“The use of the separate-but-equal model is particularly cynical… equality was always a chimera or a lie; separation was real.”
-Andrea Dworkin, Right Wing Women
This article does not require the reader to have read anything else we’ve written. However, we have published two previous articles on this topic: for a look back, check out:
Why Separate Is Not Equal In Sports & Do Women Have A Place In The NHL?
Here is a simple truth: the limits of male and female biology and athletic performance are not known.
Now, it so happens that a thing called sports is designed to explore just this issue: how far can the human body be stretched towards a social goal (football being an example of a social, not biological goal)? We know that bodies are responsive to environment and training. Sports highlight the fact that biology is complicated, moldable and surprising—that’s what makes things fun. If it wasn’t so, no records would ever be broken, winners would be predetermined like in the WWF, and the Super Bowl would be akin to dropping a ball and cheering to the ever-consistent pull of gravity. GO TEAM!
What we do know are a couple facts about human biology that, when you think about it, really tell us nothing about athletic performance, just something about reproduction:
- women cannot produce sperm or impregnate.
- men cannot give birth or be pregnant.
- all human bodies respond to and are shaped by their environment.
There seems to be an assumption about women and sports that says we already know the limits of the female body.
It is said that, as women, our biological difference is our limit. That our capacity to give birth inherently molds the female body in a way that limits our performance.
Women face a culture steeped in a deep, abiding pessimism about our physical pursuits. Whether men have a limit is rarely discussed. In fact, our culture’s “ever hopeful” investment in men’s physical pursuits fuels a $70-billion-a-year industry of professional sports—even as men suffer from brain damage, life-threatening injury, and chronic debility caused by sport. This is our culture’s narrative about female: it ends where male “specialness” begins. By this definition, it must always fall short of male accomplishment.
However, the truth is much more complicated.
For example, having never bothered to look before, we in the West are only just discovering that post-partum women (a period which can last a year or more) may have physical advantages in sport. These female athletes can breathe easier because of expanded ribcages, fatigue slower due to hormone changes, have an increased chamber capacity in the heart due to increased blood volume and because of this cycle more oxygenated blood. 1 Turns out, these are the exact effects created by blood doping. Turns out, men have been using blood doping and performance enhancing drugs to mimic natural post partum physiology.
Yes, male athletes are mimicing female biology when they use hormones like EPO, and even testosterone, because in the end the desired effect is the same: to stimulate red blood cell production and blood oxygenation. Men have been using performance enhancing drugs designed to do artificially exactly what the female body is capable of doing naturally. And you only just heard about it now!
A handy chart from the Blood Doping Wikipedia page illustrating the effects of performance enhancing drugs.
It may be that we are actually strongest at the times society has told us we are the most weak. It may be that we have the most endurance during the times that they tell us to sit down and “rest”. Is it possible? Is it possible that during the times women recover the most quickly, society has made routine medical interventions like c-sections and episiotomies that prolong recovery?
♦
In the 40’s black activists were able to end racial segregation in the NFL partly by applying strategic pressure to stadium owners who were using public funds to build stadiums and then leasing only to segregated teams.
Let me ask you, is it also wrong to use public funds to build stadiums which are then leased to only sex-segregated teams?
For example, in 2010 $120 million in public funds were spent on athletic facilities for the Vancouver Olympics. Lindsey Van, a ski jumper, who held the jump record among both women and men, was not allowed access to those facilities to defend her titles. Why? Because women are not allowed to compete in Olympic ski jumping. (Why Can’t Women Ski Jump in the Olympics? – TIME). Van petitioned to be able to compete and defend her title in 2010, just as women ski jumpers had done every single Olympics since 1998. She was denied and told explicitly that it was because the International Olympic Committee (IOC) questioned the ability of women’s reproductive organs to handle the impact of landing. Gian-Franco Kasper, president of the International Ski Federation, also said in 2005 that ski jumping is “not appropriate for ladies from a medical point of view. ”2 He, too, believed that the uterus might burst during ski jumping. There is no medical evidence for this theory and no reports of any ski-jumper ever having sustained such an injury while competing, but the “common knowledge” that vigorous activity will impact women’s reproductive organs has deep, centuries-long roots in Western culture.
