sports

Chrissy Y., Stacey S., and a former student of mine, Kenjus Watson, have all suggested that we post about the controversy over Olympic athlete Caster Semenya’s sex.

A lot of people are talking about whether or not it’s appropriate to be asking about her sex and why we would be so obsessed with knowing the answer. Those are fine questions (and I address them secondarily).  But first I would like to suggest that, even if we were to decide that it is appropriate to want to determine her sex (that we are obsessed with it for a good reason), it would be impossible to actually determine her sex definitively. Let me explain:

If you were to try to decide what qualifies a person as male or female, what quality would you choose?

I can think of eight candidates:

1. Identity (whatever the person says they are, they are)
2. Sexual orientation (boys dig girls, vice versa)
3. Secondary sex characteristics (e.g., boobs/no boobs, pubic hair patterns, distribution of fat on the body)
4. External genitalia (e.g., clitoris, labia, vaginal opening/penis and scrotum)
5. Internal genitalia (e.g., vagina, uterus, and fallopian tubes/epididymis, vas deferens, seminal vesicles, prostate, etc)
6. Hormones (preponderance of estrogens/androgens)
7. Gonads (ovaries/testes)
8. Chromosomes (XX/XY, the SRY gene)

Most of us assume that these criteria all line up. That is, that people with XY chromosomes have testes that make androgens which creates a penis, epididymis, vas deferens etc… all the way up to a male-identified person who wants to have sex with women.  We also assume that these things are binary (e.g., boobs/no boobs), when in reality most of them are on a spectrum (e.g., hormones, also boobs, likely sexual orientation).

But these criteria don’t always line up and sex-linked charactertics aren’t binary.  Examples of “syndromes” that disrupt these trajectories abound (e.g., Klinefelter’s syndrome).  And all kinds of practices, including surgeries, are sometimes used to force a binary when there isn’t one (e.g., intersex surgery to fix the “micropenis” and “obtrustive” clitoris and breast reduction surgery for men).

If these criteria don’t always line up, then we have to pick one as THE determinant of sex.  But any choice would ultimately be arbitrary.  The truth is that none of these criteria could ever actually definitively qualify a person as male or female.

The alternative would be to require that a person qualify as male or female according to ALL of the criteria.  And you might be surprised, then, how many people are neither male or female.

I think the debate over whether we should test Semenya’s sex is getting ahead of itself, given that there is no such test.

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Yet, while we won’t be learning anything definitive about Semenya’s sex, the controversy does teach us something about our obsession with sex difference.  On MSNBC, Dave Zirin explains what the controversy over is really about:

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eK-w6lDOZ5Q[/youtube]

To me, one of the most interesting things that Zirin says is that sex isn’t actually a good indicator of athletic ability.  He may be a guy, he says, but having a penis doesn’t translate into outrunning anyone.

He is implying that sex segregation in athletics, as a rule, is more about an obsession with sex categories and their affirmation than it is about sports. Remember, Semenya’s sex is being questioned not just because she appears masculine to some (she always has), but because she kicked major ass on the track.

Kenjus, my former student, writes:

…why didn’t they test Usain Bolt?  He did amazingly well… Yet, his otherworldly accomplishments are considered the result of his never-before-seen body structure… Usain, however, is a big, strong, fast Black man. The fact that his times are just as mind-boggling as Caster’s gets lost in the widely accepted narrative that big, strong, fast Black men accomplish amazing athletic feats. It’s what they’re built for.

But this woman has apparently baffled the athletic and scientific experts because her body is not doing what a woman’s body is supposed to do. More specifically, her shape is too muscular, her voice is too deep, and her time is too fast. Essentially, “Semenya-the-woman” CANNOT exist in an exclusively two-gendered (i.e. men and women) society in which men are innately bigger, stronger, more deeply-voiced, and particularly FASTER than women…

Semenya is getting far more media attention than the recent cheating scandals of higher profile athletes. This is precisely because there’s something that separates Caster from an A-Rod, a Marion, a Sosa… The world is captivated by Caster because something that should be certain; unquestionable; medical; pre-ordained, is in flux.  It is regrettable that some athletes take illegal drugs to gain an edge over the competition. It’s entirely unethical, unnatural, and ungodly for an athlete to not fit into our narrow specifications of what constitutes gender or sex.

