Yeah, because women NEVER get knocked out by men. Dude is just all a-flutter because he’s not used to the idea of women hitting back. Well, get used to it. Speaking as somebody who spent time getting knocked around for hoursby guys who were much bigger and much younger, I found the sport itself (juijitsu) both exhilarating and useful; I learned that I could get pounded pretty thoroughly and keep on going; I learned I could beat people who were a LOT bigger than I was; and it was both physically and intellectually challenging: like chess, only sweatier. If one gender gets to do it, the other should, too. There was a real advantage to the men, too, in my participating – at least to the smart ones: it gave them a chance to really practice their technique, if they chose to, rather than rely solely on muscle to win. There were some of those, too; I’m sure there always will be – but they’ll eventually lose to the ones who practiced their technique. My sister was in the Navy, and I’m proud of her, and proud of that. Just because you don’t approve, doesn’t make it shameful. Isn’t that what the patriarchy tries to do, shame women out of doing/trying/being something that it doesn’t approve of? Doesn’t look any better here.

Mortisha: My sport is crosscountry equestrian and being badly injured or dying in a fall is one of the risks you take –my choice.
Amen, Mortisha. One of my mother’s best friends was an inveterate rider. She had an accident while riding, and it killed her. Yes, it was sad for the people she left behind – but really, who here wouldn’t prefer to go out while doing something s/he loved?

Conicidnetally, I hope those of you who are interested in this subject will take the opportunity to watch the superb movie Million Dollar Baby, in which Hillary Swank stars as a boxer.

It still participates in and reproduces the overvaluation of core masculine traits: competition and aggression.

Competition and aggression are the core traits of a society built upon dominance and hierarchy in order to maintain a specific structure of power. That structure of power places men in authority roles, however that no more makes competition and aggression “core masculine traits” than the same situation makes submissiveness and objectification core feminine traits. The rigid gender roles society imposes are not the same thing as gender. As a man, a fairly masculine man, I reject the idea that my identity necessarily has to revolve around traits which I neither chose nor find particularly useful out of certain well-defined contexts.

By buying into the idea that the constructs we call gender are somehow bound by the traits that we have associated with them we continue to not only conform to those constructs in subtle ways but we support them through admission. I work in a job which demands that I spend the vast majority of my talking to people about their feelings and the meanings of their experiences, something which most people would not identify as masculine. I do not, however, feel feminized because I spend my days talking about emotions rather than wrestling bears and beating my dinner to death with my bare hands. As long as we continue to group behaviors into “things members of X gender do” rather than “things some people do” we continue to support a binary system which values some behaviors over others in order to maintain a system. Saying that a given behavior is by definition masculine or feminine and then adding a negative connotation to that judgment (especially as it applies to someone behaving “wrong” for their gender) is engaging in the kind of gender policing that will ultimately only further entrench the rigid standards we’re trying to fight.

So far women have taken great strides towards expressing their inner masculinity. They gain in value in a male-dominated world when they are more like men, or when they mostly play by the already male-determined “rules.”

Unfortunately there isn’t as much progress on the side of men expressing their inner femininity.

So the scale is too far tipped on the masculine side in terms of social value, cultural capital, etc. Women boxing, though a perfectly fine thing to happen, doesn’t change the structure of the problem. It doesn’t make it worse, but it doesn’t make it much better. It still participates in and reproduces the overvaluation of core masculine traits: competition and aggression.

Amy – I think it’s fair to say that many feminists have issues with violence in society and how it is glorified in sports. Thus, is it feminist to celebrate a violent sport such as boxing and women’s inclusion in it?

For me, I think it’s a great thing. I do have a love/hate relationship with boxing, but as many have already pointed out Olympic boxing isn’t the same as Mike Tyson boxing. While it may lead to an increase in women’s professional boxing, that’s another blog post.

I do think that that women’s ski jumping may be able to use boxing as proof that we aren’t fragile flowers who will break each time we jump.

And gawd damn it!! I can’t believe softball is still out.

