The
above clip, a famous scene from the beloved 1993 movie, The Sandlot, features a phrase that can be heard in various
iterations on baseball diamonds, soccer fields, and basketball courts: “You
play ball like a girl,” “you throw like a girl,” “don’t kick like that, you
look like a girl.” Hurled at both men and women athletes of all ages, this
exclamation is the ultimate insult. It is clear that to “insert action”
like a girl and – by extension – to be
a girl is to be weak, is to be fearful, is to be secondary, and most of all, is
to be avoided at all costs.
This
assertion is evidenced in the aforementioned scene. As the opposing teams stand
off on the baseball diamond, their leaders begin a battle of insults. These
include: “scab-eater,” “idiot,” and “fart-sniffer.” None of these, however, are
seemingly as powerful or as hurtful as “You play ball like a girl,” which not
only prompts a collective gasp from both teams, but also affectively ends the
verbal war and prompts a physical test (a game of baseball) of masculinity, or
the boys’ ability to “play ball like a MAN.”
In
"Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of
Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality," Iris Marion Young discusses
the origin of the association of femininity with weakness in athletics and
addresses the physiological differences between male and female bodies that
seemingly affect their sporting abilities. She notes that although pre-pubescent
male and female bodies are essentially the same, the stigmas of female bodies
as weak and unfavorable are present from an extremely young age, as is the
visible difference between male and female bodily comportment.
Young asserts that this visible difference in the bodily
carriage of young children despite a lack of physical difference is a result of
their socialization toward or against femininity. She defines that which is
feminine as “a set of structures and conditions which delimit the typical situation
of being a woman in a particular society, as well as the typical way in which
this situation is lived by the women themselves” (Young 140).
Girlhood, femaleness, and femininity are thus conflated.
Although not all girls are female, not all girls are feminine, and not all
feminine bodies are female, these categorizations are constructed as naturally
and exclusively existing together. Thus, female bodies are socialized as
feminine girls, creating an association between femaleness, femininity, and
perceived weakness and lack of athletic ability.
Young
asserts that this suggests that socialization affects not only the perception
of male and female bodies, but also the very behavior and demeanor of those
bodies. Drawing on Simon de Beauvoir to elucidate this assertion, Young
notes:
“When de Beauvoir does talk about the woman's bodily being
and her physical relation to her surroundings, she tends to focus on the more
evident facts of a woman's physiology. She discusses how women experience the
body as a burden” (Young 139).
In this way, women’s bodily comportment is not necessitated
by biology, but rather induced by external and internalized societal pressures
and expectations. Socialized to view their bodies as taking up undeserved space
(see: Sandra Lee Bartky’s “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of
Patriarchal Power), women thus experience them “as burdens” and move less
aggressively, with less tenacity as a result. On this subject, Young writes:
“Reflection on
feminine comportment and body movement in other physical activities reveals
that these also are frequently characterized, much as in the throwing case, by
a failure to make full use of the body's spatial and lateral potentialities”
(Young 139 – 142).
Thus, it is not the physiological differences between male
and female bodies that render one more “naturally” athletic than the other, but
rather the different perceptions and socializations of those bodies that limit
women’s abilities.
While Young explores the “you throw like a girl” insult as a
product of societal expectations regarding femininity, speaker and educator Tony
Porter discusses the fear of the feminine as a product of men’s socialization
toward masculinity. In his Ted Talk, “A call to men,” he describes an instance
in which he asked a young boy how he would feel if his coach told him he played
like a girl. He announces that the boy responded more severely than he
expected, stating, “It would destroy me.” In response, Porter asks the
audience, “What are we then teaching boys about girls?”
 |
| Via The Washington Post. |
Young, Iris Marion. "Throwing Like a
Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality." Human Studies 3.2 (1980): 137-56. JSTOR.
Web. 7 Apr. 2014. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/20008753>.
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