Indeed.  Our obsession with Semenya’s sex, in addition to being hurtful and invasive, says a great deal more about us, than it does about her.  And perhaps the reason we are so obsessed with proving Semenya’s sex, to bring this post back to its beginnings, is because binary sex doesn’t actually exist.  Me thinks we protest too much.

(Thanks to Mimi Schippers, via the Sociologists for Women in Society listserve, for alerting me to the video. Images found here and here.)

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

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.

I know I’ve been negligent in my posting for a few days. I was grading and busy watching old Michael Jackson videos and performances on YouTube and feeling unexpectedly sad about everything his life represented, and also the realization that people I idolized as a kid are now in their 50s.

Anyway, Sarah N. sent in a link to a story at the Mail Online about how women’s perceived attractiveness plays a part in deciding which matches will be played on the main court at Wimbledon. The organizers of Wimbledon don’t try to hide the fact that the appearance of the competitors is taken into account when scheduling matches:

…the All England Club admitted that physical attractiveness is taken into consideration. Spokesman Johnny Perkins said: ‘Good looks are a factor.’

Some women who were scheduled to play on Center Court, the main area, and their world rankings:

World No. 45 (unseeded) Gisela Dulko

World No. 59 (unseeded) Maria Kirilenko

No. 28 seed Sorana Cirstea

Women who played on the other courts, with their rankings:

No. 5 seed Svetlana Kuznetsova

No. 2 seed Serena Williams:

Attractiveness doesn’t seem to play such a factor in scheduling the men’s matches:

In the men’s tournament, five-times winner Roger Federer and British hope Andy Murray invariably play on Centre.

The scheduling of women by perceived attractiveness may have something to do with attracting television viewers. A comment from a BBC television employee:

But obviously it’s advantageous to us if there are good-looking women players on Centre Court…Our preference would always be a Brit or a babe as this always delivers high viewing figures.

Of course, it’s nothing new that female athletes are judged on their appearances as well as their athletic abilities. Female athletes have often felt pressure to meet conventional standards of beauty. This isn’t just about looks; it’s also about doing heterosexual femininity. Female athletes have long been suspected of being lesbians, particularly if they did not seem to actively seek male sexual approval. In fact, WNBA players have been encouraged to wear make-up and jewelry, have their hair long, and bring up their boyfriends, husbands, and/or children to prove their heterosexuality. Thus, in the end women’s appearances, and willingness to play up their gender in an approved way, often trumps their athletic accomplishments in a way that male athletes don’t usually face.

Other posts about female athletes and attractiveness are here, here, here, here (watch the second video), here, and here.

Z from It’s the Thought that Counts sent us this example of an identical product–mosquito repellent–packaged two different ways (found here). In the top example, the mostly blue package includes a male figure fishing and logos for hunting, camping, and fishing. In the bottom one, the mostly orange package includes a female figure, perhaps on a walk.

Rudbeckia Hirta explains:

Sold in the same anti-mosquito display. Same active ingredient. Same concentration of active ingredient. Same quantity in the package. Same price.

This reminds us that gender seems to be a salient variable no matter what the context, which goes to show how profoundly our psyches and cultures are organized by gender.

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Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

This post is dedicated to Frankie Manning.  Frankie died this morning of complications related to pneumonia   He was one month shy of his 95th birthday.  I will really miss him.  Frankie is a lindy hop legend.  He choreographed the clip below and is the dancer in the overalls.

In the 1980s, there was a lindy hop revival.  Lindy hop is a partner dance invented by African American youth in Harlem dancing to swing music in the early 1930s. Named after the “hopping” of the Atlantic by Charles Lindbergh Jr., it became wildly popular in the 1930s and ‘40s, traveling from the East to the West Coast and from black to white youth. Since its resurgence, Lindy Hoppers have enjoyed a national scene with websites, workshops, competitions, and city-wide social events that draw national and international crowds.

Though lindy hop was invented by African Americans, lindy hoppers today are primarily white.  These contemporary dancers look to old movie clips of famous black dancers as inspiration.  And this is where things get interesting:  The old clips feature profoundly talented black dancers, but the context in which they are dancing is important. Professional black musicians, choreographers, and dancers had to make the same concessions that other black entertainers at the time made. That is, they were required to capitulate to white producers and directors who presented black people to white audiences. These movies portrayed black people in ways that white people were comfortable with: blacks were musical, entertaining, athletic (even animalistic), outrageous (even wild), not-so-smart, happy-go-lucky, etc.

