EXERCISE IS GOOD FOR YOU.
That’s the rather obvious main message of Colette Dowling’s book The Frailty Myth: Women Approaching Physical Equality.
A slightly expanded, and slightly more provocative, summary of Dowling’s thesis: Female humans aren’t weaklings; or at least they don’t have to be if they work at it. So get your daughters into sports and exercise now, and they could develop strength and agility comparable to males of the same size/weight class.
Women actually were weaklings once, but that was long ago, when they didn’t get enough iron in their diet and kept dying in childbirth. Modern medicine and cast-iron cookware started women on the road to greater heartiness; the turn-of-the-century “physical culture” movement continued this trend.
And now, Dowling asserts, we’re on the cusp of a great new era in which XXers can fully match XYers, even on the field of sport.
Already, besides the TV ratings and endorsement deals and magazine covers that’ve accrued to female tennis and golf players, there are attempts to bring women into the milieu of team sports. Besides the WNBA (which drove the more exciting ABL out of business), there’s a fledgling Women’s Professional Football League and a soon-to-launch Women’s United Soccer Association.
One of the e-mail lists I’m on had a posting last month about Heather Sue Mercer, who’d tried to become the place kicker on Duke University’s football team. When she was rejected, she filed a gender-discrimination suit against the college. After three years, she’s now finally won a $2 million judgement in the case–now that she’s graduated, in a career, and not planning to try out for team sports anytime soon.
The news prompted scholar Jim Beniger, who runs this particular e-mail list, to comment:
“What will become of commodified content derived from professional and collegiate team sports when women and men are finally fully integrated into them? One obvious possibility is that the audiences for various team sports will double–if not more than double. Another possibility is that there will be far less spitting, and far fewer athletes with police records for the assault and abuse of women. What do you all think? Can you think of even one undesired result? Will the Earth continue to turn on its axis?”
Speaking for myself, as one who’s mighty skeptical of the whole masculinity-as-root-of-all-evil ideology, I’m not so sure of these sky-high hopes.
Have corporate middle-managements become less asinine, college bureaucracies less treacherous, or city councils less corrupt, now that they’re at least more coed than they used to be?
As for the practicalities, I can imagine soccer (which emphasizes lower-body agility) and hockey (which emphasizes speed and finesse) as more easily gender-integratable. Coed basketball would need to deemphasize height and reach; coed baseball would need to deemphasize fastballs and homers; coed football would need to deemphasize brutal takedowns.
All of these changes, of course, might actually be intriguing to a certain brand of fan who prefers the thrill of strategy and team execution to the spectacle of raw power.
For a postscript, there was a small controversy earlier this year about boys joining a championship little league softball team. Seems that when females break into a previously all-male institution, it’s popularly intrepreted as an overdue challenge to outmoded tradition. When males break into a previously all-female institution, it’s popularly interpreted as a bullying intrusion into a safe little refuge for protection-needing little ladies.
Large parts of society, apparently, are not quite ready to accept the possibility or consequences of equality.
MONDAY: We set our fictional column characters loose for the first time.
ELSEWHERE:
