‘Masculine’ Men Threatened by Women in Sport.
An insight into what it means to be a woman in sport, more specifically women’s rugby, in comparison to our male counterparts.
It’s no shock that the tendrils of the patriarchy have crept their way into women’s sports, given that sports such as women’s football only began professionally in 2009 when the FA introduced contracts but there still was no professional league until as late as 2018. The sport alone has faced some of the most brutal barriers of discrimination including a major lack of funding and a 50-year ban due to the threat it posed to men’s football. Although other sports such as women’s rugby had earlier roots in establishing a league, the England Women’s Rugby team became the first to go fully professional with contracts in 2019, with many teams still having unpaid players despite playing full-time.
Now while I love the sport and love to take part in the great strides it’s making for women in sport and the way women are viewed professionally, it’s not to say that the culture and ideologies are still deeply flawed. Rugby epitomizes stereotypically ‘masculine’ characters, such as aggression and competition, and while the argument of what it means to be masculine or feminine is gaining traction, women’s participation and pushing of these boundaries challenge what it means to be male or female in today’s society. From personal experiences, it saddens me somewhat that people’s first reaction to women playing rugby is along the lines of “I couldn’t possibly do that, it’s far too aggressive” or an anecdote suggesting that only queer women would want to play a “sport like that”. When people outside of the sport further perpetuate the stereotypes around it, it makes it 10 times harder for those in it. Like many other aspects of life, women are suffering the consequences of the attitudes of those in their community and outsiders.
In an article written on RugbyPass recently, the author leads us in with a statement that suggests he’ll discuss the hardships women rugby players face with “Misguided pile-ons do more harm than good to women’s rugby” but spends the majority of the article talking about the England Men’s captain, Jamie George. While it lightly discusses his input on coaching the women’s team, it is mostly coming to the defence of men’s rugby and the suggestion that he’s being used as a PR stunt to bring down the image of men’s rugby. The author proceeds to conclude the article by stating “I’ll be completely honest. I struggle with the Women’s Six Nations […] It does nothing for me.” And says he has “no moral obligation to like it”. It’s not like women’s sports need further criticism under the guise of an article suggesting its support. He justifies his opinion by stating that “Women’s sport has many, many advantages over men’s sport” which I think sums up his misconstrued perception of what it means to be a female athlete. Suggesting that women’s sport is more “family-friendly” is not the compliment you think it is, it’s so deeply rooted in misogyny and you’re completely blind to it.
I’m so excited for where this sport and women’s sports in general can go and how popular we already see them becoming but before we get there, we must tackle this false ideology that women’s sport, in some way, threatens men and their masculinity. Women are not weaker or less athletic than men. Women do not need to care about how physically attractive you find them when they play sports. Their talent should trump how you rate their appearance. Women are allowed to be muscular AND feminine. This social pressure on women in all aspects of their lives needs to end — 64% of girls quit sports by the time they are 17 years old due to never feeling good enough. Women are good enough and we don’t need to standards men have set to tell us so.
