Article Review #3 Men in Sports

Devan Marry

12-5-13

WGST 202 Currans

T/Th 9:30-10:45

Men in sports

Article Review #3

Zipp, John. (2010). “Sport and Sexuality: Athletic Participation by Sexual Minority and Sexual Majority Adolescents in the U.S.” Sex Roles (2010) 64:19–31

In the article “Sport and Sexuality: Athletic Participation by Sexual Minority and Sexual Majority Adolescents in the U.S.”, John Zipp writes about how individuals, male and female, are hypothesized to have smaller participation numbers when they are a part of a sexuality minority. A sexuality minority is defined as anyone who is lesbian, gay, bisexual, queer, or transgender. Basically, any sexual orientation besides being heterosexual is considered a sexual minority.

To support this argument, Zipp uses other theories of scholars saying that the decrease of male participation in middle school and high school, was because of these sexuality minorities not having the traits that are associated with the idea of hegemonic masculinity. Through high school and middle school sports these boys are given the chance to display their masculinity through their play on the field, court, mat or track. Strength, physicality, aggressiveness and toughness are all traits that are usually associated in the portrayal of these boys’ masculinity. When looking at the members of the male sexual minorities, these members would most likely not worry about displaying masculinity if they were interested in being a feminine man or even a woman all together.

He also used the sexuality minorities to see which sports those in the sexuality minorities were getting involved into. The team contact sports had the least of the percentage of involvement from the minorities. The next lowest is the individual contact sports, and last the individual sports like swimming or tennis. So they looked at sports like wrestling and football compared to sports like volleyball and then to swimming or tennis.

This relates to my topic because some men are discriminated or feel they would be if they were involved in these sports like football or wrestling. When looking at recent examples when the NBA player came out, there was a ton of noise and debate brought up, but when a Swiss diver came out it was kind of accepted throughout the world and no real debate or controversy came from it.

This is relatively similar to the article, “Gender, sexuality and sport” written by Kyla Bremner which is the article I discussed in the second article review. In the article from Bremner she dealt with how masculinity was seen as an advantage in male and female sports. Bremner had to deal with being turned away from a wrestling tournament because she was seen as too frail and feminine. In this article, Zipp discusses how the members of the sexuality minorities lack this masculinity or do not conform to the typical masculinity or aggression displayed by the other individuals. These members of the sexuality minorities may experience discrimination similar to what Bremner experienced being turned away at the registration for a male wrestling tournament. All of this returns to the idea of the hegemonic masculinity that is desired by men in our society.