“Ours are on the inside, and they’re very well protected. And theirs is literally hanging outside their body.” Van said. “You tell me which is safer.” – Lindsey Van *** “I hope the girls don’t waste their time and make this a human rights issue”- Dick Pound, a Canadian member of the IOC, in response to the female ski-jumpers’ continued fight to compete in the Olympics.
The excuses for why women should not be allowed to train or compete with men have been wildly inventive, absurdly unjustified, and endlessly pseudo-scientific. In the 1800s when women began to ride bicycles, people feared the vibrations would harm the uterus (and that the seat may sexually stimulate women, which was also seen as a threat to the uterus). It was further warned, cycling “may suppress or render irregular and fearfully painful the menses, and perhaps sow the seeds for future ill health.” In the 1860s, there was the worrysome issue of female thighs working industrial sewing machines. The first woman to officially run a Marathon, Kathryn Sweitzer, recalls in her memoir how her high school’s basketball coach told her women could not play basketball because the “excessive number of jump balls could displace the uterus.”
One thing is for sure, wherever it is discovered that women can compete —whenever we show up at all— men use their resources, institutions, social narratives, and penises to separate and block our trajectory toward parity. Real parity, a situation in which men’s performances and women’s performances can actually be fairly compared. In other words, a situation where men and women are actually competing. Our “second class citizen” social status is used to check women’s physical readiness and athletic development, and when trying to stunt those factors doesn’t work, men consistently resort to barring us from competition.
Our foremother’s fought to stop wearing corsets and dresses so that they could ride bicycles, to run and to be able to play sports at all. When Title IX passed in 1972, gender segregation was assumed to be a necessary part of opening sport up to women. But
“The Awful Effects Of Velocipeding”
remember, we had only discovered competitive running did not crush ovaries 6 years earlier, when Bobbi Gibbs ran the Boston Marathon in disguise. Precisely because there is no hard-and-fast difference between men and women other than our reproductive organs, these fights always seem to come back to our uteruses. But as feminists, we know, what sets limits on our achievement is not located in our bodies at all. It is our place socially.
I believe our task now, as modern athletes and feminists, is to expose the fact that men are systematically granting us segregated, female-specific sports events with tweaked rules in order to make sure that women’s performance can never be compared to men’s. Put another way, they do this to make sure that we can never compete with men. If we do not compete with men, we remain in our place, “do not compare” to men, and our biology can be said to be the reason why—the “natural” reason why—we are second class citizens.
Although it’s taboo to suggest what I am suggesting here, which is that women aren’t inherently weaker or less fit than men, sporting women throughout history have recognized this. They recognized that getting to compete with men is crucial to true equality for women in sport and sought to compete virtually, through comparable events, if not literally by being on the field at the same time as men. Elite women athletes want equality across the sexes, and that basically boils down to the ability to compare, yes, dare I say compete, with men.
If not, if female athletes aren’t striving toward equality and continually finding it requires comparability—the breaking of the boundary between separate spheres—why did female boxers petition AIBA to have the same length of rounds as men? Why did the ski jumpers petition to be able to compete on the same size hill that men jump on? Why did bobsledders petition to have their starting line at the same place as men? Why did tennis players petition not to be required to wear skirts? After all these years and Title IX, women have been admitted to sports but no one tracking and following women’s aspirations could really believe that segregated competition is enough for us.
And so, since the 1970s, female athletes have been fighting for equality in the most arduous way possible: as individuals fighting individual sports’ governing bodies. In biathlon, cross-country skiing, and long-track speed skating women are forced to compete in shorter distances that the men in every event, even though in some cases the difference is as little as 20 meters. Women are still barred from competing in doubles luge… the examples go on and on. There is no end in sight as long as we are fighting sport-by-sport and rule-by-rule, a strategy that is getting us nowhere.
Looking strategically, we need to recognize that a major advantage men have in maintaining the status quo is that there is no single rule applied to women in sports, no single rule we can fight to even the playing field. The only single rule we can fight that will effect all sports is the fight for integration.
♦
Steep anyone in the morass of unequal rules and regulations that shapes sports sex-segregation, and it will become clear to her very quickly that the rules are not based on anything other than simple beliefs about what women should or shouldn’t do, held by men who dominate sport rule-making bodies.
The 4-man bobsleigh race is ostensibly open to women, but no woman has ever competed on a team with men in the event.
