What A Woman Can Be

Does anyone else remember the above poster from history lessons? Well, I was reminded of it while catching part of yesterday’s Jeremy Vine show on BBC Radio 2. He did a segment about the recent doping allegations against Ye Shiwen and it ran into some things that have come up recently in other parts of my life / conversations. You can listen to the radio show here: [External Link] (if you’re in the UK. I can’t answer for elsewhere.)

I will, of course, be attempting to pull it back into what this means to my writing, but please bear with me if it doesn’t.

Storm In a Tea Cup

I’m not going to pretend to know anything about the Olympics or sports in general. I’m not going to pretend to know anything about the ins and outs of the whole affair. If you want to have a quick read, there’s a BBC News story here: [External Link] and a New Scientist piece here: [External Link]. Both of these may be subject to editing.

I have no interest in going into why doping accusations may have been made (there are political implications as well as just plain sour grapes), nor whether the doping police can keep up with the doping criminals (these things are always an arms race). What I am interested in is how people reacted and how it gets dragged into a gender issue. In other words, what has bothered me is what people are saying after the “experts” have talked on the Jeremy Vine show.

Please bear in mind that the people invited to speak as “experts” point out the following:

  • While everyone comments on the fact that the last length was completed by Ye Shiwen at a faster speed than the current top male swimmer, they also point out that this is for one length out of many and other women have also achieved this in the last four years.
  • Ye Shiwen got gold at a world championships (which I know nothing about) and has competed for a year at this sort of level. She has not come from nowhere.
  • This time is a major improvement (by five seconds) on her previous international level competition time but she is young and can be expected to improve because young atheletes often see an impressive jump before they get to their full age – i.e. until their bodies have stopped growing and developing.

Then the “general public” come on and there is reference to a “young girl” who has come out of nowhere and has to be on something because no girl would be stronger and fitter than a man. Bearing in mind that the base level we’re discussing is Olympic class, this may be true but is size and male musculator really an advantage in a swimming pool? I have no idea.

Visually, Ye Shiwen has the dubious advantage of appearing small and young. We know she is a teenager, we can see that. The assumption is, despite the hours, days, weeks, months, years of training, that she can’t be that good. Is the problem that she beat the western “favourite” or that she beat a man’s time (at least on that final length)? I can’t really tell. It may even be both.

Perhaps she should be grateful that no one is calling for her to prove her gender identity and biological sex because no man could possibly be whatever height and weight she is (or so the genral public perceive). No-one has felt the need to drag her through the mud on this one because, well, she looks like a young woman. At least, not so far.

Play With The Girls

You may remember, however, what happened to Caster Semenye. What happened to this star athlete may result in all international level women athletes ending up with invasive tests to prove who they are. There’s a petition here [External Link], calling attention to it. A man (as a friend facetiously pointed out on Facebook) just has to pull his pants down to prove he’s a man. This is not strictly true because biology is somewhat more complicated than that (Wikipedia: Gender verification in sport [External Link]), but it does seem to be pretty much what the general perception of gender is.

The only reading that can honestly be taken from this possible set of rules is: women should play like girls or not at all. In other words, it’s okay to excel as long as it’s only by so much. If a woman does better than a woman should (or as well as a man) she will immediately have to prove that she is a woman. Proving this will no doubt involve dropping one’s pants and being subjected to tests. I only hope it’s nothing worse than what’s done for a smear test, else we’ll be taking humiliation to new lows. It isn’t actually anything new, as the wikipedia link shows, but part of the issue is that we insist on dividing children into male and not male (by default female) based on what’s in their pants rather than what’s in their heads or what’s in the rest of their body, which can lead to issues later in life.

Continuing with the binary division, I’m aware that men are (generally) bigger and stronger than women, but that’s about averages. In the realms of the most physically fit people in the world, I’m not sure how big the difference between people who train rigorously for the same task is. Or else there wouldn’t be comments about how masculine (possibly with the help of doping, let’s allow for testosterone injections and protein shakes) particular sportswomen end up looking. You know, like body-builders and shot-putters who are competing in sports that require the upper body strength that men tend to have the advantage in.

However, as someone who is a casual martial artist and has paid attention to a few other conversations on these things lately, women do have some advantages over men. We’re often more flexible and bend in slightly different ways. Further more, as we (typically) don’t have raw, brute strength going for us, women’s technique is often better – after plenty of training. We have to work harder to overcome the strength of our opponents where training in tandem is possible and the best of us do. Forget those conversations where people mention that women have to learn to run like men in order to compete (I have no evidence, I just remember hearing it) and consider all those times we’ve heard people lament that the men’s tennis game is purely about power while the women have so much good technique. I hear the same in fencing and have just joined a discussion group that is doing its best to encourage more women to pick up HEMA / WMA / historical fencing.

