Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better
The realm of sports has long been dominated by men. Sundays are for football, October is for baseball playoffs, and March is for basketball and the “madness” that comes with it. The hype around all of these events is that men are able to come together with other men to watch men play sports that they were never really good at and yell at the TV about how stupid a play call was or how the umpire is a bias dumbass. Ask a man if they would ever watch any of these sports played by women and they will most likely laugh it off as some kind of joke and say that they will only watch it if it involved some sort of lingerie. But why is this the case? Why are sports played by men televised so much more than women sports? Why in the sports world, just like in the real world, are men respected more than women, no matter what the sport or position is?
All of these questions can be answered using a simple phrase: “the social construct of gender”. What does this even mean? Well, the differences between men and women have been magnified and deconstructed socially for centuries and most come up with the conclusion that men are just naturally stronger and better than women at most things. This is usually justified by biology. On the other hand, everyday the concepts of “masculinity” and “femininity” and how they play a role in gender are upheld every day in almost every society. As Freya Brown states in her article, in education the difference between gender and sex seems to be well understood but in mainstream media and society it can be seen as a controversial subject. Socially, women are still expected to stay home and rear children despite having proved themselves to be more than just vehicles that carry children. When women go against these norms and invade a social sphere that is predominately full of men, men and their hyper-masculinity become threatened.
Recently, something that had almost been unheard of in the baseball world occurred. On October 6, 2015 the American League wild card game was broadcasted by Olympian and gold medalist softball player Jessica Mendoza. For those of you who do not know about Jessica Mendoza, she is considered to be one of the best to ever play softball. In the softball world, her name is the equivalent to saying Babe Ruth to any hardcore baseball fan. Jessica Mendoza has won an Olympic gold medal, was apart of Team USA for a various number of years, and during her time with Stanford got awards throughout her 4 years as a Cardinal because of her outstanding athletic achievements. So it is safe to assume that Jessica Mendoza is familiar with both softball and baseball. This, however, did not stop the sexist and misogynistic tweets when people found out that a woman was broadcasting the game.
There were hundreds of more tweets similar to these two, all along the same lines. Women should just leave some things to men, women should worry about their children instead of sports, women need to go back to the kitchen. One of the biggest questions that comes out of this is what makes women so threatening to men when they enter a predominantly male space? Is it because men realize that women are more than capable of doing jobs that are often times only done by men? Or is it because men fear that women will realize their actual worth and not value themselves according to a patriarchal societies standards?
Jessica handled the backlash with grace and dignity.
“Yes, I am a female, but I want it to get to the point where, let’s think about what I am saying, what I am doing, and not so much the sex that I am,” she said.
“I want to get to a point when we hear a female voice on NBA, NFL, or just anything in men’s sports, and it is like, ‘Sweet. She’s doing a good job.”
Mendoza acknowledges that she is judged based on her “sex” rather than her abilities or her merits. I think that Mendoza gets tons of points for saying sex because there are people who aren’t cisgendered and they get judged because of their sex.
We’re in 2015 and there are still people who believe that women and men should stay in there separate spheres. This is a ridiculous concept because women have proved that they can excel in areas that are dominated by men, and men have proved that they can do things just as well as women.