It is all about male self-definition and men’s style of identity formation, which is deeply comparative–perhaps pathologically comparative. The idea that “women can’t go as far/fast/high” is not really about women at all. In the same way, saying “white men can’t jump” is a way for white men to define their status in opposition to the black men they oppress. 3 I may not be a monster on the court, but I have a mansion, a white family and a stock portfolio to go home to.
To be man enough: superior, gifted, martial, brutal, dominant, men have to be superior to someone, gifted in comparison to some normal level of skill, dominant over someone. That is why any challenge to the notion that men are physically superior to women is so taboo and threatening. Sports, after all, are men’s things: actually invented by men, they are not plant or animal. The form they take has been crafted by men over decades and centuries. And the form sports have taken in the West has consistently explored the themes of masculinity, race, and imperialism from the perspective of the imperial white male.
Sport has been a joint effort among men to focus on and make real those very things that are said to define manhood: upper body strength, speed, uncontrolled impacts and falls, and the story that men’s biology does not just chase a ball around a chalked-off area but inherently, biologically seeks to publicly dominate with brute force.
Lindsey Van, the ski-jumper, discovered that men’s rules are totally illogical, and that this fact simply does not matter. Keeping us on our separate field is the best and most logical defense to mount for what is an indefensible, highly ideological stance. Men’s rules, when looked at as the last-ditch efforts of someone running scared, make a lot of sense. Separating women physically from men and preventing the generation of good evidence is a great way to prevent scientific inquiry into the hypothesis that men are physically superior to women.
Van has a theory as to why the fight for equality is so hot in her specific sport: “In every other sport you can see that gender gap. Then in ski jumping, there is hardly any gender gap, it’s smaller than any other sport,” Van said, adding that the gap actually gets smaller when the hills get larger, because it becomes less about power and more about technique. “I don’t think that does our sport favors. I think people see that and they want to bury it,” she says. It is quite possible that the very sports women are most competitive at, will be the last to be integrated.
Everyone in ski-jumping knew that Lindsey Van held the “hill record” at the specific hill where the Olympic ski-jumping competition would be held in the 2010 Vancouver games. But because there was no women’s event at that Olympics and women are not allowed to compete in the men’s, she watched from the sidelines as three men took gold, silver, and bronze. Only one of those men broke her hill record.
Merely posting times on comparable courses or events inside our own segregated competition gives men the willies. Competing with them, on the same field or course at the exact same time, is the scariest possible version of this challenge.
In 2014, after decades of fighting for what we all thought was equality—a sex-segregated women’s event in the Olympics—Van got her wish. A women’s ski-jumping event was added to the Sochi Olympic Games. The IOC granted women one event, called the “normal” hill,” while men had three (the “normal,” “team,” and “large hill” competitions). Because the women’s event was segregated from the men’s, the IOC was able to continue to refuse parity for the female athletes. The following year, after 19 years of training, years of legal battles over being allowed to compete in the Olympics, and after jumping in Sochi from a distance safe for her uterus, Van announced her retirement.
The fact that women are required to do sports over here, in the feminine sphere, is the very requirement that makes women’s sports unequal. The segregation is quite real, but the idea that there is equality in that separation is a lie.
If we did have the same rules, if the possibility was allowed for women’s sport performance to be compared to men’s, evidence would quickly mount that undermines male supremacy. Evidence would undermine the idea that women are inherently weak, that we can’t build muscle, and that we can’t take blows or hard falls. Evidence would undermine the belief that physical exertion of any kind, but especially the sporty kind, can cause “pelvic ossification” or “narrowed vaginas.” Evidence would also show that neither women nor men can take certain blows or falls without repercussions.
Since the sport’s inception Cross Fit has awarded male and female competitors equally, and the expectations, events and rules for men and women are the same. Suprisingly, or unsuprisingly, female Cross fit athletes look and perform a lot like the men.
With sports integration, evidence will appear that women often have more endurance than men, more speed because of their size, can withstand more extreme temperatures, have more mental toughness because of our underdog status, and can nurture a wicked six pack.
Evidence will appear that men struggle to maintain an advantage. Evidence will show that the foundation of different rules in sport is gender expectation and that competing with equal expectation is precisely what makes a level playing-field.
