These alibis are routinely produced during the periodic scandals that erupt within sport. While they do not go unchallenged, they have proven resilient because of the specific history of sport as a social institution. I will briefly trace that history, because it reveals why it is particularly difficult to counter sexism within sport.<\/p>\n
Every time an Olympics comes around, references to the Ancient Games suggest that sport is a practice that stretches back to antiquity. But this is a misleading narrative \u2013 the Ancient Olympics and other athletic festivals in Ancient Greece bore very little resemblance to the Games revived by the French aristocrat Baron Pierre de Coubertin in 1896. The Modern Olympics are a pastiche of recovered elements of the Ancient Games, British private school sport and market town recreational events in the English countryside (most famously the Wenlock Olympian Games). The Western origins of these developments should not be discounted \u2013 organised, competitive, commercialised sport is one of the West\u2019s most successful \u2018gifts\u2019 of cultural imperialism to the world, an effective form of \u2018soft power\u2019 operating long before the term was coined.<\/p>\n
Today, the term \u2018Prolympics\u2019<\/a>\u00a0is a more accurate descriptor of the post-amateur, government- and corporation-sponsored Games. But one element that has remained fairly constant as folk games morphed into professional sport is male domination. Women were not allowed to compete in the Ancient Olympics and de Coubertin tried to keep them out<\/a>\u00a0of his revived version, declaring that the Olympic spirit required:<\/p>\n the solemn and periodic exaltation of male athleticism, based on internationalism, by means of fairness, in an athletic setting, with the applause of women as the reward.<\/p>\n Ironically, women have a stronger place in the 21st century Olympics than in most other domains of sport, although it took the organisation of their own successful Women\u2019s Olympics in the 1920s along the way. But the sport-patriarchy nexus still weighs heavily on their prospects in sport. In considering the role that law might play in accelerating or retarding women\u2019s sporting advancement, there needs to be due acknowledgement of the impact of sport\u2019s lore on potential legal remedies.<\/p>\n Sport is historically a male-dominated sphere of popular culture, and during the late-19th century it came to define masculinity itself. There are several reasons for this connection between sport and approved modes of being male. Anxieties (shared by de Coubertin after France\u2019s capitulation in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870) about urban men becoming soft and losing their capacity to wage war engendered moves to encourage them to \u2018get physical\u2019 in a competitive environment. Because of the belief that the \u2018child is father to the man\u2019, this meant that competitive athleticism (sometimes represented as Muscular Christianity) should be instilled in boys. As compulsory schooling was becoming established, it was no longer necessary to rely on parents to cajole their indolent sons to embrace competitive physical culture.<\/p>\n \n Considerable resources from both government and civil society were invested in building up sport as a masculinist social institution. When in the 20th century sport was transformed into both a major industry and a pivotal element of broadcast media, it became even harder for women to make serious inroads into the male bastion of sport. A male sport star (and, later, celebrity) system emerged out of this \u2018sportsbiz\u2019, largely leaving the old ethic of amateurism \u2013 which abhorred pay for play \u2013 behind. But sport also retained much of its heroic Olympian mythology as a magical space that transcended everyday life and struggle, which included harking back to the idea of the Olympic truce involving the cessation of conflict and the free passage of athletes through war zones during the Ancient Games.<\/p>\n A further irony here is that sport became a key means of expressing nationalist sentiment that sometimes exhibited xenophobic and chauvinistic characteristics. Sportsmen came to match military warriors as symbols of national identity. Those engaged in team contact sport in particular were celebrated as ideal representatives of neighbourhoods, cities, regions and countries. The media, both private and public, made them into household names, providing the single most important source of revenue for elite sport, supported by all three tiers of government in the name of healthy citizenship and national pride. While society in general was proclaimed to be the beneficiary of sport conceived as a gender-neutral social good, it was men who received most of its kudos and material reward. Contemporary sport\u2019s combination of corporate capitalism and state subsidy has created an institution that has reinforced male power behind a veneer of common sense market logic and equal opportunity rhetoric.<\/p>\n This does not mean that women have been consistently excluded from involvement in sport or entirely subjugated within it. There is an established history of female sport achievement, and sportswomen and teams have been lauded and, in a small minority of cases, especially in individual sports, achieved something like parity with men. But they have struggled against the automatic allocation of predominantly supporting organisational roles, while sportswomen have generally received inequitable recognition, media attention and remuneration.<\/p>\n The sport market has been largely designed around the idea that sport is, in the first instance, male territory, supported by a vast media apparatus in which mostly male sport journalists cover male athletes in male-dominated sports. Systematic sexual segregation in sport, which is officially intended to ensure equality and prevent men from dominating women\u2019s sport, has largely functioned to produce a vertical hierarchy in the name of a horizontal one. In cultural terms, this problem is exacerbated by the consistent association of sport with manliness<\/a>. While men \u2013 including those who do not fit the mould \u2013 approach sport as a confirmation of orthodox gender identity, the reverse is the case for women, who have to address residual notions that sporting excellence and application is somehow at odds with femininity.<\/p>\n Whereas sportswomen have to \u2018prove\u2019 their heterosexual femininity in the face of accusations that it masculinises them, for men sport is still used as a weapon to police the boundaries of approved masculinity, in particular punishing and repressing homosexuality, which is stigmatised as an expression of feminised weakness. It is for this reason that hardly any elite professional sportsmen in the peak of their careers have come out as gay or bisexual<\/a>.\u00a0The world of sport still exhibits a strong preference for an outmoded sex and gender order that unconsciously and reflexively places straight men at its apex, women at is base, and is profoundly unsettled by the very notion of the intersexual and the transgendered.<\/p>\n This is a rather bleak picture that has been painted to counter the tendency for sport aficionados (among which I count myself) to romanticise the object of their passion and to obscure its manifest deficiencies. There has been progress towards gender equity in sport, but it is both slow and patchy. \u00a0If one of society\u2019s most prized institutions is not radically reformed, the negative social consequences are profound, not least because in countries like Australia sport is widely held to be definitive of nationhood. Sport cannot remain a citadel of sexism while battles are waged on all other fronts from the home to the workplace to the political sphere.<\/p>\n The law, it can be suggested, might operate as an \u2018accelerant\u2019 of progress in sport. This was certainly the case in the US with the introduction in 1972 of Title IX<\/a>, which declared that:<\/p>\n No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.<\/p>\n Anti-discrimination law can be effective in countering some of the more blatant manifestations of sexism in sport, as well as the attachment of strings to public funding as occurred, for example, in February 2016 when:<\/p>\n Federal Sports Minister Sussan Ley and Australian Sports Commission (ASC) chairman John Wylie [wrote] to the 30 top funded organisations setting out their expectations for change<\/a>.<\/p>\n In 2016, we can think of no defensible reason why male and female athletes should travel in different classes or stay in different standard accommodation when attending major international sporting events \u2026<\/p>\n The ASC is now proposing to make gender-neutral travel policies for senior major championships a condition of investment by the ASC in a sport.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n![\"](\"http:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/05\/muscular-christianity.jpg\")
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