The first Olympic games where women were allowed to play were in 1900 summer Olympics, 4 years after the first formal Olympic games took place. Even though women were allowed to play at that time many countries just had only male delegations. This discrepancy, comes from a long time ago. Traditionally men have always been able to play sports, they were encouraged to be athletes because that made them fit and healthy. On the other hand, women has always been seen as inferior to man. As long as women’s activities are related to sustaining their families then, it is ok for them to use physical strength. The objective of this paper was to find sex role bias in sports coverage. If one surf on the internet, it is not hard to realize the difference in the amount of sports coverage in men leagues compared to women leagues. Men’s sport coverage is everywhere, for any sport you can imagine. However, it is not the case for women.
The article I chose is called “Sexism and Homophobia in Sports: A co- Dependency That Needs Our Attention”. It starts by describing how similar homophobia is to sexism in sports. It makes reference to a column that Mark Birk an NFL football player for the Baltimore Ravens, champions of the Super Bowl 2013) who wrote about how he disagrees about gay marriage and that it will affect his children, not him.
The first step to homophobia is sexism. Is that discouragement that starts when we are children and we are told that we have to be strong. Naturally, men are different from women. However, schools should discourage sexist behaviors from the very beginning of children’s’ life. Phrases such as: You throw like a girl, my sister hits harder than you. Are clearly highlighting that girls are not strong and are not good in sports.
The Author explains that sports are typically associated with masculinity. Such as physical strength, prowess and athleticism. Men’s sports tend to embrace this concept while women “struggle to curb them”. That is how people start with the sexism.
It is also evident when man receive a title after winning a competition, the media shows him celebrating with his teammates showing the grace of the sport. On the other hand women are shown with their husbands and children, which focus on her role in the family more than in the actual sport.
Society also has a problem on how it sees LGBT (lesbian gay bisexual and transgender) people. Gay man are stereotyped as feminine and less athletic, while women who are very athletic are assumed to be lesbians. It seems that we see this stereotypes are related to which sports they play. One can appreciate how some sports are bounded to conform what people expect. Female athletes are often dressed with skirts, which do not have a functional purpose more than show femininity while man are excluded from sports such as synchronized swimming.
This is not right, I think that what we should concentrate is in the performance of the sport not in if it fits the standards of some people. The main reason why scientists have not been able to create a map of brain just like a map of the body, is because even though some areas of our brains are similarly distributed for all people, each brain is different in distribution and chemical wise. That explains why each person has a different personality and way of thinking.
I personally do not judge a women for the sport she performes. I think that if you play a sport at a professional level it will modify your body. For chemical and genetic reasons, each person has different tastes, and that is something that you cannot modify. If a women is happy by practicing weight lifting then she should do it and the media should not critizize them simply because it is not their problem.
People think that women shouldn’t play sports because they may look manly. But, what does not make sense to me is that there are so many women in the world and you can find so many body shapes, personalities, hair color, skin color. It is