So what we see in the old clips that contemporary lindy hoppers idolize is not a pure manifestation of lindy hop, but a manifestation of the dance infused by racism. While lindy hoppers today look at those old clips with nothing short of reverance, they are mostly naive to the fact that the dancing they are emulating was a product made to confirm white people’s beliefs about black people.  Let’s look at how this plays out:

This clip, from the movie Hellzapoppin’ (1941) is perhaps the most inspirational clip in the contemporary lindy hopper’s arsenal:

By the way, the dancers are in “service” outfits because of the way lindy hop scenes featuring black dancers were included in movies.   Typically they would have no relationship to the plot; they would occur out of nowhere and then disappear.  This was so that the movie studios could edit out the scene when the movie was going to be shown to those white audiences that were hostile to seeing any positive representation of black people at all.  If you want to see how the scene above emerged (black “help” suddenly discovering musical instruments and spontaneously congregating), you can watch the extended clip here.

The clip features a dance troop called Whitey’s Lindy Hoppers. You can see other famous dance segments in Boy! What A Girl! and Day At The Races.

The clip below, from the Ultimate Lindy Hop Showdown (2006), reveals how powerfully contemporary lindy hoppers have been influenced by clips like the ones above.  Watch for how the styling, moves, and trick reflects the clips above:

Another good example can be found here (but the angle, audio, and visual quality are not very good).

So we have a set of (mostly) white dancers who naively and wholeheartedly emulate a set of black dancers whose performances, now 70 to 80 years old, were produced for mostly white audiences and adjusted according to the racial ethos of the time.  On the one hand, it’s neat that the dance is still alive; it’s wonderful to see it embodied, and with so much enthusiasm, so many years later.  And certainly no ill will can be fairly attributed to today’s dancers.  On the other hand, it’s troubling that the dance was appropriated then (for white audiences) and that it is that appropriation that lives on (for mostly white dancers).  Then again, without those dancers, there would likely be no revival at all.  And without those clips, however imperfect, the dance might have remained in obscurity, lost with the bodies of the original dancers.

As a white lindy hopper myself, for over ten years now, who desperately loves this dance, I find this to be a deep conundrum.

I don’t know what Frankie would have had to say about this critique.  But I do know that he loved lindy hop to his last days and he was grateful for the revival.  Here he is dancing with Dawn Hampton, another legend of lindy hop, at the age of 94:

I’lll miss you, Frankie. And I’ll keep on dancing, embodying, with ambivalence, all the great contradictions of the dance and the history of this country.

UPDATE: A couple commenters asked how, exactly, the dance was changed in order to appeal to white audiences.  This is actually really difficult to say, since few films of social dancing (black dancers dancing only for other black dancers) exist.  But we have some theories.  Evan, in the comments, had this suggestion:

For white audiences of the time, Jazz was Hot Black jungle music – Black people were sex crazy hedonists, and you can see it in the moves, the exaggerated body undulation. the speed. the sweat. the rhythmical drum.

It was like watching a tribe around a fire.

I’m with Evan.  I’d like to also add that, as a person with a trained eye for lindy hop, I see two things in those clips:

(1) I see incredibly effective technique. Unbelievable strength and precision. It’s fantastic.  (By the way, Frankie explained that, by the time they got to the take you see in the Hellzapoppin’ clip, they’d performed that routine more than 20 times in a row… they were amazing athletes.)

(2) But I also see, layered onto and facilitated by that technique, an effort to make the dance appear more out-of-control than it is. They are wild-ing the dance.

At least, that’s how it looks to me.

More than that, though.  As a dancer who has also been inspired by those clips, I know how to do that.  I know how to exaggerate the out-of-control look.  I won’t go into the technical details (I did, and then deleted!), but it’s do-able.  And it’s not that it’s not cool… adding the drama is fun and exciting to watch… but there’s a historical reason why lindy hop has that dimension and that is worth thinking about.

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.

I presume, though I have never seen any evidence for this, that we don’t all get the same email forwards.  For instance, I never received this forward… but Steve W. did:

Text:

Did You Know This About Leather Dresses?

Do you know that when a woman wears a leather dress, a man’s heart bests quicker, his throat gets dry, he gets weak in the knees, and he begins to think irrationally???

Ever wonder why?

