The Battle Between Sexes



I am not a feminist, nor do I think boys and girls are equal when it comes to certain things, but I don’t see why they are not seen as equals when it comes to sports. Sayings such as, “you throw like a girl,” “you hit like a girl”, “girls play like that,” and “a girl could do better than you,” are used on a daily basis in male and female sports. Sayings like that are used to refer to athletes that they are not doing well; therefore, they must play like girls. Referring to bad playing as playing “like a girl,” has become so common that you may even find girls telling each other that they are playing like a bunch of girls. Is it really true that boys are better at sports, or is it just some old saying that has stuck? To determine whether or not boys are better at sports than girls, we need to understand their mental levels, physical attributes, and the role society may play in the debate.

To better understand both genders mental states, it is important to know how they differ and why that may affect the way they play sports. According to Leonard Sax, saying one gender is smarter than the other would not be true, because different regions of the brain develop at different times. After his five year research, "Sexual dimorphism of brain developmental trajectories during childhood and adolescence,” Sax discovered that girls reach the halfway mark of brain development sooner than boys. The girls reached the halfway mark at the age of eleven, while boys didn’t reach halfway development until the age of fifteen. This seemed to continue into adult life as women reached full brain maturity at the age of twenty one or twenty two and men didn’t reach full maturity until the age of thirty. Although the mental state of both boys and girls differed research showed that it didn’t seem to affect the way they played sports or explain why boys are supposedly better athletes. What it does insinuate is maybe another debate, a debate that girls may be developing physically slower than boys but, boys may be developing mentally slower than girls.

 

Furthermore, according to Mikaela Conley from ABC news, she agrees with Sax by saying boys are better at sports than girls isn’t true. In fact, according to research, girls proved they can hang with the boys. Indiana University did a research project of USA swimmers ages 6-19, they recorded 1.9 million swims from the year 2005 to the year 2010, it was found that from the ages of eight to twelve boys and girls seemed to be equal in there swims but, that changed at the age thirteen when puberty normally hits. At the point of puberty boys start to physically exceed the girls, with major increases in there muscle mass helping them to outperform girls. Joel Stager, professor in the School of Health, Physical Education and Recreation at Indiana University at Bloomington, and lead author of the study cleared it up like this, “Due to differences in developmental pace it seems to be true that at least in some sports there are periods of time during which girls and boys might be athletic equals.”

Moreover, research seems to back the opinion that boys and girls can be athletic equals and along with the research society also seems to back the same opinion. When asked how boys feel about the debate they even agreed that in certain sports and at a certain age girls and boys could play the same sport and succeed just the same.  Jim Thomas recalls a moment in his life that proved to him girls could be equal when it came to sports, “There was a girl who used to compete on my swimming team in high school and to be honest she could out swim most of the boys on that team, it just went to show that genders weren’t that different when it came to competing in sports it all came down to who worked harder.”  Along with Jim Thomas I have also witnessed gender equality in sports; while attending Carolina Forest high school there was a girl named Chelsea Thomas who went from a cheerleader to our first female football player. When interviewing her teammates and coaches I found that she was a key asset to the team and not only that, but she was treated as an equal in practice and on the field, she never once got special treatment for being a girl. To this day what Coach Hummel said about her playing on a team with boys sticks with me, “She may be a girl, but she is more than qualified to play this sport with the boys she has drive, passion, and has put in the hard work, it wouldn’t be the same without her on the team she is one of the guys,” He added by saying, “it never mattered that she was a girl it just that she worked just as hard if not harder as everyone else.”

So are boys better than girls at sports? I don’t think we will ever truly know the answer to that question, but what we do know is that everyone develops in different ways, mentally, physically, and socially. There is no telling how each individual, female or male is going to develop and there is always going to be a different opinion on the battle between sexes. Maybe in the generations to come society will play a more “power to the women role,” and girls will become the new top dogs in sports while boys may whip around and become the new Einstein’s. Like I said, “Maybe,” but until then all we can do is watch and see what happens. Like Mary Douglas once said, “real equality is immesely difficult to achieve, it needs continual revision and monitoring of distributions."

 

Work Cited

Conley, Mikaela. Girls Can Hang Athletically Wit the Boys, Says Study. ABC News. 1. Conley, Mikaela. May 31, 2013. Blog. October 6, 2013. http://www.abcnews.go.com/blogs/health/201/05/31/girls-can-hang-athletically-with-the-boys-says-study/

Sax, Leonard. Gender Differences in the Sequence of Brain Development. Education. 1. n.p. May17, 2010. Blog. October 6, 2013. http://www.education.com/refrence/article/Ref_Boys_Girls/