Colette Dowling, LMSW

The fear of female physical power is cross-cultural.
When Barbara Mayer Winters became a finalist at the Acapulco cliff-diving championships, she was promptly disqualified from further jumping--for "her own protection", she was told. The men had complained about having to compete with her. "This is a death-defying activity," said one. "What would be the point if everyone saw that a woman could do the same?"
What would be the point, indeed? In some cultures the very rites of passage into adulthood require men's being able to scare hell out of women with their physical daring. Young boys from Bunlap, in the Pentecostal Islands, are taught to hurl themselves from absurdly high platforms, making twenty-five foot dives when they're as young as 5, then going on to higher and higher jumping platforms as they grow older. A National Geographic reporter watched a sixteen-year-old dive from seventy feet. When his lianas, vines tied to the ankles to break the fall, snapped, the boy remained face down on the ground, pretending to be dead, until his mother and sisters broke out sobbing, whereupon he leaped up shouting and laughing.
I wonder what this youth would he have made of the eighty- three-year-old woman who recently bungee-jumped from a bridge over a gorge in Queenstown, New Zealand, dropping 150 feet and bobbing on her line like a yo-yo. Was she scared? Not really. She said it was exhilarating.

Men's Fear of Women's Strength

Historically, men have been able to disempower and subordinate women, use their labor, influence their thoughts and secure their co-operation mainly because of the power they have held over women's bodies. At a conscious level, this has manifested itself in actual physical servitude, wherein women have been coerced into performing duties deemed appropriate to their sex. Tegla Laroupe's being required to launder the dirty clothes of her fellow male athletes from Kenya, during the Olympics, is an example. But there are subtler forms of domination. More effective than anything has been getting women to experience their bodies in ways that make men more comfortable. This conspiring of women in their own physical oppression can be seen in female bodybuilding. The sport became serious in 1980 with the creation of the American Federation of Women Bodybuilders. But from the beginning, women took care to shore up their feminine image by posing differently than male bodybuilders. They affect dance-like, less static postures which prevent onlookers from being able to see the full extent of their muscular development. Such a method "ensures that female body builders do not too closely approximate their male counterparts," one researcher explained. But this is not just the women's idea, it's something that is encouraged, if not required, by male officials who have focused entirely on "femininity" as a judging criteria for female bodybuilders. "First and foremost, the judge must bear in mind that he or she is judging a woman's bodybuilding competition and is looking for an ideal feminine physique," says the International Federation of Bodybuilding in its guidelines on judging women. " Therefore, the most important aspect is shape, a feminine shape, and controlling the development of muscle--"it must not be carried to excess, where it resembles the massive muscularity of the male physique."
Here, at last, we have written out, unvarnished, the message females have been getting since they were girls: don't develop yourself to the fullest. Keep yourself smaller, so as to seem weaker than the boys. Bodybuilding is a contest that is about being strong. It is about developing oneself physically to the max. But lo and behold, as women got more muscular, the event was redesigned for female competitors so that it has less to do with looking strong, and more to do with looking female. The old bottom line was right there in the black-and-white of the Federation of Bodybuilders criteria: for women, it's not what you do, it's how you look while doing it. The beauty of the surface is relevant for women, but not for men. Besides rewarding smaller muscles and more feminine dance poses, female bodybuilding judges are instructed to take off points for typical female wear-and- tear: stretch marks, surgical scars, cellulite. Get rid of them if you want to have chance on the bodybuilding stage.
The question of How much is too much? is, for women, continually being reassessed, and redefined. In female bodybuilding, truly muscular women have always been at a disadvantage. The irony was not lost on two film makers, who used it to pump up the drama in Pumping Iron II: The Women. To give the movie a documentary effect, two actual bodybuilders, Bev Francis, a muscular powerlifter, and Rachel McLish, who describes herself as a "powderpuff," were used as the film's main characters. Bev can dead-lift 520 pounds. Here was a woman, as Cashmore likes to put it, "who had not only challenged traditional concepts of femininity but crushed them like an aluminum beer can in her mighty fist." Rachel, by comparison, is a lifter of another dimension--someone who poses for magazine photo sessions in super femme costumes: viz., a zebra-print bikini and feather headdress with gold chains around her belly. In the story, the contest between Bev and Rachel, who are getting ready for a staged competition, structures the film's plot. "On one level," says feminist scholar Anne Balsamo, "the film is about the competition between these two female bodies. But at another level, it is a film about ideologies of femininity."
Pumping Iron II shows by whom--and for what--women bodybuilders get rewarded, and its message was nothing if not pointed: they don't get rewarded for out-and-out strength. Of eight women lifters, Bev finished last--not because she didn't lift great but because she didn't look right. Her last-place finish was used to symbolize her body's "transgressions against the cultural norm," says Balsamo, with a judge explaining that "women with "big grotesque muscles" violate the natural differences between men and women"--just in case the film audience didn't get it.
In the end, Rachel didn't win, either. That would have been too obviously retrograde. To finish off the story the scriptwriter brought in a third woman, neither too massive nor too feminine. Carla Dunlap's being a black athlete, however, threw a new variable into the mix, so that the initial tension between macho woman and powderpuff girl was never resolved, it was simply dropped. Carla became the way out of a plot dilemma that seemed, to the film makers, impossible. Though apparently they were entranced by the drama of women exhibiting great strength, they couldn't find a way to extricate themselves from the very issue they found so dramatic. They couldn't bring themselves to say a woman capable of deadlifting 550 pounds is a woman like any other.
In the real world of female bodybuilding, 1993 was a big year because the Federation finally lifted its ban on big muscles. The achievements of Bev Francis were instrumental, Cashmore believes, in the rule change. By the end of the 90s, the bigger and harder shape had become the norm, with women competitors being judged on virtually the same criteria as men. Today, women bodybuilding champions can actually make as much money from appearances and endorsements as male bodybuilders-- "perhaps," says Cashmore, "the final indignity for many men." While extreme muscular development in women is still considered a turnoff by many, in fact there has been a growing acceptance of a "bigger and harder shape." Certainly in the women's sports magazines, showing bodies that are highly developed and even big, has become the norm. The fashion magazines trail behind, although today even models show off bodies that are subtly shaped with muscle. Before the 90s, muscle in models was nowhere to be seen.

