Who says women are the weaker sex at sport? Sharon Krum Marion Jones wanted to win five gold medals at the Olympics last month, setting a new record in athletics the way Mark Spitz, with seven in 1972, set it in swimming. It did not happen but Jones, the fastest female in the world, clearly has the talent. But she also has a confidence, many say arrogance, that is pushing people’s buttons in a way unseen before. She was too boastful, too assertive, too cocksure she would bring home the gold. In short, she is displaying character traits Americans ascribe to male athletes. But in men the chest-thumping is admired. In women it is shocking and has led to Jones being called arrogant, pretentious and a certain word that rhymes with rich. But Jones won’t apologise for her bravado, and nor should she, suggests Colette Dowling, author of an audacious new book about women and sports, The Frailty Myth. Published last month, it has sparked a heated debate in the athletic world. Dowling, a writer and lecturer whose first book, You Mean I Don’t Have To Feel This Way, became the bible for women suffering depression, has for the past two decades carved out a respected niche writing about the psychosocial issues of American women. Her 1981 book The Cinderella Complex, castigating females who live in the expectation that men will rescue them, has never gone out of print. In her new book Dowling pulls together research from physiology, biology and psychology to suggest that not only are women as capable as men of excelling in sports, it is their natural inclination to do so. The reason there aren’t more Joneses, she says, is not because women can’t or won’t compete. Rather, she paints women as victims of a vast conspiracy to keep them off the playing field. To blame are a culture of misogyny, parents and teachers who pander to gender stereotypes, and a media that rewards women for looking weak and feminine, and excoriates them when they display strength. “Women have been excluded from so much in life because of the frailty myth,” she writes. “First we believed we were weak. Then we began to suspect that we weren’t but kept getting told that we were. Then we began proving that we weren’t and were mocked as men because we were strong. “Women have thrown themselves over hurdle after hurdle during the course of the past century, demonstrating extraordinary physical powers and skills, and still we’re being kept back for no reason other than we’re female.” The book is a powerful clarion call to both sexes, demanding they abandon the old saw that women are the weaker sex. She argues that the belief female-equals-frail has done untold damage to women’s health, self- esteem and social status. Physical equality, she warns complacent feminists, is the real final frontier of women’s liberation.
To make her argument stick, Dowling draws on research in exercise physiology, which proves there are no biological reasons for women to stay off the sporting field. She slaps the wrists of 19th century doctors who insisted “weakness” in women was a natural condition, and that exercise was a danger that might dislodge the uterus. Instead Dowling explains that before puberty, boys are neither taller nor heavier than girls. And whereas it was long thought that only boys experienced a muscle-building surge of testosterone during puberty, girls do too. Modern medicine knows this, so why, she asks, given their ability to develop athletically, did women never venture beyond sewing, cooking and Barbies? Dowling says the answer is cultural, and continues to be. Frailty has long been sold to women as feminine. “Strength has a withering effect on male identity. To salvage men’s failing sense of dominance (post industrial revolution) women were encouraged to scale back their own physical development.” She contends that sport is the last place that men, no longer supremely dominant, can assert their body strength and masculinity.
That is why, she argues, the frailty myth endures, despite the leaps women have taken in professional sport in the past decade. Men need to keep women weak, off the football field and out of the boxing ring, so they can continue to feel strong. They do this by criticising muscular women, announcing they are unfeminine, whispering that they are probably lesbians. “Girls who display strength, power or physicality while interacting with boys run the risks of being marginalised.” Dowling says that girls learn this long before they start reading Vogue. Fathers, she says, still teach their sons to play catch, but not their daughters, who they put in the “doll corner”. But, she claims, when they do teach their girls to throw, they learn just as competently as boys. “Boys throw better simply because they are trained to from childhood.” But to suggest that if men suddenly declared big muscles sexy, women would storm the football field is plainly untrue. As the noted American anthropologist Helen Fisher argues in her book The First Sex – The Natural Talents of Women and How They are Changing the World, girls will never be as obsessed with sports as boys, because evolution wires women to be co-operators, not competitors. “Nobody pushes girls into the doll corner – they go there naturally,” she says. “Throughout their life cycle, girls show more tendency toward nurturing activities, and we believe this is linked to the production of oestrogen. It’s amazing how many people have to try to prove that everything is all socialisation, whereas biology and culture go hand in hand.”
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