There are many stereotypes in our society today, and I will be focusing mainly on athletics and the stereotypes that surround athletes, especially women. In today’s society, sports are extremely important to the majority of the country. From basketball to tennis, we all have our favorite teams and most frequent assumptions of the sports. These assumptions typically concern what team is better and who will win, but our fans today also assume a lot about the gender identity of the athletes playing the game. Men’s sporting events are more frequently watched over women’s sports every day. I asked myself why this is. I feel the stereotypes women have (such as being inferior to men, less competitive, etc.) physically follow them everywhere they go, especially into the world of sports.
Society structures our gender roles for men and women to follow;
men are forceful and competitive and women are shy and reluctant. According to
Kristin Wilde, once a female steps out of her assigned gender role she will
then be labeled. For women to even participate in sports automatically makes
them different. Different
in the sense of, that being a female does not constrict me from what I want to
do. If a girl wishes to play basketball or volleyball, she will. There
are thousands of girls who quit or don't even try to play sports because of
the stigma they receive from their peers. For example, my
sister went through this stage in High School. She felt different because the
girls would judge her for doing something to "manly" and the guys
thought she was a lesbian. So she quit and it was a shame because she did enjoy
playing. I agree with Wilde, the social contrasts placed on females when
they participate in sports are a hard one to break. If a girl plays
volleyball, she is seen as a normal girl playing sports, but when that girl
plays football, a primary man-dominated sport, she is socially
prosecuted.
One particular female athlete, Holley Mangold, is an Olympic
weightlifter. She is my size, and I am a big man. She lifts in the heavyweight category
and her story was once on MTV's True Life. Her brother is a NFL lineman and she
grew up always doing what he did. However, because she is a female athlete,
she receives a lot of criticism for her decisions. Here is her
story...
Sports
are socially segregated by gender and very rarely are they crossed. The stigma
a woman athlete has if she crosses the line the assumption that she is a
lesbian. Abusive slang words are thrown around about her simply because she wants
to play a sport with men. As a result, it is rare to see women play football
with men collegiality or professionally. I have experienced this, when my
female older cousin played high school football and received a lot of back lash
and disapproval from her friends and some family because of her participation.
I also have a cousin who plays sports professionally and she is a heterosexual
female. These cousins are on different sides of the family and do not know each
other, so they did not go through the same hardships that each other endured. Additionally,
another cousin of mine is a professional volleyball player in California. She
also models when she isn't playing. Each of my cousins look
completely different: one is a model, while my other cousin fits your
stereotypical role of a “butch.”
The sport that a girl or a woman plays really depicts how they are
perceived and judged. For example, one cousin plays volleyball, a traditionally
dominate female sport and the other played football, a traditionally male
dominate sport. Women are not valued in our sports culture all the time by their
athletic abilities, but are more often than not judged by their level of
attractiveness. As you can see above, those are my cousins and one is more
likely to be accepted and praised by society as an athlete than the other. My
cousin did work hard and did not use her looks to become professional, but it
seems once she became professional, her popularity increased. My other cousin
was not as athletically gifted as the volleyball player and could not become a
professional, but she continued on and recreationally does karate and other sports.
The stereotype here is that women are inferior to men in sporting
competitions and are only good for the eyes. There is also an assumption that men
do not watch female sports for the play, but they only watch for the “show”.
Another stereotype is that all women who play masculine sports are lesbian.
This is not always the case and this happens to both genders. A person’s
heterosexuality comes into play when the sport they choose to play in does not
meet society’s criteria. It is viewed that if a woman excels at her sport she
must be a lesbian because regular feminine women could or would not act
masculine enough to excel. To counter that, it’s viewed that men who do not do
well in sports are not masculine. The idea that ‘since sports are what guys do,
they should be good at them,’ this is another false stereotype that is placed
and attached to sports and gender.
Men are more harshly judged with their decisions with sports than
women are. If a male runs cross country, he tends to be smaller and skinnier
compared to a male that plays football who has more body mass. Even though both
men may play sports well, the one who runs cross country is viewed as feminine
because he does not fit society’s criteria for what a man should look like and
do. I find that most feminine sporting events are not as closely watched as
men’s. Men play football and football has a massive event known as the super
bowl, the super bowl is world known and people who do not even watch football
tune into the game. But, what do women have? Is there a sport in which women have
their own equivalent of a super bowl? No. There are professional leagues for
women playing sports such as the WNBA (Women’s National Basketball Society) but
we so very rarely see any games on ESPN. Take the March Madness obsession with
male basketball and the extreme popularity that comes along with it; now compare
it to the women’s March Madness and its popularity. There is no comparison.
Men’s college basketball is so much more marketed and viewed by the country. In
almost every newspaper across the country, there was a bracket in which you
filled out your champion for men’s college basketball; in the meantime, the
women’s basketball tournament was going on at the same time and the bracket was
never given out in a mass production like the men’s brackets were.
In conclusion, just because a female sport is less marketed less
than a male’s sport, it doesn't necessarily mean that it
is more important or that we as a society should respect them any less. One way
to prevent this stereotyping is to market both equally or have equal
representation in the media. More famous celebrity athletes could step up and
speak on behalf of respecting both genders of athletes and focus more solely on
the sports that they play.
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