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Abstract
Lacking in the philosophy of sport is discussion of the gendered numbers of sets played in Grand Slam tennis. We argue that the practice is indefensible. It can be upheld only through false beliefs about women or repressive femininity ideals. It treats male tennis players unfairly in forcing them to play more sets because of their sex. Its ideological consequences are pernicious, since it reinforces the respective identifications of the female and male with physical limitation and heroism. Both sexes have compelling reason to reject the practice.
Notes
1. See Kane (Citation1995) for an excellent discussion of sex based rule differences in sport, including a brief discussion of the set disparity between males and females in tennis. More recently, Flake, Dufur, and Moore (Citation2012) briefly discuss the set disparity between the men’s and women’s games in professional tennis as a popular rationalisation for the pay gap between the sexes.
2. Grand Slam Men’s Doubles matches, Wimbledon excepted, are the best-of-three sets. In fact, the only fixed rule is that Men’s Singles matches are the best-of-five sets. The 2017 official Grand Slam rule book states that, ‘All Men’s Singles Main Draw matches in Grand Slam Tournaments shall be best-of-five (5) sets. All other matches shall be the best-of-three (3) or the best-of-five (5) sets unless otherwise determined by each Grand Slam Tournament’.
4. The best-of-five format is also played in the men’s Davis Cup. The women’s equivalent of the Davis Cup is the Federation Cup, which follows a best-of-three format.
5. For instance, 2013 Wimbledon Women’s Singles champion Marion Bartoli told BBC News channel’s HARDtalk that women should not play the best of five sets because of the physical differences between men and women. She opined, ‘You can’t ask a woman to play for six hours (BBC News, 5 February 2014)’.
6. Similarly, the women’s Olympic marathon race takes place one week before the men’s.
7. For compelling argument that sexism which disadvantages women is undetachable from sexism which disadvantages men, see Benatar (Citation2003).
8. According to Kretchmar Pluralistic Internalism is located in a Broad Internalist position, ‘… but one that also responds to Morgan’s (Citation2012) concerns over what he sees as the excessively abstract rationalist tendencies of internalists’ (83).
9. MacKinnon (Citation1987, 118) has said,
If you ask, not why do women and men do different physical activities, but why has femininity meant physical weakness, you notice that someone who is physically weak is more easily able to be raped, available to be molested, open to sexual harassment. Feminine means violable.
10. For a more extensive discussion of male and female versions of rules in sport, see Kane (Citation1995), McDonagh and Pappano (Citation2008) and Burke (Citation2010, Citation2014).
11. Simon (Citation2015, 30) observes that ‘Morgan’s approach is quite compatible with, and may even presuppose, Broad Internalism, in that it requires us to find the best overall interpretation of sporting practices within given sociocultural contexts’.
12. We are indebted to a reviewer of an earlier version for prompting us here.
13. The point of this example is reinforced by the vigorous public discussion of this topic in recent years.
14. British television has recently and repeatedly shown a couple of programmes entitled, ‘It Was Alright in the 70s’. The title could mislead, since there were a significant number in the period (from a diversity of standpoints) for whom the practices shown were not alright.
15. In the UK, the Miss World contest of 1973 was immediately followed by the discussion programme, The Dimbleby Talk-In, about the sexualisation of women putatively inscribed in the Miss World contest. Moreover, Miss World was an established site of controversy since the 1970 contest was disrupted by activists of what was then called Women’s Liberation, who (among other things) threw smoke bombs, ink bombs and leaflets onto the stage.
16. If, as McNamee, Jones, and Duda (Citation2003) and Flanagan (Citation1991) affirm, virtue is many and morality intrinsically conflictive, it can be neither surprising nor disqualifying that a defining principle of an internal sport ethic sometimes clashes with elements of a broader normative framework with which the ethic conceives itself continuous.
17. Burke (Citation2014, 50) is mistaken to say that ‘for groups who do not have epistemic authority, realism has often been a terrible starting position’. It is not realism that is the problem for groups deficient in epistemic authority, but realist forms of truth skewed by those who do have epistemic authority. Eagleton (Citation1990, 372) proffers a polemical yet penetrating articulation: ‘The avant-garde’s response to the cognitive, ethical and aesthetic is quite unequivocal. Truth is a lie; morality stinks; beauty is shit. And … they are right. Truth is a White House communique; morality is the Moral Majority; beauty is a naked woman advertising perfume. Equally … they are wrong. Truth, morality and beauty are too important to be handed contemptuously over to the political enemy’.
18. It is worth observing that one of Broad Internalism’s flagship concepts, human flourishing, might be among those vulnerable to patriarchal inscription. However, if Young is correct, then an active and skilful body subjectivity is as integral to the flourishing of the human female as it is to that of the male.
19. See Giulianotti (Citation2005, 99) and Davis (Citation2015, 147).
20. Shafer-Landau (Citation2003, 258–260) has observed that most of our beliefs are contingent. For instance, our belief that ‘the earth is many billions of years old, roughly round, not at the centre of the universe, and the site of millions of generations of evolutionary activity depends on our living when and where we do’. Yet ‘the fact that one’s views would probably have been different in other contexts does not defeat whatever justification one’s beliefs presently enjoy’.
21. It might be argued that the fortnight allocated to slams doesn’t allow both the men’s and women’s tournaments to house best-of-five set matches. The most obvious suggestion is to make Grand Slam tournaments longer. An alternative which is in the round more attractive is to stagger the number of sets in both men’s and women’s matches. For instance, in one year the opening men’s rounds could be best-of-three sets and women’s best-of-five, with reversal the next year. Where one round in any year involves women playing more sets, the next round could have men playing more sets. And this could proceed until the semi-finals, when both sexes must play the best-of-five sets.