The Myth of the "Mannish" Woman

No less an authority than Lewis Terman, the creator of the first IQ test, got involved in the pressing issue of masculinity and femininity in sports. He concocted what would become the extremely influential "Attitude Interest Analysis Survey." One's attitudes and interests, he believed, were the key to determining where a given individual fell on the masculinity-femininity spectrum. An interest in sport, in Terman's schema, was a major indicator; indeed, he declared that an interest in sport was "the most masculine interest" a woman could have.. Terman decided that his tests showed that college athletes, whether they were male or female, were the high scorers in "masculinity."
One of Terman's students, E. Lowell Kelly, took all this masculine/feminine insanity to its inevitable conclusion when he came up with a system to test for "potential homosexuality." Based on a ridiculously small sample, the research results, highly publicized, caught everyone's eye. Analyzing a test group of eighteen lesbians, he had found--oh boy!--that they were "slightly less masculine" than a group of thirty-seven female college athletes. Terman and Kelly's "scales" lent supposedly scientific validity to the idea that women athletes not only lacked femininity but were even more masculine than the much- feared lesbians. This was exciting stuff. Popular magazines published articles on the new studies, accompanied by clever little M/F surveys that encouraged anxious readers to rate themselves. "How Masculine or Feminine Are You?" a magazine with a wide circulation, teased it's readers. Football, skating or tennis were the possibilities from which one was to choose a favorite sport. If one chose football, that was two points. Skating and tennis were gender-neutral enough to confer zero points. The higher the total points (there were other scoring categories besides sports) the greater the masculinity. Terman and Kelly's vaunted M/F scales fed into and supported mid-century gender proscriptions. If a girl wanted to play on her school football team there was clearly something wrong with her. End of story.

