Women, Sport, and Film - 2002
Student Papers
On Serendip

Perhaps it was because she wanted evidence of her liberation, or maybe as a result of her liberal, unmarried, single mothers want for a show-pony daughter, she took up track in middle school. There is a picture of her from our senior year in Game Face, the Washington Post's gallery of women athletes, which was taken by a local photojournalist and also placed in a Smithsonian exhibition on the subject. She stands around her teammates after a race, and they huddle together. I do not see any homoeroticism or envy of the masculine in this photo, but oddly, am reminded of Alcott's Little Women, that demure yet quietly brave story of girls growing up and growing in to each other's lives, shoulder to shoulder around each other. The lesbian accusation leveled at both feminists and women athletes is in contrast to the notion of women as social creatures, interested in creating sorts of families out of those people who populate their lives. Where men are encouraged to be individual, women are supposed to take these independent people and place them into supportive groups. I see this photo of her, in track uniform, dripping, with limbs draping down over her teammates, as both a masculine and feminine stance. In the jersey of athletics, with its cut adapted from the male form, she remains female.

By eighth grade, and the approach of our final middle school yearbook, the polls went out. Most athletic boy and girl were chosen, and the girl known for playing basketball won. My friend was angry because she ran track, played softball, and did cross-country while the winner only played her one sport. While nominated, my friend did not win the most votes. The winning girl played basketball, and by this, her effort carried more prestige as basketball, dominated by men, was valued more than the women's game of softball, and the less-gendered and commercialized world of running. She played women's sports, yet these did not carry the weight of those sports dominant in society, where dozens of its professional athletes were celebrities. A woman entering a masculine sport is questioned, yet does receive some credibility from the nature of the sport. A man entering a woman's sport is stepping down, not merely stepping out of bounds.

Women entering men's sports, which I would classify as any where gender is immediately assumed to be male, often do lose status. The eighth grade poll winner was not a wrestler or on the football team, and playing basketball is a milder infiltration into male culture. Where stronger gender lines are drawn, the motivation behind a woman joining is questioned. What is it in this sport that she craves? Why does she find the company and competition against women uninteresting? What about this makes it worth the extra effort of finding a gym, trainer, and league to compete in? Is being alone in an underutilized women's locker room worth the isolation? A woman deciding on these issues somehow subverts her femininity, as society sees her denying the sisterhood one can see in the photograph of my friend. There is a false front of masculinity that denies women's identity is enough. Society may see a woman in masculine sports as trying to expand the realm of women's work, but is more likely to see her retreating from such work.

Costs of going against the grain will come from the assumptions people will come to as to why a person isn't satisfied with the dominant culture, and the traditional opportunities and restrictions placed on him or her. A woman entering the world of sports is seen as taking on the challenge of masculine aggression and power, but not necessarily saying it's wrong. As radical feminism has at times taken on masculine culture and reappropriated it for women instead of denying its value and decrying it as wrong, women entering sports accept athleticism's value and bring it closer to themselves. They are thus not criticizing masculine culture, but finding values within it that, truthfully, are universal instead of gendered. There are benefits as women (or men entering women's sports) expand their lifestyle possibilities, and costs as their perceived lifestyle becomes narrower, more specific than before. Their actions liberate them internally, while externally, they have been circumscribed around motivations based on 'deviant' gender and sexual identity. This has been shown to produce a plateau in how far many women feel comfortable allowing sports in to their lives. The woman athlete in a single sport is somehow more approachable than the woman athlete who tackles many.
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