gender and sex inequalities

The Victorian Era led to more opportunities for women through education, the workforce, and technologies. This era stressed women’s physiology, fashion, and their social expectations within the structures of society while also reflecting social class and race. It was thought that exercise was unfeminine, muscular, and even subject to uterine cancer. The Play Day Era brought women together and enabled them to play sports. The women wouldn’t “compete” but they would all play together, against each other. The Cult of Manliness arose in the latter 19th/20th centuries and became a direct link to male masculinity. Thusly sport and male privileges are interconnected through structures and ideologies of American sport. Through structure, males are said to hold the power or what counts or what is considered to be “sport,” and through the ideologies that sport reinforces by valuing the male body.
Mike Messner’s claim is that one of the dominant notions of men playing sports is to promote their heterosexuality and masculinity. Messner states, "An important dimension of this reconstruction of hegemonic masculinity through sport involved a linkage between masculinity and heterosexuality” (224). Women's participation in sports allowed people to question sexuality along with gender, it is known that the more masculine women are, the more likely it will be that they get the label of lesbian.
In Messner’s sexual story he and his teammates exemplified heterosexuality in sport by reacting to effeminate peers with a mixture of homophobia, rejection and aggression (233). On my college basketball team, there were many lesbian players. It was interesting to watch the way certain individuals would react to those who were lesbian. Many of the straight teammates were homophobic and wouldn’t like to change in the locker room or would do other things relating to homophobia.