The threat of seeming masculine has kept a lot of girls and women from entering sports in a serious way--and understandably. Formidable female athletes have been shamelessly ridiculed, reduced to little more than sideshow freaks. The stronger and more athletically brilliant, the freakier their portrayal in the media. The story of Martina Navratilova is the classic example. A young defector from Communist Czechoslovakia, Navratilova was sworn in as U.S. citizen in 1981 and went on to take the world of women's tennis by storm. Over the course of her career she netted 18 Grand Slam singles titles and a record 1,438 single match victories. By 1985, she had accumulated 8.5 million dollars in winnings, more than any other player in the history of sport. This athlete's stunning achievements might have been construed as an example of using natural talent, hard work and first-rate training to reach a new level of performance. Yet the media took the position that anyone who performed as well as Martina couldn't possibly be a real woman, she could only be some sort of overly aggressive misfit. Naratilova was characterized as a "bionic sci-fi creation," an "Amazon," even "some kind of hulking predator who kept 'beating up on all those innocent girls.'" A writer for Sports Illustrated, refereed to her as "the bleached blonde Czech bisexual defector" who "bludgeoned" and "teased" her hopelessly inferior opponents and suggested she was something other than a "natural" female. Time Magazine wrote that in order to play so well, Navratilova "must have a chromosomic screw loose somewhere."
Within a few years, other women had developed their skills to the point of being able to beat Navratilova, but the smear of virilism didn't stop there, it just spread to others. Instead of returning talented female athletes to the category of normal as their ranks swelled in all sports, male writers became yet more hostile and suspicious. Even in the 90s, top women athletes were ridiculed as unfeminine. A story in the Washington Post, "The (Lesser) Games Women Play," said of female basketball players in the 1992 Barcelona games, "They walked like men, slapped hands like men."
They may have behaved like men, but of course they didn't play like men. Rather, this sportswriter jibed, "They played like junior high school boys."
Women who are successful as athletes invariably have the experience, at some point in their careers, of being described as masculine. The British golfer Enid Wilson, could "punch out an iron with masculine vigor...". Tennis players were robot-like, exhibiting "cold, tense, machine-like qualities." Aggressive male players were praised. Aggressive female players were not talented, they were cruelly merciless. When Helen Wills played, it "was almost as though a man with a rapier were sending home his vital thrusts against a foeman unarmed."
The underlying tension in women's sport has always been the presumed contradiction between physical intelligence and womanhood. From the 1930s to the 1950s, Mildred "Babe" Didrickson's fabulous athletic accomplishments were shredded in the journalistic mill as comments about her "mannish" appearance, her "hawkish and hairy" face, and her "unusual amount of male dominance" littered the tabloids. Reporters were always asking didrickson if she ever intended to marry. "It gets my goat," she said. "They seem to think I'm a strange, unnatural being summed up in the words Muscle Moll." Poor Babe. It's no wonder she finally took a husband (who knew about her lesbianism.) As a career-saver, it worked. "Babe is a Lady Now: The World's Most Amazing Athlete Has Learned to Wear Nylons and Cook for Her Huge Husband," Life magazine raved. But with all the brouhaha about Didrickson's femininity, her remarkable athletic ability got less attention than it deserved. After starring in basketball, track and field, and baseball, she became between bouts of cancer, she became the top woman golfer in the U.S. When, still in her forties, she died of the illness, the press spent less time celebrating her athletic accomplishments than her achievement of "femininity."
Men even slapped the label of gender abnormality on female children who were good athletes. At a girls' soccer match in Lewisville, Texas, fathers whose daughters' team was defeated
charged out onto the field and demanded that the three best players on the winning team be sent to the bathroom to have their sex verified. (This was in 1990!) After the game, one of the fathers further humiliated the team's nine-year-old star goalie, calling out to her, "Nice game, boy!" and "Good game, son." Young Natasha Dennis, to her credit, didn't fold, but instead remarked that someone should take the men "and check to see if they have anything between their ears."
The soccer fathers, of course, were revealing their own insecurities. Historically, men have dominated the playing fields, with athletic qualities such as aggression, competitiveness, strength, speed, and power being viewed entirely as masculine. And now not only women, but girls, kids, were appropriating those very traits. "Nice game, boy!" meanly and deliberately addressed to a girl of nine, is the sound of the world tilting.
Not all girls are as clear-headed as Natasha. The implication of lesbianism is still a fearsome challenge--for young females especially. It was partly a result of homophobic attitudes toward strong, athletic females that girls' participation in high school sports barely increased during the 60 and 70s. Post-Title IX, far fewer girls entered sports than progressive educators had hoped would. It was because, if you were a girl, you had to have guts if you wanted to play your heart out. Even in the 90s, you could be chewed up and spit out for that transgression.
The taint of lesbianism is the modern-day equivalent of the mark of the tarbrush. For the woman so marked, it changes everything. It certainly dissuades women from pursuing careers in coaching or athletic administration. A former high school athlete, and later a coach, Laura Noah knew when she was young that much of her identity was wrapped up in sports. "My mother says I was an athlete in the womb. I could pick up a basketball before I could walk." Yet she was constantly feeling that she could be successful in sports "only as long as I still looked and acted like a "girl"..."" Laura was a soccer and basketball star in high school, a four-year soccer starter at Division III Kenyon College in Ohio, won all-conference and all-regional honors and the North Coast Athletic conference's scholar-athlete award.
But she was also a lesbian. By the time she was a senior in college Laura was "out" to the team captains, and dearly wanted to come out to the rest of her team. The team captains didn't think so. They said if she came out it would be too upsetting and disruptive to the team. To Laura, it seemed as if she couldn't be both an open lesbian and an athlete. "I was holding back. I didn't feel whole." When she left coaching, at the age of 26, it was because she feared she'd to have to remain in the closet if she wanted to succeed in her field.
Some say homophobia has gotten worse as women get stronger. It has always been a big issue for female athletic coaches, whether or not they're lesbian. If they are, they're advised not to "come out." If they're not, they're categorized as lesbian anyway. For some, like Laura, the whole atmosphere is destructive and they are forced to leave the field to protect their integrity.
People's confusion about gender and athleticism is nowhere more dramatically revealed than in the story of Richard Raskind, a six-foot high-ranking player in the 35-and-older men's division of the United States Tennis Association. Richard became a surgically constructed female in 1975, changed his name to Renee Clarke, and in 1976 thrashed the defending champion in the women's division of a local tournament in La Jola, California. A suspicious reporter looked into the situation--the winner was six two-- and discovered that Renee Clarke was actually Renee Richards, the name Richard Raskin had taken after becoming a transsexual. Talk about a media circus. The clamor might eventually have died down had Richards not accepted an invitation to play in a national tournament that was a warm-up for the U.S. Open. That did it. The USTA, the WTA and the U.S. Open Committee responded by requiring all women competitors to take a sex chromosome test. Richards refused, and one year later took the case to the new York Supreme Court, which ruled that "this person is now female" and that requiring Richards to pass a chromosome test was "grossly unfair, discriminatory and inequitable, and violative of her rights." The court's decision opened the way for Richards to play in the women's singles in the 1977 U.S. Open, where he/she promptly lost in the first round to Virginia Wade. That's right. Husky, six-two Renee lost to a woman. What had everyone been so afraid of? "...that the floodgates would be opened," in Richards words. That through them "would come tumbling an endless stream of made-over Neanderthals who would brutalize Chrissie Evert and Evonne Goolagoong... Some player who was not quite good enough in men's tennis might decide to change only in order to overpower the women players."
Here, perhaps, is the most peculiar possibility of all. Did Richards lose his game as part of his makeover? Did he subconsciously weaken himself in order to play--in Bob Dylan's famous refrain-- "just like a woman"?

