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July 10, 1999 |
The cultural implications are tantalizing. It's not just about
equity for little girls, who can now dream of a career in professional sports, just like their brothers. It's about a new Amazonian vision of womanhood that includes sweat and strength, competitiveness and even ferocity. Individual female athletes, such as
tennis players or runners, have been accepted and popular for some time.
But team sports, and especially contact sports, are much more of a metaphor
for warfare. There's a unique thrill in watching women collide in a dive
for the soccer ball or battle for a rebound under the basket, get smashed
up and go on despite the pain and exuberantly celebrate a successful play. The rise of women in sports is often hailed as the conquest of yet
another male bastion -- a victory for feminism at its best, the kind that
revels in female power and accomplishment instead of wallowing in
victimhood. Yet it is also rife with paradoxes and ironies that call into
question not only traditional but feminist assumptions about gender. Take just one: While women athletes are indeed thriving in a "male" domain, they
can do so only as long as they don't compete directly with men. With only a few
exceptions, like equestrian sports and sharpshooting, sports are virtually
the only remaining sex-segregated sphere of activity. Other than the
maverick Camille Paglia -- who quite unfairly dismisses women's sports as boring and lacking in grace -- there are no feminists calling for
integration, presumably because they know that in integrated sports, women
wouldn't stand a chance. It's not that they have less ability or spirit. Many male
soccer fans have been greatly impressed by the technical skill, finesse
and aggressiveness displayed in the Women's World Cup. Women's basketball
will never thrill those who live on slam-dunks alone, but contrary to the
claims of its detractors, it hardly lacks in athleticism or even
flamboyance. Spectacular no-look passes, running jumpers and reverse
layups, dazzling spin moves and pretty fadeaway shots are becoming staples of the women's game. (Who says watching
the Houston Comets' Cynthia Cooper, the WNBA's two-time Most Valuable
Player, slice through the defense and make an impossible off-the-glass shot
is any less exciting than a dunk?) Some longtime (male) NBA fans say that
they now find the women's game more enjoyable to watch because it has more
intensity. Nevertheless, the simple fact remains that men are bigger,
stronger and faster. In a new Gatorade commercial, Mia Hamm and Michael Jordan challenge
each other in various sports, to the soundtrack of "Anything you can do, I
can do better." It's cute, but it's bull. Billie Jean King may have
trashed Bobby Riggs in the "Battle of the Sexes" a quarter-century ago, but
all she proved was that a woman tennis player at the top of her game could beat
a guy way past his prime. Venus Williams wouldn't last long against Pete
Sampras; it's safe to say that none of the top five female players
could beat any man in the top 25. Despite a lot of hype about the
closing gap between the performance of male and female runners, the female
winners of the New York Marathon invariably come in behind more than 40 men. The "Battle of the Sexes" may have raised consciousness, but in a
way it also set a misguided standard for measuring women's athletic
achievement. If men's performance is the yardstick, women are doomed to
inferiority. As the example of tennis has shown, it doesn't have to be
that way: The women's game can be enjoyed on its own terms. Yet there are
some provocative lessons here for feminists. The existence of women's
sports is clearly incompatible with the notion, popular with some academic
gender theorists, that the two sexes are not distinct biological categories
but merely points on a "continuum" that includes hermaphrodites. (On a
continuum, the women will be stuck in the basement.) | ||
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