Our September 2016 podcast takes a look at women in sports on the heels of the Olympic games, and increasing changes in our society’s standards for sex-based participation. Elizabeth McKeown discusses those guidelines in our feature story. We also hear a brand new song from Ali Bee relevant to the topic, and Sekhmet She-Owl speaks with Professor Susan Basow regarding the perception of women as strong athletes. Plus, some very important headlines by Nile Pierce. With your help, we can get women’s voices heard– please share far and wide.
Edition transcript available here.
Susan Basow is a social/clinical psychologist with a special focus on gender and the Charles A Dana Professor of Psychology at Lafayette College in Easton, PA. She is also a member of the college’s Women and Gender Studies Advisory Committee. Her research interests include the effects of gender on people’s perceptions of others, women’s body ideals, and homophobia in women and men.
One analysis that is sorely missing from this is the percentage of girls (as opposed to women) in female sports. Seeking “equality” in the Olympic movement is like black folks surprised blacks are sorely represented in the KKK.
Today’s Olympics is class war. A war of economics and a war of sexism. Take a good look at all the medallists, and count the number of under 18 y.o. boys who’ve won medals compared to the number of girls under 18 who’ve won medals.
The problem with our Olympics is that the very nature of the vast majority of the sports are designed for male ideals. Before female girls transform into women, we are at our most efficient in sports designed for the male gaze.
Girls in sports suffer great physical ailments, bone breaks which leave permanent health problems, osteoporosis, and various other injuries that are less likely to happen in a matured body rather than a growing body.
Female soccer teams have realised that girls were getting more foot and leg injuries and are therefore lobbying for a smaller ball, girls in gymnastics often fail to have a properly timed puberty, because of lack of fat cells on their bodies.
Missing puberty is not just about missing sexual maturation, it is missing out on whole body maturation.
On the psychological perspective, at least when sports were truly amateur, adult athletes held down regular jobs and did Olympic sports on their spare time. But since the world of pro-Olympians, younger and younger females are building their entire social identity around achieving medals and celebrity athletic status back at home. Basically these young pro-athletes are being set-up for failure.
I want to see a much reduced Olympiad, one with only 20 male podiums and 20 female podiums. No team sports. No sport requiring technology or animal slave (shoes, javelins, parallel bars, horses, etc) and where the age of entry is 18, not a day younger, and were female sports focus on adult feats of female strength and endurance, rather than male standards which demand immature female bodies, rather than mature female bodies. We need get coaches out of sport, stop subsidising pro-sports through massive stadium and arena construction from taxpayer money.
At the Olympics, we should not be seeking “equality” with males, that is a libfem perspective, we should be seeking a complete overhaul, top to bottom.
This is Thistle of the WLRN team. We have gotten similar feedback from others about our Olympics edition. Thanks for adding yours here on our site. I agree wholeheartedly that women should not be seeking “equality” in the Olympics and that the culture of the Olympics is woman-hating in an over-arching way that cannot be ignored. Fortunately, we are increasing our podcasts to one hour in length so that we can flesh-out ideas more and add more critiques. I think that is what happened with this edition — we simply did not have enough time to cover all that we should have when discussing the Olympics. Thanks again for your comment.
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