♦
When the Supreme Court ruled on Brown v Board of Education, the landmark court case in which school segregation was found to be unconstitutional, the justices wrote:
Does segregation of children in public schools solely on the basis of race, even though the physical facilities and other “tangible” factors may be equal, deprive the children of the minority group of equal educational opportunities? We believe that it does. […] The doctrine of ‘separate but equal’ has no place. Separate educational facilities are inherently unequal.
But, let’s be real here. If you still find yourself doubting the reality of women ever overtaking men in sports—no matter how “feminist,” “equal,” or “integrated” sports and the culture at large become—keep reading.
During the nineteenth century in the US, the unquestioned narrative was that the white race was superior—”physically dominant”—to the black race in sport (and in everything else, of course). The sense of security whites felt in this “obvious” fact was so strong that they weren’t even defensive about recognizing the occasional successes of individual black athletes in individual sports. Nothing could touch how clear it seemed to be that white people dominated physically everywhere, and were obviously superior athletes, period.
One hundred years ago black men were, on average, over an inch shorter than northern-born whites (and on a diet higher in calories no less). 4 This could be seen as incontrovertible evidence that black people were genetically weaker, less capable—not as individuals, but as a race. Darker skin was seen as clear evidence that blacks were of a different category of life. And as late as 1906 white people were putting black people on display as animals.5 The idea that evidence would ever appear to contradict white people’s physical supremacy was unimaginable. The idea that there could be a complete reversal of the stereotypes about race and athletic fitness, in which suddenly white people were no longer understood to be inherently “more fit,” was unimaginable. That the successes of black male athletes in matches against white champions would be a driving factor in this complete reversal, leading blacks to become a group stereotyped as athletically gifted, was unthinkable and simply impossible.
…until this switch did, in fact, occur.
As scholar Ben Carrington writes:
Jack Johnson, aka the “Galveston Giant”, crushed the “Great White Hope” (of superiority) in 1910 when he beat James Jeffries. He became the first African-American world heavyweight champion.
“During the first few decades of the twentieth century a dramatic and profound change occurs that challenges, and in one respect completely reverses, a central tenet of nineteenth century racial science.”
Carrington describes how, in the 1930s as black athletes started to come into their own, the success of these black athletes wasn’t seen as a result of training, talent, grit, or anything else individual. Instead it was understood in solely racial terms. This was, after all, the same era in which eugenics was emerging. White people went positively crazy trying to scientifically discover a reason why black people were publicly beating them at sports—a mysterious “physiological essence of the sporting black body” that would of course never be found. 6
“A contest for physical supremacy between the white and black races.” The Daily Gate City, an Iowa newspaper, reports on Jack Johnson’s boxing match with Jim Jeffries, July 03, 191
I imagine that if we asked 100 people on the street today about sport integration for women, most would immediately point out that women are on average shorter, smaller, and less muscular than men, a fact which is commonly seen as proof that we are inherently weaker and less capable. So although today we intuitively feel how absurd an idea it is that skin color might correspond to biological or sporting inferiority, we apparently struggle to see that a proposed correspondence between sex and sporting inferiority is equally absurd.
So, what about the damning evidence? Yes, today, men are on average 5 inches taller than women and, on average, have about 10% more muscle mass. On average, they do indeed have more testosterone. Interestingly, Women in South Korea have gained and average of 8 inches in height in the past century — a jump bigger than any other population in the world. What to make of it all?
First and foremost, feminists must come to see these measurements just as we see the height measurements of American slaves or civil war soldiers— as simply a record, a snapshot in time rather than a frozen essence.7 The numbers capture one moment in an endless, fluctuating flow of female bodies that we know grow and change in response to their environments. “Height and strength differences between the sexes are caused by a long history of gender norms concerning food and exercise,” writes feminist scholar Sally Haslanger.8
During the Jim Crow era (1877 to 1954), the highest courts in the United States believed that segregation was constitutional, under the logic that social institutions can be “reasonably and fairly constructed on the basis of biology, for instance race or skin color.”9 The justification given for why racial segregation was “reasonable” and “fair” in the Jim Crow era is the same one offered for segregated sport today: there is no other way to achieve equality on behalf of a group that could never perform equally on its own.
In the modern day, sport segregation still suggests that we can only be equal while sporting separately from men because we could never be equal while sporting with them. Signing off on the idea that sex makes separateness fair means endorsing the notion that “sex” is equivalent to women’s inferiority. We must bring feminists’ attention to this unchallenged belief system so that they can see integration as the first step toward true equality and formulate arguments that will help us to organize for just that.
