Messner- Gender and sport, Sexuality

In patriarchal societies, where a system of relations exist that legitimate male power over women, this inequality is portrayed through institutions, cultural practices, and within the media. 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 arose to bring women together as a whole; sport for women by women. This was a way to bring all different female teams together and play more with each rather than against. 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 (strength, power, mass) and otherwise falling under the androcentric standards of sport.

Messner states that sexuality and gender are constructed differently between men and women in the world of sport. “Sport participation offers a normalizing equation for men: athleticism=masculinity=heterosexuality,” (Messner 225) whereas for women it is different. There is a circular question between athleticism, femininity, and heterosexuality; what a man does in sport can be seen as “normal” and when a women does the same thing, it is questioned as to whether or not one is a lesbian (manly). Along with others, Messner believes in challenging the binary, basically challenging the idea of female sport leads to homosexuality; a women can partake in athletics and still remain the same “gender.” He argues that the hierarchical theories have incorrectly names certain groups of people, the working class women, in relations to differential accesses to structured constraints (resources, opportunities, livelihoods, ect…)

Messners high school “Sexual Story” is broadly consisted of two situations; him rejecting Timmy and engaging in hegemonic masculinity of the rest of his team in the context of sport. Then, in order to insure/secure his spot as the leader on his team, he tried to be more aggressive, elbowing the “weakest” kid on the team in order to show his masculinity. I remember playing football and/or basketball in high school during gym class and me being one of the shortest kids, I was always being pushed around and felt like I just wasn’t as good as the others. I to tried would try to exhibit more aggressive, more dominant behaviors when a person bigger than me was guarding me.