The Set-Up: False Ways of Assessing Performance

The idea that women are unable to achieve the same levels of physical development as men is no longer viable. If women had been considered as physically capable as men to begin with, they may have been performing at similar levels today. The only reason some women don't, some sport sociologists and even physicians suggest, is because women have been cast as biologically incapable for so long. In the new edition of the Oxford Textbook of Sports Medicine, Per-Olaf Astrand, professor emeritus of Sweden's Karolinska Institute, is one who suggests how close women's records may end up coming to men's, despite physiological differences.
A professor of Sociology at Staffordshire University, in England, Ellis Cashmore has done an historical analysis of marathon results, comparing changes in mens' and women's running times. Since 1964, the world record for women has improved by 1 hour 5 minutes and 21 seconds. During that same period the male world record has been reduced by 5 minutes 2 seconds. In 1995, the difference in the world's bests was 12 minutes 13 seconds in 1995--or about 9 percent.
"Is the performance of women inferior to that of men?" asks movement analyst Jackie Hudson. "It depends on the terms of comparison: Who, and what are being compared?" A method developed for comparing male weight lifters is finally being considered a fairer and more accurate way of assessing performance comparisons between males and females. Based on biomechanics, the calculation converts fixed race distances into units of competitor height. An example: Suppose you stand 1.67 meters (5'5 and 3/4") tall and run the 10K in 50 minutes, or 3,000 seconds. Convert the length of the race to heights by dividing race length by height. 10,000 meters divided by 1.67 meters equals 6,000 heights. Then compute velocity by dividing heights by time. Now, says Hudson, it is possible to get an accurate answer to the question, Who is the world's fastest human? This title has traditionally gone to the world record holder of the men's 100-meter-dash: Carl Lewis, who stands 6'2" tall and holds the men's world record of 9.92 seconds has a relative velocity of 5.36 heights per second. But is he actually faster than the women's world record holder? You probably have guessed the biomechanical truth. Florence Griffith- Joyner, who was 5'6-1/2" tall ran the 100-meter dash in 10.49 seconds, had a relative velocity of 5.64 height-seconds. "In other words," says Hudson, exultantly, in Women and Sport, "the fastest woman is 5.3% faster than the fastest man!"
Well, we've already gotten the picture that women have stronger legs than men, so their ability to run faster than men may not be all that surprising. But what about men's vaunted upper-body strength and relatively wider shoulders? Would they be better equipped for an upper-body event such as swimming? Not necessarily. Hudson suggests comparing Janet Evans, the 5'5" women's world record holder with 15:52.1 min in the 1,500-meter- freestyle, with Vladimir Salnikov, the 5'11" men's record holder with 14:54.76 min. When a biomechanical assessment is made, Hudson shows us, Evans' velocity is .949 heights per second and Salnikov's is .926 heights/sec, a difference of 2.5% in favor of Evans. (Let's hear it for fancy math.) When measurements are made in absolute terms the males are faster. However, when these fairer biomechanical measurements, which take into account an individual's size, are made, the physical abilities of females appear to be equal, and sometimes superior, to those of males. What happens, skeptics may wonder, when the base of comparison is broadened? When 57 women and 70 men who swam the 100-meter freestyle in the 1988 Olympics were compared inch for inch, the men were 2.1% faster. This difference appears to support the hypothesis that swimming, because it's an upper-body sport, favors men. However, the other characteristics of the contestants are relevant: Age is significantly related to velocity, and the men were 2.8 years older. Might the women reduce the velocity differential with 2.8 more years of training? That is a tantalizing question.
But surely, males have some physical advantages. Well yes, although, as I'll show, so do women. On average, men can carry and use more oxygen. They tend to be heavier--an advantage in football--and taller: handy in basketball and volleyball. Men have more lean muscle mass, convenient in sports requiring explosive power--which happens to include most of the sports men have invented. Less muscle-bound, women generally have better flexibility, useful in gymnastics, diving, and skating. Their lower center of gravity helps in hockey, golf, tennis, baseball, and even basketball. Women sweat better (less dripping, therefore better evaporation), which is critical, since bodies need to remain cool to function efficiently. A physiologist at the University of Virginia tested athletes under various conditions of heat, humidity, exercise, and nutritional intake, and concluded that women are better able to adjust to environmental changes. "In every case, females were better able to handle the stress," she says.
You might be wondering whether closing the strength gap is something only elite female athletes are capable of. Significantly, the difference is greater between elite women and ordinary athletes, than it is between elite men and ordinary athletes. As an example, the average female 18-year-old needs 10 min and 51 sec to run a mile whereas the women's world record holder needs just 39% of that time (4:15). By contrast, the male champion completes the mile in about half (49%) the time taken by the average male 18-year-old. (7:35). Young adult women appear to be farther from their athletic potential than their male counterparts.
Analyzing jumping in men and women, researchers tested military trainees on the task of maximal vertical jumping while carrying a rifle and wearing an 80-pound backpack. The women and men subjects differed significantly on three variables: The men jumped higher, took longer to jump, and created greater forces against the ground in preparing to jump. From these results the researchers concluded that the men were "better performers" than the women. Yet biomechanics experts like Jackie Hudson will tell you that jump scores probably would have been insignificant if different heights of the trainees had been taken into consideration. Also, she notes, taking longer to jump is a characteristic of poor performance, not good performance.
Interestingly, as well, the trainees' performance declined when subjects were wearing the 80-pound pack as opposed to no pack, and the decline was similar for both 135-pound women and 160- pound men.
Perhaps the most bias-free--method of analyzing sports performance came into use in the late 90s when scientists from the Human Performance Institute at the University of Texas began applying tools used in engineering to construct a complex mathematical model for assessing the requirements for a given level of performance on a given task. Using computers, they threw into the hopper every conceivable variable relative to skill and motor performance. Their model unearthed very specific skill deficits that would allow coaches and Phys Ed teachers to tailor-make regimens to help individual athletes. If inadequate sprinting speed were teased out as a problem in someone's baseball performance, then activities to enhance sprinting abilities would be prescribed. Improvement came from addressing specific motor deficits.
Jackie Hudson's research found that when novice, intermediate/advanced, and elite college women basketball players were compared on free-throw-shooting technique, the novice players were more likely to use restricted range of motion and to veer off balance. From this, she extrapolated that the limited range of motion may have been a function of the instability and that improving balance regulation might be a general goal for players in the novice phase. At the intermediate/advanced phaseof skill development, reduced range of motion correlated with missed shots. This led Hudson to speculate that tasks for improving range of motion might be a general goal for players in the intermediate learning phase.
What does all this mean for women? It's the importance of The Training Effect again. What these biomechanical models do is break down skill problems into precise units with clearcut techniques for correcting them. As the performance mystique is penetrated by more sophisticated assessment tools, it becomes clearer not only what was is required for better performance, but that the potential for improvement has nothing to do with gender and everything to do with know-how.

