Article Review #2 Men in Sports

Devan Marry

WGST 202

T/Th 9:30-10:45

Professor Currans

Blog Topic: Men in Sports

Article Review #2

Bremner, Kyla. (2002). “Gender, sexuality and sport.” Canadian Woman Studies,

Volume 21: 6-11.

In the article “Gender, sexuality and sport” Bremner tells how there is a crisis and sense of urgency in men to express their masculinity due to women becoming more and more powerful. Over the last century, women have been given rights, liberties, and privileges that are very similar if not the same as those that are provided or given to the men in society. This holds true for most of the nations around the world, depending on the dominant religion or other factors that are input into the situation.

With this somewhat new empowerment of women, the men around the world have to assert their dominance through sport. Most sports are changing to be both for males and females or anyone else who would want to partake, that is why men are trying to excel at these sports and establish their dominance and masculinity. Bremner goes on to explain how masculinity in sports is seen as an advantage among all of the sports. For example a gay male, this is usually exhibiting feminine traits, they are seen as weak in the male playing field. On the other side of the spectrum, for a lesbian, they are expected to be strong and athletic and dominate their playing fields.

Also, when an athlete is dominating the playing field there are usually some assumptions about the person. If the athlete is a female and is dominating the rest of the players on the field, some might assume she is a “dike”. Same holds true for male athletes, if the male is dominating the sport he is usually assumed to be a heterosexual male getting tons of women hanging all over him. Obviously this can be reversed for both circumstances.

Later on, Brenner talks about how she sees it unfair to see the gender barriers never are broken. She used to compete in wrestling back in high school and was a nationally ranked wrestler. She was nationally ranked among the girls though in her age division. When Brenner went to a regional tournament for men in Canada and asked if she could partake, she was denied because “she might get hurt”. She saw this very unfair because wrestling is split up between weight class and age group, therefor she’d be wrestling people her age and her weight. This seems to happen because men are set on keeping their status as dominant in the sports world. If the man was perhaps knocked off by a girl in wrestling or basketball, it would be a testament to his masculinity and manhood.

In this article you see how women and men compare in terms of dominance in the sports world. You can look at publicity and see that men dominate the TV stations for sports. This feeds what the article: “Gender Verification and Gender Policies in Elite Sport: Eligibility and ‘Fair Play’”, is referring to. In this other article by Claire Sullivan, they argue that there should be more than just a men and women’s division in sports, specifically Olympic sports. Bremner was looking for female equality to men in the sports world, while Sullivan was looking at transgender equality at the Olympic or world level. Either way you look at it, men dominate the playing field across the board in terms of publicity, but all types of people besides heterosexual men want more recognition for themselves in their sports. I never realized all the stereotypes were coming up in sports until this article by Bremner pointed out the assumptions made by spectators of the sports.