Monthly Archives: February 2022

American football is a largely popular sport among American men. There are many commercials and videos that cater to it. The video I chose was a compilation of the best plays in the NFL in 2021. It is just one of many videos that are like this. The fanbase for American football is very large in the U.S. and therefore gets lots of attention and funding along with interest to make videos with rankings or commentary such as the video I chose. Football is a very male dominated sport due to the sport almost always only offering positions for men. Women participating in the sport is rare and usually looked down upon. Due to the gameplay of American football, lots of pushing and physical contact, team recruiters look for men to participate. The business behind the NFL and American football is also dominated by men. Sponsors will also more heavily fund and broadcast male sports as a whole. This sport heavily speaks to the misogyny among sports funding and exposure. It speaks to how sponsors would much rather fund male sports and make a larger deal about the sports men play versus women. Football is very popular and culturally important to the U.S. as a whole. We have Super Bowl Sunday every year to watch the finals for the NFL and thousands of ads and news articles that promote the sport. There is also the importance of football in colleges and high schools. Going out to watch the school football players play games is considered “having school spirit” and is implied to be important in participating in the school culture. 

American football is in my opinion the blueprint for “playing gender”. There is no real option for women in this sport but yet the sport is said to be culturally important to American life and school life while leaving out half of the population. Football is thought of as a wild and more brutal sport due to its heavy contact which plays into how it leaves out women. Women in society are not expected to be seen as wild and therefore are not truly welcome in this wild sport despite women still being capable of being wild and playing heavy contact sports such as rugby and roller derby. 

-Stephanie Wilhite

Wingsuiting is an extreme sport similar to skydiving that uses a special wingsuit that features webbing connecting one’s limbs to increase glide speed and distance as the diver falls. Divers will jump from high altitudes as they glide through dangerous landscapes at high speeds, deploying parachutes once they are ready to land. Participants and fans, while aware of the dangers and death the sport can lead to, love wingsuiting for experiencing or watching rushes of life or death risks. Divers see the danger as a challenge to overcome and live for speed only experienceable through sport. This chance to do what is believed to be impossible – to push limits of human action – fits into people’s desire to be wild.

Wingsuiting rules generally concern safety instead of strict point-scoring systems since flights are scored on an individual’s speed and/or distance traveled. That being said, diving rules are still extensive as careless flight can threaten the safety of an entire group of divers. Because of this, and the sport not involving defensive/offensive action, wingsuiting is open for simultaneous participation by both genders. However, with wingsuiting, and many other extreme sports, there is a lack of female participation. As seen with the wingsuiting group in the video, the sport is predominantly male, and while there are a fair amount of women who take flight, most other videos follow this trend of male representation. This phenomenon seems to be due to the marketing of extreme sports to men due to their “wild” nature that some believe may not appeal to “womens’ feminine interest” as well as the lack of spotlight that female participants seem to get. The truth of the matter is that while the sport is defined by thrilling and risky action, gender does not make a difference while wingsuiting, but current gender norms about extreme sports make it so. Wingsuiting is defined by its wildness through the opportunity to break the restraints of humanity and take to the skies, regardless of gender.

Kenny Ly

Wingsuit Flying Formation in “The Crack” | Miles Above 3.0

Synchronized swimming is a sport that involves completing elaborate tricks and routines in the water all while coordinated with music. This sport combines coordination with a team, technical ability to stay and move underwater, and artistic grace. The players are essentially swimmers with some competing in solos, duets, or in a team of anywhere from 4-8 people. The synchronized swimming community can range quite a bit, but can be ascribed to the general public.  It is an accessible and fairly digestible sport, as it is essentially a performance. It does seem to have a more predominately female audience, however, it is a sport that can easily be appreciated by many kinds of people. The rules of synchronized swimming involve not touching the bottom on the pool, using specific technical elements, and staying in dress-codes. These rules play to a more traditionally female audience, as the rules require a certain level of grace and attention to detail in each move. This sport has an interesting history, as in the 19th century it was a male-only categorized sport. However, in the 20th/21st century it changed to being female dominated and men were even prohibited from many competitions including the Olympics. 