The Backlash

Just as we're uncovering historical evidence of women whose physical feats, until now, have been lost to us, so are we uncovering scientific evidence that women inherently are no more frail than men. The breaking through of this long suppressed information has brought the boom of male backlash crashing down. As Susan Faludi so solidly nailed it, in her Pulitzer prize- winning book, Backlash, the negative reaction to womens' progress is a recurring phenomenon. Its chilling effect can be counted on whenever women appear to be making some progress toward equality.
With women around the world developing Physical Intelligence, using strength to justify a power difference between genders is on its way to becoming history. That this is powerfully threatening to men can be seen in the phenomenal backlash. Virtually everyone involved in the forward movement of women's sport has been subjected to male hostility. Sometimes the backlash is personal, sometimes institutional. Sometimes it is ridiculous in its effect, sometimes devastating. But this much can be said without risk of rebuttal: men don't like women's bold new intrusion into the insular, comforting, antifemale world of sport. As Susan Faludi wrote, backlash is not triggered by women's achieving full equality, but when they show an increased possibility of doing so. "It is a preemptive strike," she says, "that stops women long before they reach the finish line."
Even women once removed in the fight for the right to play--not the players themselves, but those who write about the players-- have been punished for their temerity, especially if they were writing about men. A Florida sportswriter, Jeannie Roberts recalls, of entering male locker rooms in the early 70s, "I had things. like jockstraps 'accidentally' thrown at me... and my fellow reports would pretend that they didn't see a thing." There was a male fraternity of sportswriters who were "embarrassed," Roberts says, "to show any kind of support for female reporters." To do so was "a sign of weakness. If they show any allegiance at all it's as if they become a traitor to the fraternity."
With only a dozen or so women sportswriters in the U.S. having broken into the coverage of men's sports, Time Inc. sued to allow Sports Illustrated reporter Melissa Ludtke to enter the New York Yankee clubhouse--the first time a woman had broached this hermetically sealed bubble of masculine sweat and self aggrandizement. It was 1978. Certainly getting into the clubhouse, or lockeroom, or any other fortress of male exclusivity had never been pleasant for women pioneering the break-ins, but in the arena of sport, the very physicality of the atmosphere heightened the hostility of the men's reaction. In September 1990, Lisa Olson, a sports reporter for the Boston herald, whose regular beat was football, was sexually harassed in the New England Patriots locker room. Zeke Mowatt shook his genitals at her while making lewd remarks. Team members watched and cheered. Management took no action.
Supported by many of her peers, Olson publicly protested. Victor Kiam, owner of the Patriots, dismissed the incident until media attention and threatened feminist boycotts of Remington, also his company, convinced him the public was taking the incident seriously. Finally Kiam sent Olson an official apology. Privately, however, the smarm continued. Four months later, Kiam found himself in the appalling position of having to apologize once again to Olson, this time for a blatantly sexist joke he'd made about her at a Patriots banquet.
Olson, in the meantime, was receiving threats and harassing phone calls. The incident in the Patriots locker room had apparently touched a chord and the reaction was widespread, and venomous. Vendors sold inflatable "Lisa" dolls outside Foxboro Stadium, and male fans amused themselves by engaging dolls in "lewd and suggestive acts." This jolly romp spread to other venues. In Fenway Park, the following year, male spectators at a baseball game tossed plastic, life-sized female blow-up dolls from spectator to spectator. It was a gang-bang atmosphere. "Yeah, yeah, do her!", men yelled, fists punching the air. Reporter Bella English wrote, "they were touching her breasts... They threw her around to each other. These are grown men we're talking about. It was disgusting. It was like an advertisement for rape."
Reports of harassment of female sportswriters mounted: a football player running a razor up a woman's leg; another player sending a female sportswriter a rat in a pink box; the ubiquitous hurling of jockstraps and obscenities at women writers as they try to get the after-game story--as any male sportswriter would do--in the locker room. There were those in the world of sport, like Frank Deford (six times named Sportswriter of the Year) who tried to explain away the hostility toward women. "It's not a matter of... breaking into a profession," he said. "It's a matter of breaking down a culture and that is eminently harder to do. We (men) think we need you for procreation and recreation, but we don't need you for sports."
Nowhere is misogyny more blatantly on display than in male rugby culture where, post-game, men sing songs depicting women as "loathsome creatures with insatiable sexual appetites and dangerous sexual organs." They talk about raping other men's girlfriends and mothers, sociologist-anthropologist Steven P. Schecht informed a meeting of the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport. In a presentation on the misogynism that flourishes in rugby culture, Schecht described witnessing a coach telling a player, "Fuck you, you pussy. Just shut the fuck up, or I'll bend you over (and) fuck ya like a bitch." Code terms for plays included: "Fucked your mother"; "Your mother's a cunt"; "Gang banged your girlfriend; "and "suck my dick."
Beginning in the late 1960s, sociologists began to open "the back door" of sport, a social institution whose influence the above writers compare to the family, the media, the economy, education and politics. "There is a seamy side to sport that involves inequality, oppression, discrimination, scandal, deviant behavior, and violence," write the authors of a book on the sociology of sport. "For many years this seamy side of sport remained hidden." The seamy side of everything remains hidden for as long as it can. The problems in sport, including misogynism of the sort Schecht described in rugby culture, are not encapsulated instances of violence and hatred, they are reflections of society as a whole. Athletic skill is masculinity, so far as men are concerned. Nor is it only the strongest, most aggressive female athletes who create a threat, for what they can do, others can obviously do if they put in the training effort. "All of us, collectively, are a threat," wrote Mariah Burton Nelson. "A threat to male privilege and to masculinity as defined through manly sports."



