Affirmative Action

PROBLEM: INEQUALITY IN SPORTS SOLUTION: GET TO THE ROOT Written by: Shawn Monaghan for Professor Glass in course 32.236 October 16th,1995 More of public money is given to male than female sports at least at the high end of the scale (ie. in professional and near professional level sports). Landsdowne park was built and maintained i on public funds and it currently is used disproportionately by male teams over female teams . Money funding sportii teams at Carleton University goes disproportionately to male teams such as the Carleton Ravens . The above situations are symptoms of discrimination of which an egalitarian and progressive society should clearly not be proud. It could however be argued that the reason women's sports receive less funding is due to less actual need or interest. The argument might proceed much like this: Women have less interest in sports naturally and are less physically capable and should therefore have less sport funding. Otherwise, a few athletic women would benefit disproportionately to the great number of athletic men. This argument leaves out a very fundamental factor of society that must not be ignored -socialization. Women have been socialized to be pretty and 'feminine' for countless generations and it has come to the point at which it is virtually impossible to know for sure whether women are born and bred or trained and seen to be 'weaker' and less athletic than men. Given the ubiquitous and covert nature of socialization it is arguably impossible to distinguish its effect on us from genetics. This causes a great many problems when describing the 'nature' of men and women in such a complex social network as exists today. For example the statement; women are physically the weaker sex. This seems rather a reasonable statement in a male dominated society where strength is measured by how many pounds you can lift in the gym, but perhaps in a female dominated society strength would have been measured by endurance of pain in childbearing. Surely to this scale men would be the weaker sex by far. Of course, this would not be fair to men for they do not bear children, it is biologically impossible, but is today's standard ofiiistrength any more fair to women in ignoring the strength and endurance required of giving birth . Perhaps in an egalitarian society we would see or define strength through both the virile male athlete and the vigorous mother. To return to the gist of the above argument: If we are to give less funding to women in sports due to their lack of athleticism perhaps it would be best that we demonstrated that women are truly uninterested and incapable first. This means giving women at the very least an equal chance to develop their physical interests and capabilities. It could be argued that women should have even greater funding than men to develop their athletic potential as women have to first overcome societal pressures against being athletic. Not only do women have to combat the feminine mystic that they are weaker than men but they must also overcome societal pressures of the ideal iv woman . The rise of, or perhaps more appropriately the discovery of the existence of, bulimia and anorexia in women of all ages is evidence to many that women are succumbing to the pressures of 'the beauty myth'. Everyday the newsstands and the television sets inundate women with the images of very thin very tall supposedly sexy superstars, not to mention the ubiquitous message - dieting is the only way for a woman to be healthy and sexy.

You can not go through a single grocery store line without seeing yet another of those fad diets plastered all over the tabloids and magazines. It is no wonder that statisticians are noticing an increasing tendency in young women to diet right around the time of puberty. I had not noticed v this myself when I was young, but some of my friends have told me that they have felt the urge to go on a diet ever since they broke the magical 100 lb mark. If women are, at an ever decreasing age, compelled by society to take on a diet of starvation and near starvation levels we should not be in the least bit surprised to find them weaker than men, nor indeed should we be surprised to find them less mentally solvent. If a man wants to lose fat he will deal with the perceived problem by first increasing physical activity and then cutting out extraneous food consumption, rarely will he even consider taking such obscenely unhealthy diets of which many women partake on a regular basis. Unfortunately for the woman she is not quite so free to chose such a 'manly' lifestyle. Clearly the situation for women in sports is not equal to that of men. Some sporting events that receive television and radio broadcasting during prime-time include; football, baseball, hockey, tennis, golf and the Olympics. The first three of these are completely male dominated with very few if any female athletes reaching professional stature. The last three sport events all have a female contingent, which arguably is slowly but surely reaching the stature of equality with the male contingent. The reason for the above modern situation seems clear, disproportionate funding for 'male' sports and socialization that relegates and confines women to the role of spectator or substandard athlete. As I hope has been demonstrated above, this role women have been riveted into by societal pressures is by no means necessarily a demonstration of their true limitations but merely the product of many generations of male domination. Male domination means that the men have had the power to control the lives of woman and to define her role in society. Affirmative action then must be a means to allow women to redefine her role in society on her terms. This means she should be free to explore parts of herself heretofore either undiscovered or denied. Perhaps it is the feminist athlete's dream to become the best (person not woman) in her sport of choice. Perhaps, but why should she stop there, it would seem that there is the possibility of a huge variety of activities that could test the mettle of the athlete. Why should the female athlete be interested in football, baseball, marathons, golf, etcetera these sports were all devised by men for men. I am certainly not suggesting that 'male' sports are not good enough for women. I am suggesting vi however that women might devise sports for women of a different nature than those which were devised by men for men in a society dominated by men and male values. It does not seem necessary that there must be a single winner or winning team while all the rest are losers. Nor does it seem necessary that competition be at the centre of sports and not cooperation, for example. Certainly as a product of our patriarchal society I find it difficult to imagine how we could have a sporting event that is not competitive at its heart, but this is no argument that such a noncompetitive sporting event could not exist. Our modern sporting events are handed down to us by a long tradition of man to son and competition appears to be at the heart of all of them. If we can stop and consider that even in the sporting events in which women have achieved professional