♦
So, how did we arrive here? Where many feminists are not concerned with sports integration for women and may even endorse a separate but equal model? It has something to do with feelings.
Segregation in sport institutionalizes our current culturally-produced feeling that women’s biology makes us less than. We all have these feelings, because we are alive now, in this culture. And like with any colonization, the changes brought by the conquest of a land, race, or sex is said to be the “true nature” of those things. When we civilized humans look out at the cityscape, it feels natural that we are here to build those cities. Feelings of “naturalness” help break logical barriers, and looking specifically into the sphere of women, it appears natural and feels safe that women be “equal” there, in that sphere, which is under men’s control.
In our natural feeling sphere, with socialized feelings of trepidation about leaving it, we can arrive at the idea that what is clearly not equal, is, somehow. In the case of women, that means that our sports performances only feel fair and equal to us when they are in their sphere, and that we feel viscerally that our bodies have been stunted and limited in comparison to men’s. We must see that they were stunted by our separate sphere and patriarchy. That is sex and gender under male supremacy: it is a hierarchy. When we don’t talk about this part of the story, the part where women’s physical bodies are profoundly shaped by patriarchy, we are endorsing a Jim-Crow-like era of sporting. Just like free black men are no longer an inch shorter than whites, our bodies absolutely will be changed and adapted to freedom.
A poignant example of these centuries-long cultural norms is the modern perception that osteoporosis is a women’s disease and a women’s issue. We are told it is not our culturally mandated inactivity but our very nature as females that causes our bones to crumble and weaken. Yet, if we look at male Jewish scholars—bent over books, inside for decades, memorizing, praying—it turns out that they have osteoporosis at about the same rates as women. All bones, when not in use, lose density. The aptly titled NY Times Article, “Some Traditions Point To Bone Disease”, which discusses osteoporosis in Ultra Orthodox Jews, should have explicitly mentioned that the the tradition of patriarchy points to bone disease for women. Our bones, if allowed to be used, will be stronger. The extent to which osteoporosis is relevant now as a “women’s disease” is a great indicator of the degree to which women remain embattled under patriarchy. Osteoporosis, throwing like a girl, killing it at 12-and-under sports but failing to make the 13-and-under team, is not a weakness we got from our ability to give birth, but a snapshot in time capturing womens’ physical response to living under patriarchy. The idea of “naked biology”—biology that is pre-determined and untouchable by social or environmental factors—is not something that we can encounter in real life.
And it is important to notice that the creation of “femininity” and its separate “women’s sphere” is a patriarchal strategy. Femininity, said to represent us, is actually there to obscure and replace the realities of many women’s bodies and lives with a patriarchy-friendly message. As long as the feminine sphere and its standards hold cultural sway, women who have large bodies, big bodies, fat bodies, or strong bodies—bodies that really are stronger and bigger than many men’s—can be dismissed and targeted for abuse because they are not “feminine enough.” Why is it that girls like Precious, girls who basically look like young football players, are picked out for abuse or type-cast as victims, introverted, or sad?
Why is it that a 250lb 13-year-old girl is cast as someone who cannot defend herself, while a 250lb 13-year-old boy is celebrated as a hypermasculine god, bound for glory on the football field? Ideas about “naked biology” cannot explain why the worth of a 250 lb child is so variable: worth its weight in gold in one sphere and regarded as garbage in the other.
But while the social worth of men playing sports is that of entertainment and inspiration for the masses, million dollar contracts, lifelong glory and respect…what is the social worth of women playing sports? We are told that women in women’s sports are happy, exercised, and esteemed, despite the obvious differences between self-esteem and social-esteem.
Segregation is, as Andrea Dworkin calls it, a “metaphysical paternalism.” From this viewpoint it is believed that, instead of suffering with the knowledge of our own inferiority, we should silently assume our inferiority and disguise it within a sphere that is said to be equally appropriate to women and of equal social worth.
Naturalized gender—which promotes the idea that “femininity’ is natural to females and “masculinity” to males—is a cornerstone of patriarchal cultures. Sports play a huge part in this, as they are supposed to demontrate “male nature” right before our eyes. Women competing with (and potentially besting) men is so taboo because it flatly contradicts the idea of exclusive or special associations between masculinity and sports.