How Did We Get Here?

It’s hard to tell. The division of male and female in competitive sports seems to be a result of competition (and many sports) not having been ladylike. Competition as we present it, if I dare get into these things, seems to spring from the wealthy middle class set-up of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (No, I’m not going to go looking for sources, I’m just bouncing around an idea. Go ahead and correct me in the comments, I’m willing to discuss.) Gender division in that class and at that time was pretty strong. Either way, the division continues as much because “that’s the way it is” as because of any real thought.

How do we change it? Well, it seems to me that while there may be some sports where direct male-female competition isn’t smart, this doesn’t stop sports where there isn’t direct competition from happening at the same time. Any non-contact sport, for example, like marathons, swimming competitions and so on. There was an issue in the last few years when women’s best times (when running with men) were disregarded as records because it was known that women picked up the pace to match their male compatriots. But isn’t it better to consider this as an obvious benefit to competition? See, I’m not saying that women can or cannot run / swim / sail / ski / throw / shoot / whatever against men, only that it would be easy to run an open non-contact competition where the score can be broken down to have an overall gold, a male gold and a female gold – assuming we’re insisting that biological sex is just binary. We effectively do this already in all sorts of competitions.

Then there are car-related sports that have already proven that women can directly compete against men, although not many have made it to the high levels, yet – whether that’s their own interest or a glass ceiling is a debate for another day. Things like horse-racing and so on – things that rely on the speed and strength of something else as much as the rider / driver – don’t require gender separation and (as far as I know) the horse disciplines at the Olympics have none. Cycling is a bit more of a grey area as we’re back to the musculature argument but that would put us back in the indirect competition mentioned in the previous paragraph.

To date, HEMA have been pretty good with many competitions being automatically open to everyone, as do many martial arts competitions – and, yet, contact sports are the one thing you’d think it was difficult to mix genders on. The bigger interest arts tend to break things down by size, as boxing does (but boxing itself is an exception, see below). There is a side issue with martial arts: the whole thing about men often rely on their strength and women on technique? With spades (or swords, in this case). Particularly new-to-the-sport women can be nervous of going up against men who are basically acting like aggressive dicks – in comparison. The tactics for taking on a man are a somewhat different to the tactics for a woman. This is something that’s coming up in the women’s fencing discussion group I’ve joined and there are debates about parallel competitions, whether open is truly open and inviting, and so on.

Of course, there’s also the money. Team sports are the ones that really draw the money in. In the UK, we’re talking football (soccer) and cricket. While there’s no real reason why either of these couldn’t be mixed gender – after all, women have been playing just as physical football and cricket for years without having as many substitutes or as much financial support. The thing that stops it is that there’s a lot invested in sportsmen, particularly the higher levels. Men’s sports always attract more money – the general public as a whole, not just the men or the women – seem to prefer their sporting heroes male.

And, if you mix the strength and money issues in things like boxing, I doubt many people would be in favour of mixed gender, and many would protest a male-female boxing night. Full on rugby (league or union), with its high speed contact, would also make the general public flinch. It doesn’t, however, mean that there aren’t women who wouldn’t be capable of playing with the boys. They don’t have to be big bruisers if they’re fast and manoeuvrable – hey, it worked for Shane Williams – if we can find women who are capable and want to. I wouldn’t recommend it but then I doubt I recommend rugby as a career choice to any young man, either, despite enjoying watching it.

Putting It Into Words

Does this mean anything for writing? Well, it means its probably believable (or should that be truthful?) to have a future world where mixed sex / gender competitions and sports are the norm. However, you might have difficulty getting readers to accept it – after all, truth is stranger than fiction because it relies on the bare facts while fiction relies on cultural assumptions that have been around for a long time. In much the same way that a conservative reader (in the non-political party sense) might say a woman general in a medieval world is unbelievable, the same reader is likely to rely on the old chestnut about men being bigger and stronger – which works for averages but a writer has the advantage of being able to pick up the exceptions (Caster Semenye, based on her musculature) and the outliers (Ye Shiwen, based solely on performance) for the important roles.

To put it in real terms: It is more likely that there will be male champion of an open longsword competition but it doesn’t mean that a female cannot win. The odds are against her, in that the women are typically out-numbered at least ten to one (when I have observed the competitions) and the men are typically stronger and more aggressive, but this doesn’t mean that a woman isn’t capable of winning at all.

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