status it appears as only token, the female athlete or team that is the champion is merely the 'female' champion. If women are given the benefit of affirmatively active procedures that focus on redressing women the result should be a drastically less stratified society. This means women and men would have roughly equal ranges of pay as professionals and roughly equal funding at all levels, also a roughly equal percentage of both men and women might also become involved in sports in general as well as at the professional level. At present women are not as a group participating in sports in the same proportion as men, thus it appears quite likely that women will eventually catch up with men with regards to speed, agility and many other physical attributes of importance to sports. Men do however, appear to have physical superiority to women in upper body strength such that it would be impossible for men and women to compete on an equal basis in sports that require upper body strength. Tennis for example is a very demanding physical sport that favours the male biology over the female. Perhaps as women become more involved in sports as a group we will find that they have the biological advantage in other types of sports (perhaps even sports which have not yet been invented). Fundamentally this means that I believe that women and men are roughly equal when compared as a group in agility and speed, and that perhaps the reason women appear less fast and agile than men is that a number of exceptional individuals have been dissuaded from using their talents because they have been socialized not to be athletic. Unfortunately, there appears to be a fundamental barrier to physical equality between men and women. Any attempt to generate gender equality in sports must deal with this biological argument. In the same spirit it should be said that any attempt to desegregate sports would have to also deal with the argument from biology. Perhaps it can be argued that women should not be prevented from trying-out for professional teams just because women as a group have less upperbody strength than men as a group. Given, that the strongest woman is a good deal stronger than the weakest man how can one justify allowing every single manviito try out for professional teams while at the same time disallowing any woman from trying out ? Unfortunately, even in the desegregation of sports we can not get away from the fact that many more men will be on the team than women -- due merely to our biology differences. If our understanding of the biological differences between men and women are correct it seems impossible that desegregation of sports could provide even a semblance of gender parity. Furthermore, if women are allowed to try out for men's teams, will women's teams be then required to allow men in? If so, then the desegregation would do much to reverse any attempts for gender parity in sports. The above argument may appear at first rather convincing but there are a number of major complications and over-simplifications. What if any female teams would men be interested in trying out for? The High school women's basketballviiiteam, perhaps? Women do not have professional football, basketball, or baseball teams , so it does not seem possible that they could lose by the above reciprocity argument. True, men would outnumber women on professional teams by quite a large proportion but this would go a good deal toward gender parity and not away from it as the number of women on such teams now are zero. Perhaps the best method of attaining gender-parity would be to encourage female professional teams in football, baseball and hockey. Unfortunately it does not appear likely that these 'female' versions of 'real' teams would do anything at all for women or gender parity. Intuitively, it does

