In Iris Marion Young’s Article about
female body comportment called Throwing
Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and
Spatiality, she discusses the ways in which females move their body and
occupy space with it. Her main argument is encompassed by this quote from the
article, “Woman is thereby both culturally and social denied the subjectivity,
autonomy, and creativity which are definitive of being human and which in
patriarchal society accorded the man. At the same time, however because she is
a human existence, the female person necessarily is a subjectivity and
transcendence and she knows herself to be.” This statement translates into
every move that women make. Not only in every day life, with movements such as
crossing legs or folding in on oneself, but also in sports.
Young makes the allusion early in
the reading to studies that discuss the idea of women and men using their
bodies differently to throw a ball. She claims that women have been proven to
throw more poorly because of cultural constraints placed upon them. Her
argument is almost 35 years old. The data she cites is also fairly old. Why is
this still relevant today? Nothing has changed, and “you throw like a girl” is
still a very common phrase. I see it every day in my own life and in the lives
of people around me. Women are said to not throw as well as men, and often
times we believe it to be true.
The video I attached goes in to
depth about the science of throwing as a man and as a woman. Their tests are
not irrefutable, academically published, or peer reviewed, but it is an
interesting study nonetheless. They have male and female participants throw
with their dominant hands and test them for speed, strength, and form. They
compare their forms against professional baseball and softball players. When
they use their dominant hand, men have better form and therefore throw the ball
more effectively. The twist comes when they ask the participants to throw with
their non-dominant hand, and the men have the same form as women. This negates
their advantage if we control for muscle and body size of men. This proves that
the idea of women throwing less effectively is mostly cultural. It is because
of her relative objectivity that she doesn’t throw as well. It puts her in a bind
mentally, and that translates into a psychical binding. It means something
powerful that a social construction can physically inhibit a person. I would be
very interested to see how this study would do if they had only tested children
because the boys and girls would have very similar body sizes.
Young’s research has proven that in
her time period, men threw better than women, but she also has an explanation.
It isn’t because women are inherently weak or because they are too fragile or
ignorant. It is because on some level they can identify with being the ball.
Women don’t literally have experience with being a ball, but she argues very
articulately in the earlier quote that women are denied subjectivity. They are
the subject because they are a human, but in comparison to men, they are the
objects. They are being manipulated and controlled from the outside, so before
they can pick up that ball, they have to also know that all of that oppression
is on their shoulders. Men, being simply subjects, can manipulate the ball with
ease because they have no cultural restraints put upon them that make them
believe that they have to overcome the inherent inability to throw. This supports
the data from the video as well.
This comes through in the media
every day. In order to make someone look weak, it is required to make him look
like a woman. In the picture below, President Obama is throwing a baseball in a
pose that is normally associated with the way that females throw a ball. The
magazine title calls him a “whimp” and then makes claims that since he throws like
a woman, he must be too insecure to properly run the country. This is the kind
of cultural attitudes that girls and women internalize.
Think of how women sit and stand
every day. It’s hard to picture because we don’t think of women standing a
certain way because it’s not verbalized often that everyday body comportment is
gendered. Women internally and subconsciously know that they have no place or
right to occupy a large amount of space, so when we see women doing that, it is
startling to us. We see that something is not aligned, and it makes us anxious.
This is why it is necessary to unpack these meanings. We must pay closer
attention to the everyday examples of female body comportment so that we can
put an end to the stigma that causes it. It is a symptom of a greater issue in
our society.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LD5Xm5u7UDM
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