{"id":2850,"date":"2017-08-03T17:29:38","date_gmt":"2017-08-03T15:29:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/?p=2850"},"modified":"2017-08-06T12:17:02","modified_gmt":"2017-08-06T10:17:02","slug":"when-lost-ladies-matter-but-an-omitted-womens-matters-more","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/when-lost-ladies-matter-but-an-omitted-womens-matters-more\/","title":{"rendered":"When lost \u2018Ladies\u2019 matter, but an omitted \u2018Women\u2019s\u2019 matters more"},"content":{"rendered":"

The recent decision by the Arsenal Football Club to rename its ’Ladies’ team\u00a0Arsenal Women\u2019s Football Club<\/a> (as in cricket, golf and tennis, \u2018Ladies\u2019 remains the preferred label for women\u2019s games and institutions), and dropping the marker \u2018women\u2019s\u2019 except in contexts where it is absolutely necessary to demarcate the team from the men\u2019s team may seem minor, but is of great significance. It represents at a very high institutional level an impact of feminist critiques of sport, wider social institutions and the language that surrounds them. It may have been passed over with a nod and an \u2018about time\u2019 by many, but the comments sections of on-line reports of this change show that an awful lot of chaps recognise the threat this change presents. We should celebrate this change more, despite and because of the venom of those comments.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not saying anything new to state that sport is a male preserve: a place where we gather to learn to be men, to be brothers, to accept the hierarchies and rules of the sporting fratriarchy and patriarchy, and in doing so shore up a gendered social world where men exercise power. Now, of course we men don\u2019t all exercise the same power \u2013 it is demarcated by class, ethnicity, dis\/ability, location, sexuality and a myriad other factors, but the masculine domain matters in sport, and as a result in all those places where the sphere of sport has an impact. For most of the North Atlantic world and its spin-offs in New Zealand and Australia, this man-making role of sport has replaced compulsory military service and the war experience of our fathers and grandfathers, although that too is unevenly distributed by class, ethnicity, locality and so forth. The male sporting preserve is culturally potent.<\/p>\n

It is also nothing new to say that in the sporting world, the effect of this masculine preserve has been an ethos that men are better athletes, better at sport and have the right to determine and define culturally the measures of success and competent \u00e9lite performance. We saw this in John McEnroe\u2019s recent claim that although Serena Williams is among the best women tennis players we\u2019ve ever seen, in the men\u2019s competition she\u2019d rank \u2018like 700\u2019<\/a>. The condemnation of McEnroe was widespread and in many cases properly make the point that she is one of the best tennis players, ever! McEnroe\u2019s phrasing is a sign of why the decision \"\"<\/a>by Arsenal matters so much. It removes the implicit marker of women\u2019s sport as distinct and different (meaning, inferior) to the unmarked, unlabelled and therefore normal and standardising men\u2019s sport: we have the World Cup and the Women\u2019s World Cup, we have football\/cricket\/rugby\/basketball and women\u2019s football\/cricket\/rugby\/basketball: it isn\u2019t the MNBA and WNBA, but the NBA and WNBA \u2013 and the \u2018W\u2019 makes all the difference to profile, salaries and respect. I can see how (although I don\u2019t accept) in some sports that advocates of gender marking might build a case that is coherent and has a degree of perceived legitimacy because of agreed understandings about strength and power \u2013 but the same thing happens in darts and pool and other similar sports.<\/p>\n

Leaving aside a very small number of sports marked as predominantly for women, in some cases the playing of which marks men as less than \u2018proper men\u2019, the use of a gendered marker in sport is always<\/em> to label a sport feminine and always<\/em> indicates that it is a \u2018substandard\u2019 form or version of the game, whether or not the rules differ. This \u2018inferiority\u2019 then becomes an excuse to marginalise women\u2019s sport to the media outlands \u2013 for at least 20 years, nearly every survey in nearly every country I have seen of media coverage of women\u2019s sport has it at no more than 5% of national media coverage, and in many case this 5% has also included coverage of mixed sex sport. In some cases women\u2019s sport is so marginalised as to become farcical: at the same time as England was playing France in the Quarter Final of the UEFA Women\u2019s European Cup \u2013 a match largely ignored by US TV networks, ESPN2 was showing Drone Racing! (Of course, folks in my Twitter feed might have been engaging in hyperbole – but if so it is believable hyperbole.)<\/p>\n

