Sunday, April 6, 2008

Women In Sports vs. Men In Sports

http://youtube.com/watch?v=UW001QH7ovU

The link of the video clip above discusses why women’s sports are less popular than men’s sports. Why is this? One reason is that women’s sports are not as exciting and are definitely not at the same level of intensity as men’s sports. People like to see the best of the best, and men are constantly raising the bar of expectations in most sports. Men are also more recognized for their accomplishments in the media than women. In terms of names and statistics, we hear more about men than we do women. This is a big problem because as a society we always want to know who and what. Many times when researching women’s sports we tend to hear about the need to grow or improve women in sports. Instead, we need to hear more names and statistics of talented and successful female athletes rather than how women in sports need to grow.

Kin 338 - TuTh 9:30-10:45- Sabrina M

1 comment:

Kerrie Kauer said...

Wow, there were so many things wrong with this video that I don’t know where to begin. The entire page was extremely sexist and degrading. The surrounding comment and video links were filthy and they never truly answered the main question which was “Do women athletes have to be beautiful and hot for us to watch?” Instead the “newscaster” rambled on and on that the reason why she doesn’t know about the women’s NCAA tournament is because “we don’t know who those women participating in it are”. This really irritated me because she kept stating that “we don’t know who they are” when in actuality there are people out there who DO know who they are. Instead of saying “we” she should have been saying “I” because that’s her own personal opinion. I also thought it was wrong of her to get angry when she couldn’t find any female sport statistics when she typed in “women in sports”. If she was looking for female athlete sports stats than she should have just typed that in to begin with. There was absolutely no reason for her to bad mouth the link on validating women in athletics because she wasn’t specific in her search. I also do not share the view that women’s sports are less exciting or less intense than men’s sports. I think they can be just as exciting and as fierce as the men depending on who’s watching them. The big problem in our society is NOT that we always want to hear “who and what” it’s that people are viewing women in sports from a hegemonic masculine perspective. Female athletes make up 40% of nationwide sports and physical activities but only 3-5% of them get media coverage. I agree that we do need to hear more names and statistics about talented and successful female athletes, but I also feel that in order to do this, women in sports still must continue to grow and improve. As long as female athletes are still not equally represented as a whole in sports they have to kept on expanding no matter what regardless of a few individual stats.

Tabitha Komathy
KIN 338IS.6