I realize there are many different (think: conflicting) definitions of “feminist,” and I certainly don’t have a comprehensive list of criteria or a litmus test for drawing hard and fast lines for formulating a working definition, but I suspect that we all know what a feminist is when we see one.
That having been said, what are the major schools of thought, per se, among feminists about professional sports? Do feminists (some, most, the majority, etc.) believe that women should be allowed to compete with men in the NBA, NFL, MLB, and NHL? I ask because I know several women studies majors at the liberal arts college I attend, and I have yet to hear any of them argue for including women in the same sports leagues that men compete in. Also, if there are feminists who don’t think that men and women should compete in the same professional leagues, what are their arguments against coed sports?
FWIW, I’m not trying to debate any issue. I’m just trying to learn more about feminists’ take on sports.
I am a feminist, and I’m for women participating in any sport they are physically capable of competing in. As Chronos said, they are allowed (as far as I know).
As stated above, there are essentially no professional sports where women are capable of competing aside men. There are a few sports where women do compete in the same field as men (such as endurance racing) where depending on the field the top women can win an event. In some forms of equestrian events women and men compete side by side with winners from both genders. Auto racing is another sport where women can compete with men. A few women have played a few times on the men’s golf tour with very limited success. There was a woman goalie who played a few games in ice hockey many years ago but it was mainly a publicity stunt, she wasn’t good enough to stay there.
But in major sports (baseball, football, basketball, hockey, soccer, tennis, golf, martial arts) there’s really no chance for women to compete head-to-head with men. They are at just too big a strength disadvantage to men.
I will add professional bowling to the list of sports where women believed they were capable of competing with men directly and have been granted the opportunity to do so, with some success. There are far fewer women in the elite class of the sport than there are men, but the women who are elite can hang with the guys.
Ila Borders pitched in a professional independent league (i.e., one not affiliated with MLB) for a few years. She wasn’t hugely successful, but she did better and lasted longer than I would have expected.
Although I’m male, I think it’s very far down the list of issues that feminists are concerned with (if ever). One of my ex GFs was a bonafide Womens’ Studies expert with a wall full of feminist literature and she never expressed an opinion one way or another about professional sports.
Back in the 90s I ended up in a cross listed Women’s Studies/Physical Education course, and this subject came up a few times. One possibility that was tossed around was that some sports could have different classes–like the weight classes used in boxing–based upon physical attributes other than gender.
An example given involved having a separate 6 foot-and-under height class in basketball, with the basket height adjusted accordingly. (I’m thinking they advocated using the current standard for this class and raising it for the taller class, but I could be wrong. I am not a sports person, and these details tended to whirl past me.) It wouldn’t necessarily be a women’s-only class, but would ideally also open professional basketball to parts of the world where people tend to be of shorter stature. Why there could even be players from far east Asia…! (Yeah, I know, but Yao Ming hadn’t yet come along at the time.)
(Several of my classmates were women who had played college and/or semi professional basketball, so they had some credibility in making this argument. And they did acknowledge that the smaller height class might be seen by the public as simply a novelty act, with the taller and presumably all male class being viewed as the “real” players.)
IIRC, there was a professional basketball league in the USA that had a maximum height limit. However, I don’t think it would open the door for women, as plenty of men under 6 feet tall can still dunk, and the ability to play “above the rim” seems to be a gamebreaker.
As for having different heights for the rim, I have a theory for why they don’t already do that; (a) they don’t do it in high school because it would cost too much money; (b) they don’t do it in college because the women are trained to shoot free throws in high school at the 10-feet-high, 15-feet-away rim.
Also, I realize that the original post was about professional leagues, but I would not be surprised if the NCAA didn’t allow women to play “men’s basketball,” claiming Title IX concerns because they couldn’t allow men to play women’s basketball. (This is not a problem with football or baseball because there’s no such thing as “women’s football” or “women’s baseball” (softball is a different sport) as far as the NCAA is concerned.) This is definitely a rule in California high schools.)
Softball is a different sport (and high-level fastpitch is not “soft” at all), but it is also the reason there’s no women’s baseball to speak of. Girls who could play LL and HS baseball come under ever-increasing pressure to divert to softball.
Weightlifting already does that – differentiation by the weight of the competitor – where the difference between one class and the next may be as little as 11 pounds. However, weightlifting is possibly the most drastic instance possible of a sport that highlights the imbalance in sheer strength, where the achievements of the lightest men aren’t matched until you get to the second-heaviest female weight class, with the female lifters 19 kilos (42 pounds) heavier! Comparing like with like as near as possible, such as the 56 kg men and 58 kg women, men are 30% ahead.
At the 2012 Olympics, one of the men’s 100m sprinters pulled up lame in the final and hobbled home in 11.99 seconds (in the semi-final he had carded 9.94). The rest finished in under 10 seconds, more than 3/4 second ahead of the fastest woman. In fact, all of the men’s semi-finalists would have beaten the winner of the women’s event by at least 0.4 seconds - equating to ~4 metres in this event.
(elision by me - Mal)
And grounds for viewing the classes this way would be the realization that if they weren’t segregated, members of Group A would be beating members of Group B handsomely no matter which set of rules they played by.