It’s because she smells like a new golf bag!

Why don’t I typically receive such forwards?  To suggest that it has something to do with my sex, which was my first guess, is probably too simple of an explanation.  I suspect it also has something to do with my class, politics, and occupation. 

What kind of forwards do you (not) get?  Do you think you might be surprised at what other people receive in their inbox? 

Do you selectively forward certain sentiments to some people and not others?  Do certain sentiments come from some people in your social network and not others?

What does the big wide world of forwarding look like?  Who forwards what to who?  Or, what part of the forwarding-whole is largely invisible to you?

I could make some sociological comment about the linking of the marketing for Easter candy and professional wrestling… but really I just think this is hilarious.  Not only is it a linking of the marketing of Easter candy and professional wrestling (go, Jesus, go?), but there is something so wrong (or is it so right?) about the proximity of the words “EGG” and “RAW” (NOT appetizing) and also the phrase “Jelly-filled mallows” (so soft and sweet!) next to the ripped, muscle-bound dude in the middle.  I couldn’t make this stuff up.

Also in wrestling: No Nipples Allowed!!!

(Image at CMM News.)

I know nothing about “fat camps,” but I have (rather thoughtlessly) simply assumed that they are oppressive places that punish and shame campers in support of a sizest status quo. But, after looking through Lauren Greenfield‘s photographs of kids at a weight-loss camp in the Catskills, NY (here), I’ve started to think differently. The pictures don’t seem to be of oppressed beaten-down kids. Instead, they seem to be having a pretty good time.  Greenfield’s captions suggest that these kids feel more comfortable at weight-loss camp than they do in their “real” life because they’re around other people that are, in this important way, just like them.  Images show them enjoying things they say they can’t do outside of camp (e.g., wearing a swimsuit), practicing (heterosexual) romance, and learning stuff that is fun or useful (e.g., tae bo, nutrition).

As Gwen pointed out, my critique of weight-loss camps was based on the idea that fat-shaming was more intense at weight-loss camp than it was elsewhere. If you think about it much, this is obviously false.  There is plenty of fat-shaming everywhere.  At least at camp, kids can potentially achieve a sense of normalcy and some solidarity with one another.  So, without suggesting that there is nothing at all problematic about weight-loss camps, these images complicate simple condemnations.

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.

Below are screenshots of the Degree Men, Degree Women, and Degree Girl websites.

Degree genders their deodorant with color (turquoise and lavender versus blue and yellow), pattern (bold lines versus curving spirals), language (women are “emotional” and men “take risks”).  Really, Degree? We’re still going there? 

Even the scents are gendered and, further, they reveal how we place men and women in a hierarchy (e.g., “Extreme Blast” versus “Summer Rain”).  Men even get a scent called “Power.”

Degree also markets their product differently towards adult and t(w)een girls.  Women are “emotional,” girls are “OMG!” let’s dance!!! 

OMG!  Let’s take a look!

“DEGREE MEN. PROTECTS MEN WHO TAKE RISKS.”

“Absolute Protection.”
“Responds to increases in adrenaline.”
“Proven at the hottest temperature on earth.”
“Unbeaten in competitive dryness testing.”

Scents include “Cool Rush,” “Extreme Blast,” “Arctic Edge,” “Intense Sport,” “Clean Reaction,” and “Power.”

“DEGREE WOMEN. DARE TO FEEL.”

“Emotional sweat can cause body odor more than perspiration from physical activity… you need extra odor protection to kick in when you’re stressed or emotional.”

Scents include “Classic Romance,” “Spring Fusion,” and “Fresh Oxygen,” “Pure Satin,” “Delicious Bliss,” and “Sexy Intrigue.”

“DEGREE GIRL. PROTECTION FOR EVERY OMG! MOMENT.”

“Crazy, exciting or embarrassing, OMG! moments happen to everyone.”

“Sign up 4 Cool Stuff! OMG SIGN UP.”

Scents include “Fun Spirit,” “Tropical Power,” and “Just Dance.”  See also “Pink Crush.”

Also in dumb gendered marketing:  Redken for men, make up for men, Frito Lay targets the ladies, nature versus the beast, it may be pink, but it’s not girly, gendered vitamins, and RISK (for men only).

Also in marketing towards tweens: “My Life” involves getting a boyfriend, teenager+colonialism = weird, and Nair for tweens.