The Estrogen Effect

In the 19th century, anatomists believed that one's sex was not limited to one's reproductive organs but affected every part of the body. The skeleton itself was thought to prove woman's inferiority, particularly her smaller (and thus, presumably, less intellectually capable) cranium. By the end of the nineteenth century, female and male bodies were virtually understood as opposites, each having different organs, functions, and even different feelings.
In the 1920s and 30s, the discovery of the hormones estrogen and testosterone added a new dimension to medicine's beliefs about sexual difference. The findings of endocrinology seemed profoundly to validate male-female polarity. Estrogen and testosterone (which, today, are no longer viewed as "sex" hormones, both being necessary to the health and functioning of both male and female) became the new scientific bedrock of the view of women as soft and weak and men as tough and strong. In the popular imagination, hormones almost replaced genitals as the signifiers of sex. This endocrinological view of male and female persisted until the last decade of the 20th century.

The long-standing perception that women are 'the weaker sex' continues to affect women's attitudes toward sport and physical activity. But this is changing as the extraordinary breakthroughs of elite-level women athletes shatter the remnants of the Frailty Myth. Consider, as one dramatic example, Sweden's Lyudmila Engquist, the 35-year-old runner who won the gold medal in the 100-meter hurdles in the 1966 Olympic Games in Atlanta and then, in the spring of 1999, went on to face her greatest trial of her life so far. In March of that year she discovered a lump in her breast. In April she had a mastectomy. In May she began chemotherapy. But then, stunningly, after the fourth of her six scheduled chemo sessions, she was back in action, competing at a track meet! When her name was announced as she stood behind the starting blocks, the other racers clapped. Finishing that race would be triumph enough, but lo! she won it--won it in 12.68 seconds, shaving 18-hundredths off her Olympics gold medal time.
Lyudmila's physician, Dr. Arne Ljungqvist, vice president of the International Amateur Athletic Federation and head of the cancer foundation in Sweden, explained that the athlete's strength had been a bonus in the healing process. Engquist hadn't let enough time past to lose muscle. Five days
after surgery she was using small weights; a month after, she and was doing clean-and-jerk exercises with over 120 pounds of weight. She continued training throughout the balance of her chemotherapy.
Farewell to the cult of female invalidism. Yes, many men have more lean muscle mass than women--due, in part, to their having more testosterone--but women actually have some physical advantages over men, and they come, some of them, from women's having more estrogen. Recent studies suggest that the hormone long associated with women's reproductive functioning buffers them against muscle soreness after exercise. Soreness results from micro-tears in muscle tissue. "The animal data are very clear," says Dr. Priscilla Clarkson, an exercise physiologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Male rats show much more muscle damage, post-exercise, than female rats. "Estrogen seems to explain the difference." When male rats were given estrogen they sustained less muscle damage. It's not clear yet how estrogen does its protecting, but Clarkson speculates that the hormone "may be able to insert itself into cells, like muscle membranes, and stabilize them, which would protect them from tearing."
God knows the woman who is exerts 150 pounds of force in expelling her child into the world wants a little muscle protection when she needs it. The sex difference in muscle soreness, in any event, may help explain why women can endure longer exercise sessions than men. "Women may accumulate less damage over the course of the long event, which would enable them to perform better," one physiologist suggests.
New hormone research challenges the traditional view of osteoporosis as a "women's" disease linked to menopause.
Of the 10 million Americans who have osteoporosis, more than 1.5 million are men, and 1 in 8 men over 50 will have an osteoporosis-related fracture. In an ironic reverse of the Frailty Myth, osteoporosis is actually far more prevalent in men than had previously been thought. Medical textbooks used to describe osteoporosis in men as the result of low testosterone levels caused by hypogonadism, a quite rare phenomenon. But new studies show that estrogen is the more central player in men's osteoporosis. In Framingham, Massachusetts, researchers studied 385 elderly men for 8 years, tracking both their bone density and their estrogen levels. The correlation was startling: men with the best bones had the highest estrogen levels. The connection between hypogonadism and low bone density in men was in fact negligible. "This is surprising," said Dr. B. Lawrence Riggs, a professor of medical research at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, who found that estrogen naturally falls in men after about age 65. "Three years ago none of us would have thought estrogen loss was a factor in male osteoporosis."
