Sex and Gender in Sports: Three Parts
PART I: Masculinity, Cultural Constructions, and Sports
Young males' self-knowledge about the ways their bodies connect in healthy ways to others is often bound to what psychologist William Pollack calls "the hardening of boys." Indeed, young males learn that they can gain access to high status, privilege, and peer respect if they adhere to what sociologist Don Sabo calls "the pain principle," in which they need to suppress empathy, be willing to accept pain, and take risks. Jackon Katz unpacks this lack of self-knowledge in Tough Guise as a mechanism of media symbolism in which hegemonic portrayals of masculinity is reproduced as social power and status.
Sociologist R. W. Connell argues that the societal gender order is made up of an interrelated web of "core" and "peripheral" institutions, like the Disney media conglomerate, that, even in the post-Title IX era, still retain a powerful patriarchal lineage of male power, control, and exploitation of women's labor and a heterosexual hegemony. It becomes necessary to examine gender constructions in institutions like sports alongside media and other group-based dynamics of power such as economics, race, and sexuality.
Messner Replication Study: Sports sociologist Michael Messner and a team of researchers viewed 22 hours of televised sports and determined that a formula about gender in sports exists in televised sports broadcasts. According to Messner, et al, the televised sports manhood formula is a "master narrative" that is produced at the intersection of sport, media, and corporations. This formula reproduces "entrenched interests" that profit from disciplining boys and men to consider gender within a narrow ideological field. Moreover, commercialization of hegemonic masculinity is constructed by Othering males who don't measure up to this formula, thus codifying male behavior in ways that support interactional tendencies at the core of men's media sport culture. Messner argues that principles that reinforce the sport-media-commercial complex profit from male college and professional male sports, and these "dominant principles and practices tend to filter down, though unevenly, into school-based and children's sports."
Films with Themes about Sports Masculinity: In the 1980s, media scholar Jut Jhally coined the term "sport-media complex" to describe the institutionally and symbolically intertwined relationship of sport and mass media. A gendered nature of institutional dynamics as portrayed by film media offer a reaffirmation of masculine privilege, economic processes that hinder gender equity, and endow commercial structures like the beer industry with institutional media approval that perpetuate male dominance and a certain kind of athletic-consumer hegemonic masculinity.
PART II: Femininity versus Feminism and beyond in Sports
The original compliance date of 1978 for all schools receiving federal funds to be in full compliance with U.S. law came and went with nearly all institutions still far from compliance. Today, fights continue to defend and extend the movement toward equity, with advocacy targets including media outlets to responsibly represent barriers that still exist such as the erosion of women's sports leadership and control of college women's sports. The National Women's Law Center has concluded that increase in expenditures for college male sports have increased while expenditures for women's college sports "pales in comparison." While football programs particularly generate enormous revenues for their colleges due to media contracts, the media have not necessarily left women's college sports out: like the famous Nike campaign, "If you let me play," corporate America has begun to awaken to the enormous potential market around women's sports.
In 1978, media and cultural studies scholar George Gerbner called the lack of media images of female athletes "symbolic annihilation." Today, there are a larger and more varied series of media representations of female athletes, but the narrowing of muscle and performance gaps between male and female athletes are reconfigured by the media into what sports sociologist Michael Messner calls "silence, humorous sexualization, backlash, and selective incorporation of standout women athletes." Jean Kilbourne, in the Killing Us Softly documentary series, helps to make visible how mass media displays of sexuality are contextualized in cultural discourses that define gender power relations.
"Femininity and Feminism in the WNBA," by Sarah Banet-Weiser, describes a media culture industry offers female athletes a central place in media discourse primarily through sexual exploitation. Some female athletes see a compatible projection of aesthetically pleasing heterosexual femininity and an athletic prowess consisting of physical strength, power, and competence. Susan Bordo suggests that female athletes may think like this due to an emergent breakdown in the cultural codings of masculinity and femininity s binaries. Yet the cultural center of media sports imagery of female athletes remains a male-as-subject, female-as-object imbalance, and a Banet-Weiser argues that the media, commercial sponsors, and the WNBA launched a new women's professional basketball league by foregrounding images of female athletes as mothers and attractive models.
PART III: Same Sex Orientation and Gender Identity in Sports
Same Sex Orientation e-Learning Module: Media imagery around dominant heterosexuality have been reproduced through a robust heterosexuality. Dworkin and Wachs have concluded that "gay men and 'promiscuous' women are viewed as virulent agents or problematic vehicles" for dismissive discourses about sexual practices and cultural imagery. Lefkowitz describes the key role of competitive, homophobic, and misogynistic talk and joking as the central, most honored form of dominance bonding in the athletic peer group. A key part of dominance bonding, according to sociologist Tim Curry, requires a symbolic debasing and a degraded feminized Other to ensure male group status. Such bonding also fragments young males' abilities to gain acceptance, emotional connections, and respect outside the dominant male status group.
invites a quest for simple fairness and equal opportunity for females while recognizing that many males are dehumanized when they do not ascribe to hegemonic masculinity. Fundamental social critique and oppositional strategies can become a beginning place so that sports, as a reflection of society, can affirm the human need for relationships and emotional accessibility and a permission to allow females a new type of cultural imagery in which nuanced depictions of the athlete first and gender second become commonplace. The media can become a mechanism for such social change if we, as media consumers, rise up and demand egalitarian transformations.
A Gender and Sexual Orientation Primer: This unit five curriculum engaged students critically with the sports-media-commercial complex and its dominant imagery of gender power in sports. When youth have the capacity to read media critically, they can then make the decision whether to consumer hegemonic sports media texts. This social justice approach to media literacy