My personal views about the interplay between the sport and gender are that it is interpreted as a highly female dominated, but also challenges current gender dynamics. In the video, you can see that the competitors dress in flashy swim costumes and have their makeup done. Part of the sport is the presentation appeal and what you can or can not wear. It plays into the idea that this sport is highly feminine and female dominated. However, if you look closer into the types of tricks done in each routine, each trick involves incredible amounts of strength, endurance, and flexibility all masked by elegance. I believe synchronized swimming is more of a silent display of more “masculine” elements of a sport, and is just as demanding as a sport like football would be. In this sport, “wildness” is seen in the crazy amount of strength required, but also in the mesmerizing and exciting choreography.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J7jiAKtOnXI

-elina chen

Gymnastics is defined by exercises that require a lot of physical coordination, flexibility, and strength! For women’s gymnastics, the players/communicators are typically young women (usually under the age of 35-40). The audience usually consists of spectators who are watching a performance for their own pleasure (as seen at the Olympics or gymnastics competitions). Gymnastics usually speaks to athletes, gymnasts themselves, and people who enjoy watching the sport! The sport is also more popular among women and girls. In terms of the gymnasts, there are definitely a higher proportion of female gymnasts over male gymnasts. Gymnastics doesn’t have traditional rules like a sports game would have. Instead, gymnasts are scored based on the accuracy, precision, and difficulty of their floor routines. The ultimate performance is determined by the gymnast’s ability to execute their routine with the highest quality and precision! Since gymnastics is such a female-dominated field, I feel like the grounds upon what determines a good gymnastics performance also conform to the patriarchal concept of a “good woman”. The gymnasts are supposed to conform to their routine and execute a delicate and perfect routine that doesn’t differ from the planned choreography. In my opinion, female gymnastics routines also have a very feminine aspect to the choreography. They also include delicate and feminine dance steps which really show the overlap between playing sports and playing gender in gymnastics. In the video that I included, you can see the careful and delicate dance steps that Simone Biles takes in her routine! In my opinion, gymnastics is not very wild because it stays to a carefully planned routine and doesn’t involve a lot of unplanned events or improvision. The routine does not include any sudden or violent movements and instead focuses on precision, agility, and planned movements. 

One sport that I think is wild is the Lingerie Football League. It sounds like a joke, but it is a real women’s sport with hard hitting full contact. It is pretty much like the National Football League rules but on a much smaller scale. The games are played indoors on a field half the size of a regulation NFL field. Also, the women have much smaller pads and helmets, as they are required to wear a skimpy bikini as they play. The players are women in their 20s-30s, and their coaches are usually men who get surprisingly very intense. Assumingly, the audience is men ranging in all ages. It definitely speaks to men, as the women are dressed in basically nothing. It is the same rules that are applied in the NFL, which makes it seem pretty non-discriminatory towards women. However, they are forced to dress in bikinis that hardly cover anything. I think it is pretty ridiculous that women are forced to be sexualized even in sport. I believe they should have the option, or maybe even the requirement to wear full pads, helmets, and especially clothes. I wouldn’t say the women in this league hit as hard as the men in the NFL, but they should still have the same protection that NFL players have for their safety. The wildness in this sport in general, minus the fact that they hardly have any clothes on, is how intense the games get. This wildness ranges from fights on the field between the women, to fights in the stands between drunk rowdy fans.

I researched the word “wild” in both the Marriam-Webster dictionary and in the Cambridge dictionary and found many different definitions for the word, meaning that the word can be used in multiple ways. Both also showed that the word can be used as an adjective, noun and adverb. The Marriam-Webster dictionary adjective description included definitions such as “living in a state of nature and not ordinarily tame or domesticated,” “not subject to restraint or regulation,” and “barbaric.” These different definitions hold different connotations; “barbaric” typically has a very negative connotation. In the Cambridge dictionary, the adjective form of the word included the definitions “uncontrolled,” “natural,” and “not thought about.” Some of these definitions hold very different connotations than some from the Marriam-Webster dictionary; the definition “natural” does not have a negative connotation at all, but is instead more neutral. When the word is used as a noun, I found that there were not as many variations of definitions as there were for the adjective form of the word. The noun definition mainly holds the meaning of being a place or region that is independent of humans and is of the natural form of Earth. 

To me, the word “wild” can be used to describe something that is out of the ordinary in human civilization. This word could be used to describe something that is “in the wild” where human civilization does not exist, or also the be used to describe something that is crazy. However, after researching the many definitions provided in the two dictionaries previously mentioned, I have realized that the word “wild” could hold many different meanings depending on the context of the sentence in which it is used.

Anna Ranslem