Saturday, Sep 6, 2008
The rise in popularity of women's sports highlights paradoxical intersections between athletics and feminism.
Jul 10, 1999 | Plenty of "Years of the Woman" have been declared before, but 1999 is truly the year of the woman athlete. For weeks now, huge crowds have roared their enthusiasm for the American soccer team in the Women's World Cup, cheering on sports stars with names like Mia and Brandi and Kristine. The Women's National Basketball Association is in its third season, with record attendance for the opening weekend and a crop of exciting new players from the defunct American Basketball League (as well as hyper-hyped rookie Chamique Holdsclaw, who actually lives up to most of the hype). In tennis, John McEnroe himself concedes that the women's game today generates more interest than the men's.
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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