Historically, men's reproductive capacity has never been suspected of being compromised by physical exertion, but that that idea is being shattered by modern science. (Medicine giveth, and medicine taketh away.) A recent study, for example, found that sperm count was lowered in men following long distance racing. And as endocrinology advances. We are beginning to find that the precious "sex hormones" sometimes up and provide advantages for the opposite sex. For example, new research indicates that androgen (testosterone) enhances spatial abilityin women but inhibits it in men. A fascinating study published in Perceptual Motor Skills, in 1998, tested spatial abilities (visualization and orientation) in 150 men and 150 women collegiate athletes in different varsity sports. Across the board, women scored significantly higher than men in their ability to visualize and orient, but in basketball their superior spatial capacities were off the charts.

The New Physical Woman

In New York City there's a legendary outdoor basketball court on the corner of West fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, in Greenwich Village. It's called "The Cage." For years men have pounded up against one another in The Cage for years, on all but the coldest days of winter. One day in the summer of '99 a girl walked into The Cage. Natasha Green, a high-school basketball star, had who'd taken the subway down from the Bronx to try out her skills against the men and boys. Sixteen years old and five- foot-nine, Natasha jumped right in. She stayed with her man as he tried to switch directions and drive to the basket. Reaching out her hand, she poked the ball loose as he headed by, "stripping him clean." as the expression goes. She turned, took five hard dribbles and burst back to the basket for a lay up.
Hoots, and long low whistles came from a couple of fence-hanging spectators who weren't accustomed to seeing a woman hold her on the blacktop, much less at this particular spot, the most revered of all for pick-up basketball in Manhattan .
Entering the males' home turf with no advocate, no backing, no ref to say what's fair play or what isn't, is probably the toughest challenge for females interested in playing hard. Pickup basketball is the game at its most primal--not for the faint of heart, whether male or female. But it's harder, much harder, for a woman to get into a long established game of pick-up.
Guys "playing her like a guy" is the supreme compliment a female player can receive, Natasha says. It's not because she wants to be like a guy, but because she wants improve her game. "Coming out here is how I get better," she says. "So if a guy's not going to play me hard, I'd rather he not even play."
Women's attitudes change when they push themselves athletically. Nicola Thost, of Germany represents a new breed of female snowboarders, going bigger than ever before. At 19, she brought a gold medal home from the 1998 Olympics, in Nagano. She's so extreme in her moves she's often been mistaken for a boy. "It's a pleasure to see other girls improving so much: like Shannon Dunn with a 720, and so many girls with a good, clean McTwist," she says. "We have to push the limits all the time."
It's a matter of figuring the angles, of understanding the particular challenges of any given sport. With snowboarding, it's important to get height. You have to be strong, but strong isn't the whole game. As Nicola says, some of the guys who snowboard are "so tiny, so muscular. It's clear it's technique."
Technique and attitude. "You must get in your mind that you can do it." Nicola says she has no "scary feelings." Fear just isn't a part of it. "I just take speed, and don't speed-check, and then just see how high I can go. It's such a good feeling to go big, If you think, 'Oh my gosh, I can't fall hard, I'm afraid I'll injure myself,' then it's already too late.
Overcoming the fear of falling is a challenge for today's woman, just as overcoming the "fear of flying"--the fear of risk and adventure-- was something for Erica Jong's generation of overly protected females to overcome. A bestselling book in the 1970s, Fear of Flying celebrated emotional risk-taking and sexual adventure for women. Today, it's fear of physical risk-taking that women have come to see is holding them back. They want the courage to go the distance, to raise their sites past what they'd thought they were capable of. Modeling this, so dramatically, are the exploits of elite women athletes, women who started out with ordinary skills, but who kept pushing it. In doing so, although this was rarely if ever the intent, they began seriously challenging the concept of male physical superiority.

