Do Girls have right
to compete in sporting contests that exclude boys?
Introduction
In modern society, it is not common to witness mixed-sex sports competition regarding the official, globally-admitted contests as a consequence of consideration mainly focusing on the natural biological differences between the two sexes of male and female. However, for the younger individuals, participants and organizers of sports contests tend to be less considerate in terms of sex issues as they are not usuall the prior problem. Under such a situation, doubts arise around the appropriateness for immature girls to participate in sports competition which involves sexual segregation.
This essay claims the right of Rirls to attend sports contests that introduce an exclusion towards boys, due to the conservative nature of this approach considering the issue of inequality involved in the patriarchal social system. As l will explain later in more detail, under the phenomenon of extra pressure that females need to face and the construction of fundamental socialization, sexual segregation should be classified as a method of protection for girls to prevent their inner perception from being invaded by patriarchal rules.
Segregation in terms of Feminism Perspective
In order to provide an answer with appropriateness for girls to engage in sports contests regarding to segregation between the two distinct sexes, it is essential to define the term of girls’ from a holistic aspect. This would not only include the general cognition of the public of “girls” as a biological feature, but would lead down to an even further dive interms of the social context involving status, communal perspective.
The traditional image of an "athlete" had long been clashing with an ideal image of women throughout the history of humansociety. By being pictured as a “hard, powerful, strong and rational” individual, a classical illustration of athlete is “tied to theroles of leader, warrior and father creating an apparent opposition towards the figure of an idealistic woman, who is usually presented as an aggregation of “beautychastity, modesty, obedience, inconspicuous behaviour" (Schneider,2000) gradually leading to a binding between traditional female imageand an identity as being a housewife or possessing a mothering role. The sense of detachment between the two figures has pushed the extent of male dominance in the traditional sport competitions through the medium of exclusion of female figures, and “solidified male privilege” through the naturalization of stereotypical female traits, namely “passivityweakness, helplessness and dependency of women". (Messner1988)
Yet a more severe issue women face in reality is the interpretation towards their figure from thesocial aspect. Female individuals are seldom recognized, in terms of public recognition, as a complete person. Under the progressing system of a patriarchal society!individuality of women tends to be dissected and analyzed through biased values, transferring them into structured identities, covering a wide range of socialized roles including housewives and mothers, with those who rejected the roles often considered to be maladjusted(Larsen & Long,1988).
Nonetheless, this process of transfer launched upon the whole society is gradually undermining the importance of the society regarding the realization of recognizing a female as an independent individual, rather than reducing her to one of the numerous identities and potentially dehumanizing her.
What is even more worrying is the possible situation that could be faced, directly or indirectly, by younger girls. Dehumanization of female adults not only leads to the neglect of one's individuality indiverse social situations, but would even have a more severe impact under specific highly male-dominated circumstances such as a sports contest. Female athletes not only face biological issues- taking periods and pregnancy into consideration-but also tend to endure sexual gaze, inappropriate clothing and extra accusations for not following stereotypical gender roles and deviating from “'feminine’ body features" pictured by the media(Brandt & Carstens,2005).
A specific example associated with the clothing problems would be the permanent situation faced by female tennis athletes where tennis skirt has long been treated as an attire “presented assexualized for attention” to serve the erotic interests of males, instead of “representations of women's agency and powerful expressions of their bodies" (Osborne& Coombs,2020) sharply revealing the fact that female athletes are not receiving the deserved respect towards their identity of a sports elite, but are rather regarded as objects free for sexualization. Situations like this may also happen within the younger generation, in which girls are likely to endure similar oppression based on their sex.
The question of the essay should then be re-assessed through a completely different perspective: is it appropriate for the following generation to be directly exposed to patriarchal society issues? lf so, what could be the idealistic way of protecting girls that functions to the greatest extent?
Difficulty to seek out a perfect protecting resolution arises as girls are younger. Although being juvenile might be seen as equivalent to possessing a larger pool of individuality due to the lack of given social roles, this generation is also determined to be possessing a higher vulnerability given that the girls do not usually get directly exposed to gender discrimination issues in genuine, official sports contests. As the
