Hired, Fa$ter, $tronger
The history and prevailing images of sport are predominantly male. Sports figures are said to be heroic in decidedly male terms—athletes are valued because they are "large, strong, often violent, record-setting champions." The male qualities of the athlete are central to the appeal of sports that crosses class, national and political lines.
Burstyn argues that "the ways in which the element of physical content of sports has been gendered are central to its appeal. The actions that the dominant sports forms practise and celebrate are `higher, faster, stronger,' in the succinct words of the Olympic motto. This is at once an industrial and a masculinist motto, for it condenses within its ideal bodies and activities the technomorphism of industrial capitalism (the ideal of the machine) and the biomorphism of maleness (the muscular superiority of males)." (22-23)
Even in the context of presumed male athletic superiority lies the essential fact that athletes are objects serving a purpose other than their own competitive goals. To survive as a professional athlete, one serves the needs of the athletic organization, the government or the corporate sponsor.
Just as Marx argued that practitioners of even the most honored professions have become the servants of capital, so too have athletes been reduced to wage laborers, even if that wage seems exorbitantly high to the fans who root for them and purchase the products they endorse.
Another aspect of the control of sport outside the playing field is the ritualized nature of athletic competition. Gone is the improvised, free-flowing game of childhood that lasts until dark in favor of a highly-controlled spectator sport. Domed stadia make competition possible in any season and any weather conditions, and the demands of the media and the marketplace help to determine the pace of the game.
It is not surprising, then, that every January, the cost of commercial television time gets almost as much attention as the strengths and vulnerabilities of the combatants in football's Super Bowl.
Gentlemen and Savages
Violence and aggressive behavior are endemic to the sports experience. Burstyn argues that the gentleman athlete, the sportsman, has been replaced by a far more aggressive paradigm.
She notes that "in the official middle-class mores of the nineteenth century, to be a good man was to be a man of `character,' one who met the rigorous standards of masculine and class duty. This ideal included being robustly active and exercising sexual restraint according to the dictates of the spermatic economy." (91)
As it became clear that sport was a commodity to be sold in the raucous marketplace of the early twentieth century, the ideal "Christian gentleman" model of the sportsman was replaced by a more aggressive, sexualized and (often) racialized one.
Citing Kevin White's work on the emergence of male masculine models, Burstyn notes that by the 1920s, the qualities of "underworld primitivism"—violence, sexual promiscuity without responsibility, and aggression—had moved into the center of American idealizations of masculinity." (90) Could Mike Tyson be far behind?
At the same time, sport itself was presumed to be the great civilizing force among those who had never experienced the influence of the "Christian gentleman" model. Participation in athletics was a way to civilize the "savages and semi-savages" of America's new immigrant population and the children of crowded city streets upon whom family, community and religion now had less of a strong behavioral hold.
Sport provided a mechanism for enforcing proper social habits for young men who had not been raised to value restraint and "character." Inevitably, the social control potential of organized sport served distinct class interests. As Burstyn notes, "'Get them off the streets and they won't riot or strike' was paired with 'Send them to the gym or playing field and they won't masturbate or fornicate.'"
Proponents of Muscular Christianity and later reform movements saw social salvation in sports. Many reformers hoped to civilize young men by having them channel their aggression onto the playing field in preparation for the discipline that their bosses would require of them in the factory or the bravery their country would require of them in a real war.
Proponents of public and private investment in athletic facilities and competitions for young men "viewed athletics as a way to build strength, create habits of dominance, teach abstract principles of group effort and common goals, promote the values of nineteenth-century Christianity, and thus to harness and control men's sexual impulses in the service of worthy social enterprises . . . sport was sold as a safe, nonsexual activity for men, and an acceptable celebration of the strong male body." (92)
Equality vs. Hypermasculinism
Burstyn argues that the hypermasculinist approach to sports that emerged out of the nineteenth century coincided with the appearance of activism by women for equality in the larger political and social world.
She argues that "conditions were ripe for sport to change toward greater egalitarianism;" yet just as the women's rights and suffragist movements brought about change over many decades with the realization that there is much work to be done to insure gender equality in the twenty-first century, earlier models of sport as a representation of masculinist ideals have been slow to yield to a more egalitarian approach.
"Late in the 1990s," she argues, "women's participation in sport notwithstanding, the core men's sports and the culture that derives from them remain prime sites for the regeneration of masculinist mythologies—fictive master narratives of heroic manhood that homogenize in fantasy and symbol a reality of diverse, contradictory masculinities that are often far from ideal." (103)
Marketing the Meat Market
One aspect of this far from ideal masculine world is the dehumanization and alienation of the athlete. Athletes are compared to physical standards that are presumed to determine performance on the field.
Can a football running back run fast enough if his calves are small? Can a defensive lineman provide enough "muscle" against the opposition if he has skinny arms? Can a pitcher be effective if he is too short or a shortstop get in front of the ball in the infield if he's too tall? How do we explain the 5'4" highly successful professional basketball player Mugsy Bogues?
In short, college and professional sports represent a "meat market" approach to judging athletes. It is not at all surprising to find similar standards and presumptions about physical prowess and body type permeating the ranks of the Little League and Pop Warner coaches.
For those athletes who possess the right attributes and who look good on camera, the sports nexus provides opportunities to use their bodies to sell products in a global marketplace. The appeal is not the jacket or the shoe, but the athlete himself.
As Michael Jordan's image of masculine perfection sells Air Jordan shoes and as he earns millions of dollars for endorsing products that bear his name, the women workers in the Southeast Asian factories that manufacture these items earn wages that at best barely keep them out of poverty. But the plight of sweatshop workers doesn't sell shoes. It's the panache of athletes like Jordan and their appeal to young consumers that keeps Nike in business. The world of sports that Burstyn describes is an overwhelmingly male world that treats women as objects of sexual desire, wives and mothers, and often as the recipients of off-the-field physical abuse. She cites rapes of college women by athletes, abuse against wives and girl friends, and the use of "female," "woman," "bitch" and "pussy" as insults to keep male athletes in line, as examples of violence against women.
In this respect, sports are similar to the military, prison and all-male boarding schools in their all-encompassing anti-female approach to conditioning young men. To be a real man is to be hard, unrelenting and violent.
This condition of the world sports is anything but salutary, in Burstyn's view. She offers several specific recommendations for change: "Diminish the selective brutalization of males inside and outside sport. Change the `sacrificial' nature of sport for both sexes. Shift the emphasis from aggressive and competitive to cooperative and expressive games and disciplines. Pursue lively physicality for the majority."
Burstyn's conclusion states her goal to "reclaim physical culture from corporate culture," in order to "balance `masculine' and `feminine' in our culture and within ourselves (and to) find ways to treat our bodies, our children, and our biosphere with respect and affirmation for our diverse natures, and for the cooperative capacities that make us capable of helping, not just dominating, our fellow creatures." (276)
Unlikely as they are to get much air time on the sports highlights, these ideas are worthy of consideration.
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