In my junior year of high school I joined my women’s rugby club for a single season, which was about as much battery as I could stand.
Rugby is all about the nexus of dignity and savagery: nosebleeds between handshakes. As a sport for women, it epitomizes my favorite elements of the athletic world.
A women’s rugby match, for example, illustrates the incompatibility between actual third health and the wispy waves body image featured in women’s magazines. My prom dress size at age 17 was normal by Seventeen Magazine standards, but that didn’t save me from getting pummeled every time the coach let me off the bench. After a couple of muddy face-plants, skinny didn’t feel so healthy.
Bitch Magazine blogger Anna Clark calls this attribute of athleticism “physical intelligence;” sports are an opportunity for women to know both the potentials and limits inherent to their own bodies, and to develop a body image that correlates with an actual improvement in physical health.
Team sports in particular are also an opportunity for women to both collaborate and compete with other women in a set time frame and physical space. On the field, the athlete can be openly aggressive toward the opponent on the premise that it is nothing personal.
My rugby club had the ritual of eating cookies with the opposing team after the game, making happy acquaintances out of former face-planters.
This is one image of consensual violence, if such a thing exists. Competition on the playing field contrasts with the way adolescent girls often learn to compete in middle school hallways, where the atmosphere is openly sweet, yet covertly vicious.
In my life, athletics have often provided a comfortable platform for understanding my own gender. Still, as a forum for exploring gender issues, the athletic world has demonstrated some serious limits over the past year — most notably in the controversy over South African runner Caster Semenya.
In August 2009, after Semenya won gold in the women’s 800-meter at the World Athletics Championships in Berlin, Germany, international media began to question her true gender. Besides her muscular, husky disposition, Semenya seems too goddamn fast to be a girl. “Is South African Runner Caster Semenya Packin’?” wrote gossip blog Bossip, with an accompanying photo of Semenya in spandex racing shorts.
The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) has responded to such questions by conducting gender tests on Semenya. In September, major news networks rumored that she might actually be intersex — carrying characteristics of both the male and female sexes.
Though, for now, Semenya has been allowed to keep her gold metal, her body has become the center of an often careless discussion on the definition of gender. In the context of running, it seems, masculinity is anything that might give the runner an advantage on the racetrack.
At the close of this year’s Winter Olympics, another controversy arose surrounding the gender fluidity of a spandex-clad athlete — this time, figure-skater Johnny Weir. Weir fans were rightfully outraged when two Canadian sports commentators suggested that his flamboyant femininity might be a bad influence on prospective male figure skaters.
Less often discussed is the way the majority of the Olympic sportscasters — even those more charmed than dismayed by Weir’s costume choices — used Weir’s femininity as a way to downplay his athleticism.
“This is just not a very masculine sport, but the sports world has decided to treat Weir totally differently. He’s not an athlete, he’s ‘fun,’” said Brian Safi on his current.com segment, “That’s So Gay.” “Weir is a three-time national champion, but who cares when you’re ‘fabulous?’”
If Semenya’s masculinity is seen as a threatening and unfair advantage in her sport, Weir’s feminine lilts serve to make him a less-threatening competitor in a sport that has relatively subjective and political judging standards. Both controversies demonstrate that, while athletics can certainly provide a nurturing, empowering place for women, international athletics are systematically inhospitable for those who exist outside the rigid bounds of “man” and “woman.”
The fact that sports like women’s rugby are at all accessible to high school girls tells us that molds break when they don’t fit anymore, but Weir and Semenya tell us there are a few to be broken still.
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