Yogsosoth, why don’t you take a moments break from your worthless shitposting and think about just what it is you are asking for? You’re looking for a citation that proves the existence of a secret, millennia-old, intercontinental conspiracy to oppress women (apologies if those words are too big for you). Go fuck yourself.
Isn’t he simply asking whether there was any evidence offered of the claim in the original text that some men use sports to shore up their own sense of masculinity? Seems like a reasonable thing to ask and it would be weird if the claim was based on nothing at all. Incidentally, I suspect the original writer meant to imply that such dynamics work at an ideological rather than a ‘secret’ level.
Meh.
“Issues in X” books are typically a compilation of short essays from different perspectives addressing popular debates or controversies in a subject. Usually you’d have essays addressing a given debate from both sides. These books are used to introduce a subject and provoke in-class discussion.
In other words, these are op-eds, not traditional textbooks. I agree that essay doesn’t seem very good, but I’m guessing the world’s great minds aren’t writing on this subject.
Ditto.
Ironic because sports are used as a means to suppress and oppress men. The men in sports are treated like farm animals put on parade for female sports reporters in the locker room while the male fans are induced to maintain a constant state of drunkenness. Female athletes get to wear pretty outfits and appear in a special issue of SI just for them. When will this wanton discrimination end?
Tripolar speaks truth to power.
Yeah, but he didn’t use the writing style that Shodan suggested in post #25, so I’m giving him a C-.
Pardon my lack of understanding, but if women are playing against women, or men are playing against men, where does gender oppression come in?
If an all-male team is beating an all-female team 100-40 in basketball, then yes, I could understand (“Men have the physical advantage”), but doesn’t women vs. women or men vs. men make it irrelevant?
It seems to me that the passage says men like aggressive sports because they celebrate the gender differences that allow them to oppress women, not that the sports themselves are oppressive.
It’d be like if the Nazis loved them some brick-oven pizza.
I’m going to go ahead and make the gigantic leap that the book’s thesis is a lot closer to “some aspects of sports culture unintentionally harm women” than “there’s a secret conspiracy of everyone who’s ever participated in a sport to oppress women.”
His contention (I don’t have my materials available, so I can’t find the papers he gave us) was that soccer and baseball filled similar niches in England and the US in the mid 19th century as pastoral games. Working men needed an excuse for fresh air, camaraderie, exercise, nature, etc. Both required minimal equipment and could be played with large and small groups of people.
Had soccer spread to the US before the civil war, it would have likely become the diversion of choice for the army camps. But instead baseball did. Then soccer struggled for a long time because it’s niche in the sporting culture was filled.
That is fine but it also a malicious and false claim. It is true that men’s sports dominate pure viewership at the professional level among both women and men but you also have to look at what it takes for the select athletes in question to get there. The best players that ever went to a particular high school in any sport may or may not get a scholarship to a Division I university. They will be force-fed a very light version of the standard curriculum while they are they and they may or may not graduate even then. If they are among the absolute best that has ever attended that particular school, they may or may not have a shot of making it into the NFL, NBA or NHL. If they do make it that far, the smart bet is that their career years will be measured in the very low single digits.
For all of that, they will likely pick up permanent physical injuries that will plague them for the rest of their life. Permanent American football brain injuries are a real crisis in the NFL right now and hockey injuries are also almost inevitable. I would call that more of serious male issue rather than a supposition of oppression of anyone other than those involved.
It boggles the mind how feminists, even male ones, can spin any possible example of exploitation as being an example of how men are oppressing women. That has nothing to do with it in this case. There is some real exploitation involved but sex or gender has nothing to do with it. It is just about athletes being exploited for something that hardly ever delivers.
Breaking news - some women are athletes too and the same thing applies to them. The most popular events in the Olympics are women’s figure skating and women’s gymnastics. My young daughter is a very talented gymnast that just won a huge regional tournament. I am proud but she claims that she wants to go to the Olympics in a few years. I put a damper on that quickly because female gymnasts are commonly exploited and I don’t won’t her to take up an identity too closely tied to that. There is no such thing as a professional gymnast after all.
The passage presented is sexist on its own because it presupposes many facts that are obviously false. Men don’t participate in sports because they want to oppress women and there are millions of female athletes in the U.S. alone. Are they secretly trying to oppress other women as well?
how do you misread a two sentence post that badly? My entire post was saying I don’t think the book was saying that sports are a secret plot to oppress women, so “aha are women athletes in on the secret plot to oppress women?” is a really bad gotcha.
I mean my bullshitese is a little bit rusty, but I think the linked passage is saying that men who think men are better than women like sports because most sports demonstrate men being better than women. I’m not convinced it’s right, but I don’t think it’s objectionable.
I misread the title of the thread as My Scientology of Sports Textbook. After thinking about it for a minute I decided that I would audit a class like that.
Yep, that’s what I got. A fairly uncontroversial statement, expressed reasonably straightforwardly. You can’t win with discussions like this, though; people are too eager to show off their contempt for left-wing academic babble which for the most part exists only in their heads. Not very edifying to see on a board which prides itself on the intelligence of the membership, I have to say.
You are correct that you personally can’t win discussions like this but it has nothing to do with politics or ideals. You added no new ideas or thoughts of your own and your grammar is atrocious. I am thrilled to have you as a member of the other side. Welcome aboard soldier!
Cheers. If it’s my side, ‘the people who can read’, versus your side, ‘the lunatic fantasists’, I have confidence in our eventual victory.
A friend’s sister just got her college diploma and posted a picture on Facebook, and I misread “Sociology” on it exactly the same way.
I just had to mop coffee off the monitor, which is housecleaning, which is totally oppressive against women!
Anyway, I agree with this statement. I missed the memo that sports oppresses women. Sports might *annoy *some women, but “oppress” seems to be a bit of an overstatement.