A Boymom’s Thoughts on Girls’ Athletics
U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 3rd Class Matthew N. Jackson, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
My sons play baseball. Not travel-team-private-lessons-go-to-college-on-a-scholarship baseball, but neighborhood rec league baseball. The leagues in our suburbs have reasonably decent competition without the added pressure of finances and schedule management required by a travel team commitment. While I want my kids to enjoy athletics and learn life lessons from team sports, I have no delusions regarding their innate athletic abilities. Their dad is 5’7” and their mom went to college on an academic scholarship. Rec league ball is perfect for us. Even though we are saving less in their 529 accounts than some parents spend on pitching coaches for 11-year-olds, I’m hopeful my kids avoid college loans and reach the age of maturity with fully functioning shoulders while still having grown up with the benefit of youth sports.
When I was a kid, the only little league team in our town was called The Biscuits, and it was a baseball team. Baseball. As in boys. They had to “travel” to play other neighboring towns because no town had more than one team. It wasn’t really “travel team,” it was just the team. A girl in my class played on The Biscuits. Softball was a Thursday night beer-league for dads, so her only option was to play with the boys. I remember thinking that she was really something: a girl on the baseball team! It was the era of The Bad News Bears, and she was our Amanda Wurlitzer. (I’d link to a clip of Walter Mathau introducing Tatum O’Neal’s character to the rest of the Bears, but it hasn’t aged well over the last 45 years. It is worth checking out, however, if you ever doubt this country is less casually racist than it used to be.)
There are a pair of twins in the same rec league as my older son. Twin girls. Only I don’t think girls on the baseball team is so awesome this time around. They’re solid ball players—not the best, certainly not the worst—but our area has both rec leagues and extensive travel-team options for softball. It has always been curious to me why these two young ladies play baseball given their many options to play competitively with other girls. It is not that I mind my sons competing against girls; I don’t. My boys play co-ed flag football too; there are always at least dozen or so girls playing across the league. Competing against girls doesn’t faze my sons either. Heck, when are the wrestling sign-ups? This baseball thing though…what message is it sending to other girls, the girls actually playing softball?
Perhaps I’m looking at it through the eyes of my youth and thinking about how neat it would have been to have had a softball team. Here are dozens, and these girls aren’t even using them! I am a boy-mom fully aware that I have no dog in this hunt other the fact that I am female and enjoy making quirky observations about things that aren’t my business. While it is highly unlikely that two girls playing baseball in a locality with youth softball team depth is limiting softball as a sport, I admit a tendency to analyze the stressed case. Please forgive me as I wallow in a receding second wave of feminism.
Remember the rift between Annika Sorenstam and Michelle Wie regarding Wie’s teenage ambitions to play golf against men? In Sorenstam’s opinion, those ambitions kept Wie from reaching her full potential as a female golfer. At the time, Wie’s well-publicized desires were a smack in the face to the women who toiled for decades to develop the LPGA only to have a teenager come along and say “Peace out, Ladies. No thanks!”
Facing off against better players improves skills, but unless there is no one to compete with or against, failing to engage with robust competition when it does exist sends a message: other females aren’t good enough. It was one thing for Annika Sorenstam — the number one female golfer in the world — to play with the men when she was invited (I cheered her on); it is quite another to trade aptitude in women’s sports for mediocrity in men’s. If every dominant female golfer decided to play on the PGA tour, the LPGA would cease to exist. Likewise, if every half-way decent softball player forgoes softball to play with the boys, there won’t be any softball teams at all. I don’t need to have daughters to know that that is not good for girls.
The debate about female athlete earnings comes up frequently. Why don’t WNBA players earn as much as NBA players? Why don’t professional softball players earn as much as baseball players? The honest answer is because the marketplace for women’s athletics is not as large as the marketplace for men’s. And women and girls playing on men’s teams does absolutely zero to grow that marketplace.
Male and female compensation disparities are not as clear-cut in the sport of soccer, however. After a recent compensation settlement was announced between U.S. women soccer players and the U.S. Soccer Federation, mid-fielder Megan Rapinoe who had filed a complaint with four other teammates with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission commented, “For our generation, knowing that we’re going to leave the game in an exponentially better place than we found it is everything.” Alex Morgan, who joined Rapino in the EEOC complaint, stated, “I mean, sometimes you think why the hell was I born a female? And then you think how incredible is it to be able to fight for something that you actually believe in an stand alongside these women…” Its interesting to consider Rapino and Morgan’s feelings of accomplishment on behalf of female soccer players against their hypothetical reaction to a young female soccer phenom bypassing the National Women’s Soccer League to play with the men. I can only imagine they would be livid.
