I feel obligated to start with a disclaimer: I do not nor have I ever played sports. Besides a brief stint in kindergarten where I "played soccer" with a bunch of other five year olds, I have gone my life without soccer, football, tennis, and everything in between. Maybe it's because of my sedentary lifestyle that I just don't get the decision to so heavily segregate the genders in sports. Don't get me wrong, I don't mind there being separate teams for separate people. With so many people on the planet Earth, there's bound to be a large variation of skill levels. My problem lies with the dividing line. Rather than being divided into groups based on skill, the line has been drawn between men and women, presumably for the same reason that any gender divide is created: ignorance and a stubborn adherence to archaic ideals.
Of course, Appalachian State is more progressive than that. Rather than give in to the outmoded idea that women and men need to play on separate teams, Appalachian State has a coed soccer team! Indeed, no matter what gender you are, you can play intramural soccer. And if you're a girl, you can score TWO points when you score a goal as opposed to just one!
That's right. According to the Soccer Rules for Intramural Sports, "a goal scored by a female counts 2 points" whereas a man's goal only counts one. This is what we in the industry call "bullshit sexist nonsense from the 1950s."
This issue was brought to my attention by Kate Rhudy, a sophomore at Appalachian State and a member of an intramural soccer team. Several days ago, Rhudy made a Facebook post, condemning the sexism of the rule. Since then, she has gone to the school's Title IX representative and is making a rather large effort to get this rule, among similarly sexist rules in other sports, changed.
I have enough faith in my audience (you are, after all, spending time reading something) to know that I don't need to hammer in the whole "sexism is bad" spiel for you to understand that this rule is really fucking stupid. That being said, I would still like to address a much less discussed (and possibly much worse) issue that continues to pervade society (and Appalachian State) today. When Rhudy took her issue to the Assistant Director of Intramural Sports, she was told rather dismissively that "there just simply has not been enough evidence in the past to support a rule change." This is a lovely example of what we like to call "institutionalized sexism." Fairly self-explanatory, this is when institutions (mainly made up of men) enact rules, regulations, and laws that discriminate against and limit women.
The whole song and dance of "well, it's just the way we've always done it" is a load of crap and it's a way for people to hide sexism in the guise of tradition. Just because something has been done for a really long time does not justify it. But this seems to always be the case for keeping women out of activities typically associated with masculinity. This, coupled with half-assed science about women being physically inferior to men. Certainly, a man at his physical peak and a woman at her physical peak will expose a disparity, but we are America and I would hazard a guess that there are very few men at their peak.
This in mind, it's fair to assume that throwing women and men together into an activity could yield a lot of instances where the former out-performs the latter. Hell, let's stop assuming entirely. Just a couple of weeks ago, Sabine Lisicki set the record for fastest recorded serve in women's tennis. It also happened to be faster than any serve Roger Federer has hit all season. Admittedly, it still hasn't beaten the record for fastest serve overall, but that's not really the point. Two incredibly talented athletes were placed side by side and the female displayed the most physical prowess.
I don't know if Roger Federer is any better than Sabine Lisicki at tennis and I don't really care. What I do care about is that this anecdote illustrates a fundamental point: That women and men can be competitive without giving the former some sort of edge.
Why Appalachian State has not caught up to the 21st century is beyond me. We have a female chancellor, a fairly liberal student body, and a reputation for being a bunch of dirty communist hippies. And yet we still can't grasp the possibility that men and women can be evenly matched in a physical activity. Despite years of discussion on the issue. Despite women's dedication and sacrifice. Despite every show of female prowess in a physical setting.
It's worth noting that, beyond logical fallacies, the continued portrayal of women as the "weaker sex" is causing a lot of harm. In a society that already erodes female confidence in the boardroom, telling women that they can't even kick a ball as well as men really can't be good for anything. Blatant sexism aside, it perpetuates that nasty whisper in every woman's ear that she's not as good as a man and that she never will be. It's that voice that oozes out of every condescending "honey," "sweetie," and "dear." It's not a subconscious voice but an amalgamation of external declarations that forms a message of inferiority and gnaws at the psyche.
Let's silence the voice. It won't be an easy battle and it certainly won't happen over night. But we can start with the little things. If men get 1 point per scored goal, so should women. It's as simple as that.
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