Part of that is due to using training standards designed for the male body. I remember reading somewhere that women athletes shouldn’t be doing the lengthy, rigorous stretching (pre-and post-workout, but especially pre-workout) that men do—that we already have that flexibility that men are striving to get with these routines. For us to do them sets us up for injury; that women are good do go with a light warmup. I also read something about how the U.S. military (I forget whether it was Army or Marines) did a study on if it was possible to train women (meaning, the average woman—not elite athletes or significantly larger-than-average-sized women) to do the heaviest physical labor. They found that it was—but that the training and diet needed to be adjusted (specifically, women needed less cardio and more weight bearing training than men, and higher protein without all the “carbo-loading”). The long runs (like 10 miles) that the men went on interfered with strength and muscle-building in women, and the women didn’t need the carbo-boost that the men did to maintain energy in cardio workouts. That was not much of a surprise to me, ‘cuz I’m a smaller woman who can lift a lot of weight, and never thought this was unusual (y’know, that you didn’t need to be built like King Kong to lift heavy weights).

I think it’s fair to wonder why we treat beating the pus out of each other as a sport

I think thats kind of an unfair statement that has a lot to do with perception and POV. All competition, at it’s core, is an attempt to dominate an opponent. All sports are a kind of alienated violence. Few people would argue that Greco-Roman or Amateur wrestling shouldn’t be considered a sport, even though it is a visceral and physical display of dominance. I would also argue that there aren’t a whole lot of people uncomfortable with Fencing, despite the fact that what we’re really looking at is a ritualized and stylized duel. Even sports with a less direct connection to physical violence (say, competitive swimming), are judged by who does better than the other person, involve language that invokes the image of physical violence (“beat their opponent,” “destroyed the competition,” “was a dominant force”). Moreover, any physical sport necessarily demands a certain amount of suffering in order to reach and perform at a high level of competition. Sure, the damage to bodies in the name of dominance might be moved to blowing out your own knee while running, but the expenditure of physical suffering in order to win is still an integral part of any competition.

I think the discomfort so many have with the more obviously martial sports is that they are less able to hide what is behind all sports. They wear their violence on their sleeves, without having hidden it beneath layers of symbol and internalization. Two individuals striking one another until the other can no longer stand is immediately violent; such a display makes us uncomfortable because we can’t pretend that we’re watching anything other than what we’re watching. Martial sports don’t let us have the lie, they don’t allow us to tell ourselves that we’re watching anything other than a direct physical confrontation. Unlike in softball or skiing the violence isn’t implied or alienated, it is direct and unselfconscious.

Oddly enough, you see some of the most truly impressive displays of sportsmanship in some of the more brutal kinds of martial competition. Georges St. Pierre (the current UFC welterweight champion) being an excellent example of how, even in an extremely violent context, competition doesn’t have to be ugly or angry.

Oh, they probably don’t. What’s actually true is that men have more birth defects and die younger than women, so in terms of *health* they are more fragile; it’s as if they’re designed like Hobbes said, to live lives that are nasty, brutish and short.

As for the endurance thing, there’s linguistic confusion because of course one meaning of endurance is stamina and being larger, with stronger muscles, means one does less work to accomplish more, so one can accomplish more for longer. But in sports where some aspect of the female body counters the male advantage of larger muscles — and I’m specifically thinking of swimming and any cold weather sport, because healthy women have more fat on their bodies than healthy men, which protects against cold and increases buoyancy — women end up having more endurance than men. At least, I’ve heard on several separate occasions that women are better able to do long-distance real-world swimming, such as crossing the English Channel, than men.

I believe women also have a higher survivor rate in situations like famines, when one factors out death by violence… probably because smaller bodies with more fat on them need less food and have more stores of it.

But no, as for sports injuries it doesn’t surprise me that women would have as many or more than men, because of smaller bones and joints. For skiing, though, women have a lower center of gravity, and the argument made to keep us out of skiing is that the jumps can harm our reproductive organs. Really? I mean, seriously? Because any activity that can harm female reproductive organs can also harm *all* internal organs and is not safe for men lest they suffer a prolapsed intestine. If one’s liver and spleen are staying put, so are one’s ovaries and uterus. *Men* have external genitalia that can be harmed by a sports injury; women *don’t*. Nothing can harm a woman’s genitals or reproductive system (if she’s not currently using it) that would not cause just as much harm to a woman or man’s gastrointestinal system.