Going the Distance

"In 1967, people thought women couldn't do long runs. It wasn't supposed to be 'feminine,'" says Katherine Switzer, the woman who opened the gateway to women's phenomenal success in long distance sports. That year, an irate official had tried to pull Switzer out of the then all-male Boston Marathon. She dodged him and kept running, becoming the first woman to officially complete the race. Her run made headlines, the 20-year-old college student made history, and women's competitive running took off. Switzer would be the one to push women's distance running all the way to the Olympics. In 1974 she won the women's division of the New York marathon, then went on to launch a series of international races that led to the establishment of the first women's Olympics marathon, in the 1984 summer Games. In her fifties, Switzer now brings the message of running to women of all ages via her work promoting the Avon races. She's inspired by her own mother, Ruth Rothfarb, who began walking after heart surgery at age 72 and completed her first marathon at 81.
Some of the elite women athletes' most compelling advances have been in swimming. In marathon and long-distance cold-water swims women usually outswim the men. In 1995, Australian champion Shelly Taylor-Smith set the record for both men and women when she swam around Manhattan in 5 hours 45 minutes and 26 seconds. In 1998, she did it again, this time pulling ahead to win after she'd dropped half a mile behind two male swimmers. "I call it, 'catching up with the boys,'" she said.
Seana Hogan recently cycled the four hundred miles from San Francisco to Los Angeles in nineteen hours, forty-nine minutes, breaking the previous men's record by almost an hour.
Helen Klein's world-record distance in a twenty-four hour race-- 109.5 miles--exceeds the best distance for an American man in her age group, which was 65-69.
The phenomenon of the older woman athlete is one of the more amazing aspects of the shattering of the frailty myth. If they keep training, they can retain endurance capabilities into late life. I am thinking in particular of a woman who looks forward each year to participating in the Avon Running Global Women's Circuit. Mary Hanes was 83 and preparing to run in Connecticut, in the Hartford 10K when I heard her story, in the summer of 1998. She'd started running 15 years earlier, at the age of 65. "I lost 22 pounds when I started and have kept it off," says Hanes, who also plays tennis, basketball and throws javelin. "Once you get going, you'd be amazed at what you can do."
Today, results of medical studies are encouraging to the woman who wants to keep moving no matter what her age. A study in The New England Journal of medicine found that walking/strolling just 2 miles a day cuts the risk of death almost in half for people in their 60s, 70s, and 80s. A 1995 Harvard Medical School study noted a 40 percent reduction in risk of heart disease for women who exercise.
Equally as amazing as the marathoning octogenarians, on the other end of the age spectrum, are the football playing girls.
Girls began playing football in the late 80s, and by the 90s had graduated to tackle football, all padded up and helmeted, playing on their high school football teams with and against boys their own age. As the century turned, a sixth-grader in New Orleans who'd been playing tackle football for five years became the first girl to play on the all-star team in her parish. Her coach says she's one of the best offensive players he's ever worked with.
It's not just tokenism, either. At Lincoln High School, in Los Angeles, four girls play on the football team. One of them, in the fall of 1999, was a finalist for homecoming queen. "The world as we knew it has changed forever," said Time magazine.
In 1998 there were 708 girls playing high school football, according to the national Federation of State High School Associations.
Efforts are underway to launch a professional tackle football league for women. In December 1999, the New York Sharks played an exhibition game with the Minnesota Vixens. "This is a dream come true for all of us," said lawyer Lyn Lewis, who plays offensive tackle for the Sharks. "I grew up playing football with the guys. Then when you go to a certain age you couldn't play anything organized... Out of all the major sports, this is the last one that brought women to its playground."
Women, there is no doubt about it, are going the distance. America's women's ice hockey team made it's debut--and won the gold its first time out! "These were warriors, hard-charging competitors who came to win, not just play,"said The New York Times, describing the 1998 Olympic women's ice hockey team. The social implications of the win were not lost on the sports world. Said Tara Mounsey's hockey coach, "This is the final public knell of the artificial construct of what is masculine and feminine in sports."
It's apparent that no one foresaw the radical changes Title IX would lead to--that girls were not only going to catch up with boys, but in some sports would surpass them. That, in the process, they would flood the gyms and athletic fields.
Not only would they enter the competition, they would take on the most challenging and aggressive sports. By the end of the century, they would be playing football, ice hockey, rugby--and would be starting these sports at younger and younger ages. Even pre-school girls were learning contact sports--ice-hockey, for example--spurred on by fathers and brothers.
By century's end, the excitement over competition, team sports, and personal best, had become thoroughly contagious. Two million girls were playing soccer. Sixteen million women were playing softball. The breakthroughs of young females were carrying over into the lives of older women--mothers, aunts, grandmothers. As female athletics became huge in the television ratings, the effect on the rest of us was like the blowing of the whistle at the beginning of the game. Suddenly, it seemed, sixty- and seventy-year-olds were in-line skating. The young were rock climbing and challenging themselves with wilderness expeditions. Teenagers--even preteenagers--were excelling at "extreme" sports: aggressive skating, half-pipe snowboarding, skateboarding. Females of all ages had discovered that they no longer had to hold themselves back.