The Woman Athlete Revealed
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opportunities for women throughout the twentieth century. Title IX was an
important, but not the sole victory in giving women increased access to all levels
of training, competition, and, with growing importance, media attention.’
Nevertheless, despite the gains women have made as athletes, especially at the
elite levels, different standards of competition and appearance for male and
female athletes persist. One explanation is that sport is one area where
patriarchy can assert and promulgate the sex differentiation that assigns
privilege and dominance to males, and subordination to females. As Helen
Lenskyj has observed,
“the maintenance of male power and privilege depends in part
on ensuring that sex differences are carefully constructed and
institutionalized in social stmctures, beliefs and practices.
Sport, by prevailing definitions concerned with physical
ability and bodily comportment, provides an appropriate site
for instruction in masculinity and femininity” (240).
Lenskyj argues that male athletic competition privileges “masculine” traits like
strength, endurance, and aggression, and accords lesser status to more
“feminine” traits like kinesthetic ability, flexibility, and coordination: “men can
maintain the illusion of athletic superiority by naming these attributes as bona
fide requirements of the ideal athlete. Women, on the other hand, might define a
dancer or a figure skater as the ideal” (237-8).
Many observers have suggested that both men and women, as athletes
and spectators, have been taught by a patriarchal culture to accept this form of
sex differentiation. Sport and the experience for women of physical power and
competence offer the “potential for reducing the physical power imbalances on
which patriarchy is founded” (Castelnuovo and Guthrie 13), and it is exactly for
this reason that our culture has so far been very reluctant to accept the crossing
of gender lines by either sex in athletics. When we encounter athletic events
where men demonstrate “feminine” skills and appearance and vice versa (men’s
figure skating vs. women’s softball), our conceptions of safe normalcy become
disturbed, and our discomfort becomes channeled into suspicions about the
athletes’ adherence to gender norms and expecta^ons about gender propriety.
To alleviate or deny this suspicion, most sports still maintain “separate
spheres,” or division along gender lines. Within the realm of women’s, or
ladies' sport, female athletes are encouraged to demonstrate the “feminine
apologetic” (Roth and Basow 252), to reassure spectators—not to mention
themselves to a certain extent—of their femininity and heterosexuality, of their
conformity to and support of social conventions and the sexual status quo:
“In order to compete, women athletes must strive for strength,
speed, and competitiveness—all those qualities which our
society codes as masculine. . . [ but i]n order to avoid being
coded as overly masculine or a lesbian, the athlete will