The male preserve normalises men\u2019s sport, making it the taken for granted standard against which we measure all sporting standards and competence, even in sports marked predominantly as \u2018for women\u2019: so netball becomes an \"\"<\/a>inferior version of basketball. Although they came from the same game, over 100 years later they have become different sports, played differently and similar only in that the objective is to get the ball through a hoop at the end of the court. Men\u2019s sport acts as this standard, even in sports few if any play at a high level, because we\u2019ve all agreed that it is; that\u2019s how cultural rules work. We may not have consciously taken that decision, but we\u2019ve agreed.<\/p>\n

It doesn\u2019t need to be that way. I\u2019ve now lived in England for nearly two decades, and still don\u2019t get football (it was soccer where I grew up); my people are a rugby playing people. During that time I have allowed myself to indulge in an occasional bout of reflexive anthropology, wondering about my perceptions and presumptions about the world I live in \u2013 and football\/soccer appears in those musings quite often. Not only did I grow up in a place where soccer was marginal \u2013 I played a little as primary school pupil, but only competitively for one season when I was about 9 or 10 \u2013 but I also grew up at a time when we didn\u2019t have ready access to the professional and therefore \u00e9lite game on TV, other than the FA Cup Final. What\u2019s more, by the time we did have more ready access I\u2019d stopped watching TV for about a decade. All this meant that by the time I got to live in England, I didn\u2019t have any real sense of what football\/soccer was supposed<\/em> to look like, and accordingly had no measures of good or bad versions of the game other than some aesthetic judgements derived from fairly classical notions of beauty and symmetry.<\/p>\n

I found myself in England, teaching in a sports studies programme, surrounded by people who had all that cultural knowledge, all that taken-for-granted learning and in a context where mediated versions of sport were football\/soccer as played by men. I realised that I didn\u2019t care for it; I found and find it dull. The sense of dullness would not be lessened by bigger goals or higher scores; the process of getting the ball to the goal for the most part bores me. What\u2019s more, having no reference points for judgements about quality meant that when I watched women\u2019s football I rated it as good, and often better than the games I saw played by men (remember, this is my own rating scale here; not the one I would have learned by absorption had I grown up in a soccer-centric world).<\/p>\n

The best football\/soccer match I have been to was a top division derby in Sweden where LdB Malm\u00f6 played a team from, I think, Gothenburg in 2010. I enjoyed the game, the stadium was about half full on a week night, and being in a setting the majority of the audience were girls and women gave the experience of the game a totally different feel to any other football match I had attended. It was one I preferred; I haven\u2019t been to a men\u2019s match since. Here I was, with my improper scale for assessing the quality of the sport, finding that I much preferred the \u2018inferior\u2019 version \u2013 at least that what is was according to the received version of the rating scale most others seemed to share.<\/p>\n

I didn\u2019t absorb the cultural rules that gave me a framework that said that not only is men\u2019s football\/soccer better than women\u2019s, but the way men play the game is the standard against which we measure competence and the wider culture of play and audienceship associated with the men\u2019s version of football\/soccer is superior. I did grow up with the gendered markers that tell me that labelling a sport or league\"\"<\/a> \u2018women\u2019s\u2019 indicates its inferiority; I also grew up spending a lot of time around netball and knowing that it was not an inferior game played by inferior athletes.<\/p>\n

Arsenal\u2019s decision is therefore important for two reasons; first, in changing \u2018Ladies\u2019 to \u2018Women\u2019s\u2019 it tells us that its women athletes are not genteel figures who, like the Victorians, don\u2019t exert themselves and certainly don\u2019t sweat, but may be permitted to \u2018glow\u2019. Second, and more importantly, in dropping the marker of \u2018women\u2019 as a standard practice in labelling their teams they have taken a small step that undermines systems of judgement of competence that value men\u2019s sport and denigrate women\u2019s and that we all absorb and deploy. Changing the cultural rules will take much longer and require much more than just changing labels, but without changing the labels the rules and the system they sustain will never start to change. It\u2019s time for all sports to drop their gender labelling.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The recent decision by the Arsenal Football Club to rename its ’Ladies’ team\u00a0Arsenal Women\u2019s Football Club (as in cricket, golf and tennis, \u2018Ladies\u2019 remains the preferred label for women\u2019s games and institutions), and dropping the marker \u2018women\u2019s\u2019 except in contexts where it is absolutely necessary to demarcate the team from the men\u2019s team may seem […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":2852,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-2850","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-okategoriserade"},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/800px-Womens_tackle.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2JbBl-JY","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2850","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2850"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2850\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2852"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2850"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2850"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2850"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}