I got older, and we eventually moved to a different town that did have softball. I played third-base and back-up pitcher and once walked four batters in a row. Perhaps I struggle with this issue because I’m not an elite competitor It just makes me sad. The tragedy of this situation is not that women’s athletic options are being eroded by girls who insist on playing with the boys. Despite my stressed-case analysis and emotions regarding those decisions, it is not practically happening. The real tragedy is that there are females who can’t see a competitor as worthy unless they are male.
What a squeeze play.
It could be that they just want to play baseball. Baseball and softball, while very similar, are not the same sport.Report
This. Men’s and women’s golf is not the same game. I can understand Michelle Wie’s desire to know, “Can I play the game competively on courses laid out for men?” Each of the three fencing weapons is a different sport. I know women who have fought to get their clubs to let them be an epee fencer, not a foil fencer. The NBA and the WNBA don’t play the same sport. A woman who played in the WNBA with the same sort of physical contact allowed/required in the NBA would foul out in minutes.Report
But is that a learned style of play, or is that physical inability to perform the activity? Like, the women who wanted to be epee fencers, did they have the equivalent performance of a man of similar size and strength, or was there something about being Female that stopped them being as good?
Like, I could see an argument that a body which experienced exposure primarily to gonadal estrogen during adolescence would develop in a different way than a body which experienced exposure to gonadal testosterone, and that a game based on performing certain actions would reward bodies developed in a way that was optimized for those actions, and thus you would expect the top performance levels of certain sports to feature almost entirely estrogen-influenced or testosterone-influenced bodies. But that’s not saying that persons with non-optimal bodies are inherently incapable no matter what, that’s just saying the same thing as “a guy who’s not in good shape will not be at the peak performance level of a sport”.Report
Why has women’s fencing traditionally been limited to foil?Report
It’s the lightest of the three weapons. The way the right-of-way rules are interpreted reduce the role that strength plays. Eg, if you make contact appropriately with your opponent’s blade, it is deemed a proper parry. You don’t have to actually control your opponent’s blade. Corps-à-corps — body-to-body contact — causes an immediate halt in action, and is often a red-card violation. For a very long time the conventional wisdom was that women weren’t disadvantaged in foil, so could do it “right”.
There’s also plenty of misogyny. Fencing coaches and administrators tend to continue until they’re elderly, so their attitudes carry on for a very long time. When I picked fencing up again a dozen years ago, I worked with a coach who was in his 70s, who had learned from a coach that was active in the sport in the 1930s. Foil was the only women’s fencing event at the Olympics until 1996, when epee was added. Women’s saber not until 2004. I knew a woman here in Colorado who wanted to fence epee back in the 1970s who described to me how hard she had to work to get enough women in the sport around the country organized to make it happen in US fencing.Report
Foil might be lighter than epee or sabre but it isn’t like modern epees or sabres or superheavy real swords that require a great deal of physical strength to wield properly. The modern electronic scoring system also gets rid of a lot of these “concerns.”Report
When foilists come down to the epee end of the gym, the first thing they say when they get on the strip is invariably some version of, “Geez, I always forget how heavy these things are.” I’ve been away for a couple of years now. If I can find a place to start again, the first six months are going to be miserable while I get my forearm/wrist/hand back in shape.
A modern epee is somewhat lighter than a rapier but generally a tad heavier than the shortsword that displaced the rapier. None of these are in the same category with melee and heavy infantry weapons, of course. And the techniques for those heavy weapons are completely different.
I’ve had the opportunity to handle period shortswords — had to wear cotton gloves, skin oils are not kind to antique weapons — and run through a handful of standard moves. Very, very much like an epee in weight and balance.
Electric scoring indicates touches. It has nothing to do with right-of-way, corps-à-corps, or the other complicated parts of the sport.Report
Thing is, there is no reason a woman can’t develop the arm strength to handle a fencing sword. As you say, they aren’t in the weight class of military weapons, nor are the athletes expected to penetrate armor.
It’s not like a woman wanting to be an offensive tackle on a man’s football team while only weighing a buck and a quarter.Report
Don’t know. Perhaps because foil is more about fooling your opponent. Perhaps because it’s a small sport, and as you come up the groups are almost always mixed gender, and epee and saber reward height and strength more than foil does. But women foilists are more common than women epeeists or women sabrists. Might matter that for insurance reasons, you have to be ten to get into a class.Report
Still, no significant reason a woman can’t do epee or sabre, only pros & cons on the margins.Report
I haven’t fenced since college, so twenty years, but the weight was literally not a problem with changing from foil to epee. I reached my maximum height of 5’5′ at fifteen and weighed a staggering 135 pounds, so it wasn’t like I was a titan of strength at the time.Report
There may be size- or strength-related reasons to believe that women would not be competitive with men in epee or saber — I’m agnostic about that — but those aren’t reasons that they couldn’t fence epee or saber against other women.
