Sports and masculinity^†

Abstract

Feminist scholarship has had a profound impact upon the study of sports. It has forced us to recognize the gendered nature of these activities and to question the traditional exclusion and marginalization of most females from sports. It has reinforced and extended the social history insight that modern sport is not the essential, universal historical practice that it was once thought to be, but a family of related activities developed under the specific conditions of rapidly industrializing Europe and spread by immigration, emulation and imperialism. We now understand sports as originating as ‘male practices’, developed by males for males, without the needs and experiences of females taken into account in any way, so that every generation of girls and women has had to fight to write themselves into this history. Often overlooked in the feminist struggle for opportunities and the politics of gender equity has been the effect of sports upon men. Yet sports have a profound effect upon men, our sense of ‘masculinity’, our relationships with other men (as well as with women) and our place in societies, whether we are players, spectators or entirely ignorant of sports. It took me a long time to recognize this and the special privilege that sports conferred upon me, far longer than it took to acknowledge the justice in feminist campaigns for fair and equitable opportunities and resources. This article was my very first attempt to come to terms with these issues. It was written for a collection on masculinities, edited by Michael Kaufman, a pioneering scholar and activist on issues of men, gender and power. In 1990, I joined with Kaufman and other men to form the White Ribbon Society to educate men about our responsibility to help end the violence against women.

Notes

^†Originally published in Michael Kaufman, ed., Beyond Patriarchy (Toronto: Oxford, 1987), 250–65. An early version of this article also appears in the Quest's Quarterly 94, no. 1 (Spring 1987).

^1.Elias, ‘Genesis of Sport’.

^2.Finlay and Pleket, Olympic Games; Young, Myth of Greek Amateur Athletics.

^3.Sipes, ‘War, Sports, and Aggression’.

^4.MacAloon, This Great Symbol.

^5.Cunningham, Leisure in Industrial Revolution; Dunning and Sheard, Barbarians, Gentlemen and Players; Guttman, From Ritual to Record.

^6.Mangan, Athleticism in Victorian Public School.

^7.Allison, ‘Batsman and Bowler’.

^8.Bailey, Leisure and Class; Mott, ‘One Solution to Urban Crisis’.

^9.Gruneau, Class, Sports and Social Development, 91–135.

^10.Hughes, Tom Brown's Schooldays, 60–1.

^11. See, for example, Palmer, Cultural in Conflict, 35–70.

^12.Marlow, ‘Popular Culture, Pugilism, and Pickwick’.

^13.Kidd, ‘Skating Away from Fight’.

^14.Atkinson, ‘Fitness, Feminism and Schooling’, 103. The quotation is from London medical professor Henry Maudsley.

^15. Ibid. 92–133; Lenskyj, Out of Bounds.

^16.Hall and Richardson, Fair Ball; Boutilier and San Giovanni, Sporting Women.

^17.Hubbard, Henifin, and Fried, Biological Woman; Birke, Women, Feminism and Biology.

^18. Many women contributed to the development of ‘girls’ rules'. Paul Atkinson, Helen Lenskyj and others have argued that in part this was a tactically necessary defence against male control of women's institutions, that without them girls and women would not have been allowed to play at all and that they were a creative attempt to avoid some of the most brutalizing features of male sport. Nevertheless, they confined most females interested in sports to a ghetto of inequality and left the existing stereotypes about female frailty unchallenged.

^19.Kidd, ‘Getting Physical’.

^20. See, for example, Sopinka, Can I play? The Canadian sports minister, Otto Jelinek, has admitted that despite a 12-year federal effort to increase women's opportunities, very little change has occurred. ‘My belief is that there hasn't been a commitment to promote the women's program’, he said. See ‘Ottawa Aiming to Get More Girls Involved in Sport’, The Globe and Mail, October 7, 1986.

^21.Hoffman, ‘Towards Equality for Women’.

^22.Kett, Rites of Passage; Mckee, ‘Nature's Medicine’; MacLeor, Building Character in American Boy.

^23.Sheard and Dunning, ‘Rugby Football Club’.

^24.Jhally, ‘Spectacle of Accumulation’.

^25.Boutilier and San Giovanni, Sporting Women, 185–218.

^26.Dyer, Challenging the Men. For a critical feminist review, see Cathy Bray, ‘Challenging the Men’.

^27.Re Ontario Softball Association and Bannerman (1978), 21 O.R. (2d) 395 (H.C.J.-Div.Ct).

^28. The player, Justine Blaniney, was successful in having the Ontario Court of Appeal declare that section 19 (2) of the Ontario Human Rights Code, which had allowed sports bodies to discriminate on the basis of sex, was in violation of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms and therefore invalid. But the court would not declare that the OHA's refusal to allow Blainey to play was a violation of the code as amended by that decision. Blainey is therefore seeking such a ruling from the ORHC. See Kidd, ‘Ontario Legalizes Discrimination’ and Justine Blainey v. Ontario Hockey Association and Ontario Human Rights Commission, April 17, 1986, unreported (Ont. C.A. #630/85).

^29.Chodorow, Reproduction of Mothering.

^30.Dinnerstein, Mermail and Minotaur, 229.

^31.Butt, Psychology of Sport; Orlick and Botterill, Every Kid Can Win.

^32.Connell, ‘Men's Bodies’, 18.

^33.Tutko and Bruns, Winning is Everything.

^34. Quoted by Varda Burstyn, ‘Play, Performance and Power – the Men’, CBC Radio ‘Ideas’, October 2, 1986. The script is available from CBC transcripts.

^35.Russell and Branch, Second Wind.