Re: gender, race, and sports

Rachel Heckert (heckertkrs who-is-at juno.com)
Fri, 7 Aug 1998 08:19:09 -0400

Jay wrote:

>cut
>but the fear of being _at the mercy_ of those who are not white." --
Early
>cut
> in what respects are, say, children at the mercy of adults? women at
the mercy of >men? and the white men in Early's thesis at the mercy of
black men? Please take >three very deep breaths and read the word ...
rape.

Anyone who doubts this thesis can check out a very popular novel from the
sixties called *Deliverance.* The villains aren't non-white (that
wouldn't have passed the editor in those days) but a group of rural poor
white men, and the protagonists are white city men on a fishing trip.
After one of their number (the most effeminate, who weeps during his
ordeal) is gang-raped and killed, the eventual sole survivor (redeems?)
himself by bushwacking one by one the entire crew of bad guys (while
they''re trying to catch and rape-murder him) before returning to his
city persona. This hortatory tale was supposed to prove something about
being a man. I had always been mystified about what the term "a real
man" meant, and this novel clarified it for me in a way which no
sociopsychological explanation could have provided.

I am sometimes tempted to think that today's proliferation of same-
cross- -inter-gender communities and viewpoints is chiefly a
counter-culture rebellion against Anglo-American culture's rather
peculiar set-up of gender identities, in which one is ascribed a gender
by birth, but then is required to achieve it by living up to a code which
is chiefly predicated on defensive masculinity. (A *real man* is first
and foremost not like a woman, and a woman who is not stereotypically
feminine is plain off the map. "Tomboy" stops being an operative
category at about age fourteen).
Any machismo-oriented culture is going to have this problem, but
Anglo-American cultures take it to an extreme form, with gender identity
dictating not only how one acts but how one is supposed to feel, where,
for instance, a teen-age boy who likes poetry is automatically assumed to
be basically homosexual.

Jay's thesis has much to recommend it, as long as it's realized that in
practice cultures are not neat, well-coordinated packages but a little
ragged around the edges and not quite so coherent as our ideas about
them are. However, American culture is changing so rapidly right now
it's hard to predict what will be in ten years, much less a whole
generation.

Rachel Heckert

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