This is a problem for women because its a problem for men. We call their manhood into question. We sporty women, in our female nonchalance, call into question whether football actually expresses anything at all about men and their nature. If we beat them, the magic male-affirming equation that “sport=football=manhood” is broken. If the real winner in a football match is just any human who wins at football, then all those men competing in order to do manhood by playing football, what are they? They are equal in every way, then, to male cheerleaders, who are also very good at the skills required for their sport.
Quinton Peron and Napolean Jinnies, the first two men on an NHL cheerleading squad. (2018)
Sports, after all, are men’s things: actually invented by men, they are not plant nor animal. The form they take has been crafted by men over decades and centuries. And the form sports have taken in the West has consistently explored the themes of masculinity, race, and imperialism from the perspective of the imperial white male. Sport has been a joint effort among men to focus on and make real those very things that are said to define manhood: upper body strength, speed, uncontrolled impacts and falls, and the story that men’s biology does not just chase a ball around a chalked-off area but inherently, biologically, seeks to publicly dominate with brute force.
Our womanhood is separable from sport. Men, on the other hand, enjoy sport as something inseparable from an experience of manhood. That is why a problem arises when we, who have no bio-spiritual attachment to football and admit that fact freely, beat men who are “doing manhood.” Not only did we not have to attempt to “do manhood” in order to beat them, but we didn’t care that much—not with every fiber of our being, and certainly not with our biology. Our uteruses didn’t really care about winning. We didn’t call them up in the final 50 yards of the race or final ten seconds of the game, our hail mary moment. We didn’t call up our uteruses, but even if we had, we wouldn’t have called upon the correct reproductve-organ-saint: the penis. We are therefore sports apostates who didn’t worship manhood fully enough while running around on a pitch. Despite the fact that we never could, we remain, improper worshippers of The P.
♦
“Intersectionality” is an abused term these days, but the concept comes in handy here, for we need to recognize that any account of sport in the modern, industrialized West must account for how gender, race, class, and the imperial imperative co-created each other. Many sports historians, like J.A. Mangan, have been able to establish that it was in the 19th century that “imperial masculinity consonant with empire-builiding became a gender imperative.”10 Sports historian Robert Young writes that:
Imperial culture was […] augmented in the nineteenth century by racial theories that portrayed Europeans as masculine and non-Europeans as feminine races; the cult of masculinity became hegemonic. British public schools, the emphasis on sport, on game hunting, the outlawing of homosexuality, the founding of the Boy Scouts, even the fashionableness of male circumcision, all bear witness to a restrictive narrowing of gender identity during the era of militarisitc imperialism.”11
Take football for example. The fact that women’s participation is seen by many men as the potential death of the sport, even as the sport itself becomes more and more clearly about inching toward death-by-concussion, highlights something crucial: the fact that this sport, when sex segregated, is more about masculinity than it is about football.12
We can have our “passions” over here, but it is seen as unfair, really, to rob a man of his manhood, which is his promised position, his inherent superiority, and its ritualized reinforcement. It is seen as unfair when women stop reinforcing men’s superiority and simply compete as equals—with equal opportunity to win or lose. Our womanhood can’t be humiliated to the degree that men’s masculinity can by a loss. Once we are all allowed on the field they have farther to fall, and it’s just not fair that our equality would cause such humiliation. Its just so painful to the dominant sensibility that our equality, and a universally even playing field, would be so unfair for manhood, which must always win.
♦
The main argument I hear in feminist circles for why elite and professional athletes should not be integrated is about fear of injury. As feminists and women, any time a woman is injured by a man we need to do our due diligence to assess the context and defend women, if need be. Considering the epidemic of male violence against women under patriarchy, it is very understandable that the sight of a woman injured by a man provokes many feelings. However, if “safety above all else” becomes the party line, we become so consumed with safety that we forget to stop and worry about women’s wasted potential.
Girls and boys interested in exercise and self-esteem can of course have recreational sex-segregated teams, the same way any group of people who share a hobby can organize any event. But for elite athletes, professional athletes, and girls and women in training to become them, segregation must end. 13
No one else but feminists will step in to remember to fight for the expansive possibilities of women’s lives and freedom. Only feminists can do this job, and we must not stop. Just as all women are safe from being fired when not allowed into the workplace, or are all safe from homelessness as long as we are all married to men, concerns about safety from some negative outcome simply do not address equality or opportunity.
chi·me·ra
noun
1.
