Popular Culture Review Vol. 18, No. 1, Winter 2007 | Page 55

The Woman Athlete Revealed 51 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