble, a sports commentator for Fox News and for the D.C. baseball team the Nationals on the Mid-Atlantic Sports Network channel during televised games. Dibble was apparently fascinated by the fact that a group of women attended the game and, like, talked and stuff. Here are the women to whom he repeatedly referred (he’s also the one who circled them on the screen so viewers could clearly see them):

Steinberg transcribed some of Dibble’s comments:

Those ladies right behind there, they haven’t stopped talking the whole game…They have some conversation going on. Right here…There must be a sale tomorrow going on here or something….Their husbands are going man, don’t bring your wife next time.

Then:

…now they’re back there, they’re eating ice cream and talking at the same time…

Later:

…they’re right there, still talking…

And:

I was just thinking, those women, there’s a new series, Real Housewives of D.C., that just came out…Maybe they’re filming an episode?

This is a perfect example of the way we interpret behavior depending on the gender of the person engaging in it. While I’m by no means a big fan, I have been to baseball games, everything from my nephew’s Little League game for 6-year-olds (seriously hilarious, since the kids mostly run from the ball, stare into space, and have very little idea what’s going on) to major-league games. Everyone eats and talks during the game, at the same time, even. Quite a few spectators consume a lot of beer, after which their conversations become more animated. Sure, they pay more attention at some times than others, but going to a baseball game is a pretty social event that does not involve staring intently at the field at all moments. In fact, the very fact that Dibble was making all these comments means he wasn’t focusing solely on events on the field himself.

But these mundane activities drew Dibble’s attention because women were doing them. Since he stereotypes women as not having a real interest in baseball, their presence, and willingness to talk and eat food, and then talk more, is a sign that they aren’t there for the right reasons and are probably ruining the game for the men around them. They must be talking about typically girly things like shopping. Or maybe they’re there because they’re part of a TV show! That is definitely the most logical explanation.

In a society where gender differences are emphasized, and where femininity is devalued, anything women do may be viewed negatively, even when (or because) men do the exact same thing. The things these women did would almost certainly go unnoticed if a group of men did them, and wouldn’t have attention drawn to them throughout the game. But because it was women, eating and talking becomes noteworthy and bizarre, if not outright annoying, and their presence at all requires explanation.

Way back in June, Eszter H., Eric B., and Kasia G. sent in an image that the Chicago Tribune ran, in early June, of Philadelphia Flyers hockey player Chris Pronger wearing a figure-skating skirt with a sparkly hem, referring to him as “Chrissy” and including the line “Looks like Tarzan, skates like Jane” (image from USA Today):

The Tribune was counting on the fact that femininity is stigmatized for men; thus, they don’t have to say anything meaningful about Pronger or make a specific claim. Just linking him to femininity — through clothing, name, and language — is enough to make fun of him. Of course, this isn’t just about mocking Pronger. By default, using femininity to ridicule men involves devaluing women and things associated with us. Someone who “skates like Jane” — that is, like a girl — is laughable.

Angela Ruggiero, head of the U.S. women’s hockey team, clearly understood the connection and didn’t appreciate it (from ESPN):

“I’d like to see that editor out on skates. I’ll take them one-on-one on the ice any day,” three-time Olympic medalist Angela Ruggiero told The Associated Press. “They obviously have never seen women’s hockey and are living in the dark ages.”

Ruggiero found out about the poster via Twitter and expressed disappointment and anger that such demeaning portrayals of women and hockey are still being made.

It’s a great example of the use of femininity as stigma, a process that harms both men (who have to eschew anything associated with women) and women (who are encouraged to perform a devalued and often ridiculed gender ideal).

NPR recently featured a story on Kevin Michael Connolly. Connolly is an athlete, adventurer, author, and photographer who was born without legs.

In his memoir, Double Take, he talks about travel. People around the world, he explains, tend to stare.  And, with his camera, he stared back.

Curiosity, it appears, is very human. But people in different places tend to speculate differently as to the source of his lost legs and that, he discovered, is quite culturally specific.

In Sarajevo, people tended to think that he’d lost his legs in mines during the Balkan conflicts.  In New Zealand he overheard a child asking his mother if he’d been attacked by a shark.  In Montana, he was asked if he still wore his dog tags from Iraq.

I broke my leg five weeks ago and, for what it’s worth (not much really), my experience, also, is that people speculate based on their own experiences and their relationship to you.  An avid lindy hopper (12 years now… well, not now exactly, but again real soon), many of my dance friends immediately inquire as to whether I broke my leg dancing.  My raunchy friend, Fancy, asked if I broke it “doin’ it.”  The second most common guess is that I broke it stepping off a curb.  It turns out lots of people do that.  Who knew!

For more, see Connolly’s website or listen to the NPR Radio Story.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.