> I take your point, roger, but I would much rather watch ballroom dancing
> than wrestling, male or female.
Ok, but, just to reemphasize, the issue isn't what sports are the most fun to watch, but rather what are the social parameters of athletic*participation* for both sexes, and who gets to set them. That is, what activity is acceptable and encouraged. Clearly the restrictions that have been imposed on women's use of their bodies in this way have had important negative effects. It is only now, with this generation of young girls, that females are beginning to be allowed to explore the pleasures and benefits of physical exertion through athletic activity on something approaching the level always available to boys. Just beginning to; not there yet.
> In your way of setting up the issue of
> women, bodies and athleticism there seems to be no way to say that
> competitive sports are stupid for BOTH sexes, and the ones that most
> closely mimic real violence are the stupidest.
What I'm saying does presuppose value in athletic activity. But, fleshed out more, there is plenty of room to identify stupidity too, when you look at the whole picture of what is sport today.
Initially, Kelley and I were talking about exercise and health. The topic naturally slid into sports. By sports I mean the dictionary definition: recreation, an active pasttime, involving exertion and skill, governed by a set of rules. So right away you throw out that oxymoron "pro sports", that commodifies athletes, images and the games themselves. Toss out also, the "I'm number one" American/capitalist/hegemonic winning-is-the-only-thing sickness that is spawned by pro sports. Replace it with the saying over the doorway in the locker room entrance at Wimbledon: something about "treating those twin imposters, victory and defeat the same". It is the activity itself that matters, not the outcome.
Although tastes differ of course, there is nothing stupid about sport per se. What is stupid, and more than that damaging, results mainly, I think, from the commodification of the activity. The easiest example is pro "wrestling", which literally mimics violence among many other of its unsavory aspects. Unfortunately, for most Americans, pro sports is what they mean by sport. And pro sport is a meat machine, that begins now with junior high school kids, spewing out as battered victims the vast majority who don't becomes pros (movingly captured in the documentary "Hoop Dreams").
There is no violence in sport as I have defined it. Violence requires malevolence of purpose; not just the use of physical force, but a desire to harm. That's incompatible with sport as recreation.
> The only Olympic events I watch are ice skating and women's
> gymnastics. Who wants to watch a lot of people grunting and groaning?
> That's what pornography is for!
Ha! But don't you see the eroticism in sports, wrestling in particular? Most men, I think, find the sight of two women wrestling erotic. You don't feel the same way about men? I wonder how Kelley's feels about that.
RO