Has anyone ever matched top male and female foil fencers against each other? If so, how did it turn out?Report
I don’t even really understand why we make this gendered distinction with regards to baseball and softball. Why is one a “boys’” sport and one a “girls’”?Report
I asked this in the late 80’s/early 90’s and the answer was given to me then was that underhand pitching does less damage to pitchers’ shoulders.
I don’t know if that same explanation is given in the current year.Report
Stronger people throw faster and swing harder, and modern sports culture is…let’s say more accepting of men modifying their bodies to increase strength than it is of women (not to mention the whole hormone-reaction thing causing men to get more results more quickly from strength training) so you’ll find a lot more strong men than you will strong women.
What this means is that at the pro levels (where you expect players to be in peak physical condition) you’ll see a major difference between male players and female players, to the point that selecting female players will be seen as a handicap in overall team performance. So either you have female leagues, or you accept that there won’t be any women on the field anywhere…Report
Kazzy wasn’t asking why there are sex-segregated leagues, which is fairly obvious, but why they play different sports, specifically why baseball is a male sport and softball is a female sport.Report
My guess is that a lot of this is from much more sexist times when it wasn’t really appropriate for girls and women to be athletic in the first place but there were some grudging exceptions made because girls wanted to play sports to. The idea of girls and women doing actions that had a good chance of really getting them physically hurt like boys was deemed too unlady-like.Report
I kind of got off that track, but in baseball the balls are thrown faster (even compared to “fast-pitch” softball).Report
I don’t think softball is more for females, but it’s less physically demanding in most respects, making it easier to play more recreationally.
There’s a big difference between fastpitch and slowpitch softball. The batter’s reaction time in fastpitch softball is comparable to baseball. But beyond that, softball is just less physically demanding. Smaller field, larger ball, lighter bats.Report
Softball is quite common, at least around here, for older players. Lots of 30+ players (both gender) playing softball around here.
So it’s double odd, because it’s quite clearly not a gendered sport for adults.Report
In my town, the kids play teeball together. Then by first grade they’re separated.
Then the adults play softball.
Go figure.Report
There are only 2 types of adult soft ball players. Elite female athletes and guys 20 pounds overweight from spending every Sunday drinking tall boys.Report
Plus those young adult co-ed leagues every city has.Report
My cousins would disagree. It may simply be there are are no adult baseball leagues, but all three play softball.
One is, bluntly, at “professional athlete” levels of fitness. The other two are at “Even the most picky doctors would have no complaints” level of fitness.
They’ve always been highly athletic, and the professional level one keeps the other two in shape. 🙂
Seriously, my younger cousin is a marvel. He was almost good enough to go pro in his chosen sport after college, but not quite. He kept the fitness routines.Report
So… it would seem…
Baseball is for boys and men and maybe very young girls depending on what you consider T-ball to be and when the leagues divide by gender.
Softball is for girls and men and women.
WTF?Report
I don’t see what the problem here is. Baseball is more physically challenging.Report
To the point where the OP assumed that any girl wanting to play baseball must be doing it out of some weird reverse sexism because they believed only men were the real athletes.
I’d have just assumed they wanted to play baseball not softball.Report
Second Wave Feminism versus Third Wave Feminism.Report
In my experience with club soccer, the dynamics are a bit different. A girl playing on a boy’s team has usually been borrowed from a girl’s team. She is playing both. Usually though it’s a sign of a thin club because otherwise they would be borrowing a younger boy.Report
> I’d link to a clip of Walter Mathau introducing Tatum O’Neal’s character to the rest of the Bears, but it hasn’t aged well over the last 45 years
The first 1:56 is nice, but NSFW after that
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dm61r3qnPKQReport
“The real tragedy is that there are females who can’t see a competitor as worthy unless they are male.”
You clearly believe it or something close. Because it never crossed your mind that they’re playing baseball because they wanted to play baseball, not softball. They’re different sports.
But you made a gendered divide between the two sports (“softball is for girls, baseball is for boys”) and assumed anyone playing the “wrong” sport must be doing it to “prove something”.
It reeks of projection.
(And as an irony: There are multiple adult softball leagues near me. It’s not gendered at all — plenty of both play, in pretty much equal numbers — might even be male dominated, but I’ve never counted).Report
When my kids (one of each) were young they both played Little League baseball for a few years. There weren’t a lot of girls, maybe one or two per team, but some were quite good; in fact one of my kids’ teams got much worse when their best player, a girl, was drafted up to a higher league.
When she started middle school, my daughter switched to softball, because she wanted to play on a girls’ team, but she didn’t like the game nearly as much. The batting helmet with a face guard and the double first base(*) made it too, well, girly.
* If you’ve never seen this, the batter runs to one first base, while the first baseman has to step on a different first base a few feet away. This is to prevent collisions.Report