not appear that the public would have much interest in a 'weaker' professional league made up of women. However, consider the air time given to the story of Monica Seles, who had a comeback in Tennis after being attacked by a fan of one of her opponents, as an example of how the female contingent of sports is becoming interesting and could be very marketable to the public. The potential for the female athletes to become as popular as male athletes is illustrated by the amount of air time given to the Monica Seles story as well as by the amount of enthusiasm required in a population to generate a fanatic assassin who is willing to maim someone, just to see their favourite female athlete win. Given the Monica Seles success story as a model of the female contingent of Tennis, it seems possible that a similar female contingent of other types of sports could arise within the foreseeable future. What we are obliged to do in the light of an egalitarian society is to help engage and speed up this process that may already be underway. We should not debate the possibility of popular female professional teams and athletes, but be as optimistic as possible in allowing the possible to become real. Perhaps one day legislation could be enforced guaranteeing gender parity in sports broadcasting on major television and radio networks. Some might argue that this type of legislation would unduly hamper the profits of the advertising dependent networks, but the Monica Seles story seems clear evidence that people want to see female athletes and are willing, nay eager to participate as consumers of female sports. Any loss to networks would surely be recouped in short order by increased segments of the population participating in the consumption of gendered sport events. Segments of the population that have until the present ignored sporting events may find a new interest and pastime in watching female teams. Consider the argument that women as individuals and athletes might suffer from the status of being only the best "female" athlete or the best "female" team in a segregated sport regime. If the only viable alternative is to have desegregated sport teams and desegregated competitions: Women would likely lose out in being under-represented on the teams and within the winners circles of many sports -- it does not seem likely that women will ever completely match the biologically determined strength of men. Perhaps being the best female athlete or the best female team is the best women can expect to achieve so long as our society focuses on the maleinvented games of the present. Given time and money women athletes may eventually surpass or equal male athletes in some sports that do not require masculine upper body strength, but until such a time we must concentrate on equality of opportunity without allowing questions of equal success to bog down ix the apparatus of equal access. As for the sports that prove to require upper-body brawn for success, it does not appear that women can ever hope to achieve equality of competition with men, short of genetic engineering. What this should say to women is not that they are lesser than men, but that they are different. The only non-genetic solution would appear to be that which some feminists put forward, whereby the first step toward equality is to liberate women from the male-dominated scale of values. Perhaps the type of sport devised in a basically egalitarian society would take on a slightly x different character as provided by the Radical feminist approach . Cooperation might take precedent over competition. Instead of having two cooperative teams competing with one another with the end result of one winner and one loser, we could have a sport that involves a test of personal best the ultimate goal being for everyone to beat their own personal best at some

physical and/or intellectual cooperative pursuit. The details are not of importance here, who could possibly tell what could result in a radical society of true egalitarianism. Perhaps the nature of future sports would be some sort of Hegelian synthesis between the male thesis of competition and the female antithesis of cooperation the end result being any of a large number of heretofore unimagined possibilities. Fundamentally the hope that Radical feminism can bring to the world of sports might be true equality. Not just the equal treatment of women to compete in a male-dominated and maledefined world, but forxi women to be allowed to define themselves and to redefine sports as well as society as a whole . There are major problem with this vision of a gender equal society devising its own form of gender equal sports. Most of these are of a practical nature. The answer appears to be of a great and varied nature: education, affirmative action, and increased awareness of gender issues. The barriers that socialization place on women and their potential futures are also immense and varied, I have only alluded to a few of them above. In my youth a mere 10 to 15 years ago I remember encountering teachers who stated that the vast majority of women could expect a career as a teacher, a nurse, or a secretary, and only a very select few (the special ones) could expect to go on to more traditionally male careers becoming engineers, doctors, and lawyers. It has become increasingly clear to me that if women are ever to become equal to men in our society they must follow the radical approach and be allowed to redefine themselves and their role in society -- the only way they will ever achieve equal opportunity within society is to first become equal partners in the design and structure of our society.

i This example was taken from the assignment sheet of 32.236. ii The major source of said money is from the federal and provincial tax base. This example was also taken from assignment the above mentioned assignment sheet. iii"Ignoring" to the degree that giving birth is not considered a accomplishment that requires strength or endurance, at least not in the sense that mothers are considered strong or vigorous from the experience. Whereas a man who lifts a heavy object is perceived as strong and virile by an observer. It should also be noted that it is unfair to compare upper body strength between men and women as women are limited by their biology. iv I must come to terms with the inescapable fact that Naomi Wolf's The Beauty Myth was an amazingly powerful societal force that raised everyone's (including of course mine) awareness about societal pressure on women to be thin. v Some felt much more than a mere urge and actually felt compelled to diet once they broke 100 lbs. vi Or perhaps women and men could invent sporting events for women and men! vii The source of this idea is in the recommended readings on affirmative action in RadcliffeRichards. viii To name only a few professional sports of which women are shut out. ix At the present time, we may not be capable of deciding which sports are truly this way given the underdevelopment of the female athlete as a whole.

x Radical Feminism as elucidated in class by Professor Glass is my sole formal source for radical ideas. xi Although this idea has occurred to me independently of this course it behooves me to cite class lectures on Radical feminism.