(in Greek mythology) a fire-breathing female monster with a lion’s head, a goat’s body, and a serpent’s tail.
2.
a thing that is hoped or wished for but in fact is illusory or impossible to achieve
A cage is an exquisitely safe place. A padded room is a perversely safe place. The streets after dark are far, far safer in a fascist country with a curfew than in a democratic country with no curfew. When the “safety” provided by our separateness dominates all else, equality comes second.
Often it is not potential physical injury but emotional injury that these sorts of arguments lean on. If women are weaker emotionally we can’t be allowed to experience the emotion of loss. We can’t be allowed to experience defeat, we can’t be allowed to compete. Working backward, we can see that it is not fear of devastating injury or defeat that causes the perception of women’s inferiority, but the fear of the emotions we will have viewing the realities of a woman’s integration into an “inappropriate” sphere.
Dworkin writes that separation is “perceived as fair because in it men and women…each [are] doing equally what is appropriate to their sex.” Implied here is that a woman operating outside her sphere—whether winning or losing—is inferior because she is unnatural. Being exposed to unnatural opportunities is understood as inherently dangerous, sure, but moreso is also felt viscerally as simply wrong.
Being allowed the possibility to lose, but also potentially to win—the opportunity—this is what disturbs us. Integration disturbs us because opportunity is felt to be inappropriate for women.
And yet, we must fight for the opportunity. And we must be proud penile apostates. To quote Mary Daly:
Laugh out loud at their pompous penile processions! Reverse their reversals! Decode their “mysteries”! Break their taboos! Spin tapestries of your own creation! Sin Big!
Title IX gave women access to sport but it instead of equality it gave us cruelly enticing phantasms of opportunity. Only sport integration can give us equality. It sits just above the waterline, giving us a visual of the iceberg many women previously saw only as naked ocean. We see, finally, that “with sex as with race, separation is a fact; equality is a chimera or a lie.” The fear of ovaries crushing, uteruses dislodging, and bones snapping is not an appeal to biology but to social worth. Women are for reproduction, this is where their value lies. This is where their talent lies. This is separate but equal.
3 Race, Sport, and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora – Carrington (2010).
4 http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/slavery/nutrition.pdf
5 A man named Ota Benga was put on display at the Bronx Zoo in the “Monkey House”.
6 Race, Sport, and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora – Carrington (2010). p79.
7 “the average height of the Federal soldier was put at 5 feet, 8¼ inches”. http://civilwarhome.com/themen.htm
“the average Union soldier during the American Civil War was 5’8.25″ http://hubpages.com/education/Myths-and-misconceptions-about-history-people-were-shorter-back-then
8 Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, Haslanger (2012). p.131
9 Right Wing Women, Dworkin (1978).
10 (Mangan 2008: 1083) as cited in Race, Sport and Politics: The Sporting Black Diaspora- Carrington (2010). p37.
11 Post Colonialism: An Historical Introduction- Robert Young ( 2016) p.326
12 data from the nation’s largest brain bank focused on traumatic brain injury has found evidence of a degenerative brain disease in 76 of the 79 former players it’s examined. Researchers also examined the brain tissue of 128 football players who, before their deaths, played the game professionally, semi-professionally, in college or in high school. Of that sample, 101 players, or just under 80 percent, tested positive for CTE.
13 Herbert Kohl (1994) further sets the context of the discussion of the validity of HBCUs, and by extension race-based organizations on predominantly white campuses, by distinguishing segregation from separation: “To be separate is not to be segregated. Segregation implies forced separation in the context of inequality; separateness is a free and conscious choice in the context of equality” (p. 93). In other words, segregation when it is a choice is vastly different from segregation where no choice is provided.
A FreudianNightmare 
Are you on Tumblr by any chance or other similar sites? Is there any way I can send a direct or private message?
Oh man, it’s been forever since you posted this comment. But, yes, I will PM you!
Please do, thank you!
Would you mind if I reposted this article to my Tumblr, with credits and links? This is rather Amazing and I”d like to get it before a few more eyeballs.
of course! & thanks for reading!