I was so drawn to the title of The Frailty Myth (subtitle: Redefining the Physical Potential of Women and Girls, by Colette Dowling) that I started reading it without trying to find out anything more about it. I was a little disappointed, not because it's a bad book, but because I was personally looking for a book about sports science. The Frailty Myth focused more than I would've liked on feminism and on the history of women in (and being excluded from) sports.
I was looking for this:
Drawing on studies in motor development, performance assessment, and sports physiology, I will show how, by keeping themselves physically undeveloped, girls and women have fulfilled the myth of the weaker sex...
...And what would happen to that mystique if women—more women, most women—actually had the knowledge, the training, and the encouragement to make the most of themselves physically?
But it was a relatively small part of the book. Some of those history lessons did turn out to be quite interesting, though.
Some Historical Lowlights
I think I'll never forget this quote about the founding of the Boy Scouts....CTE much?
The founding of the Boy Scouts in 1910 was an American effort to “reverse the feared decline in manliness”—a decline the U.S. commissioner of education explained, with a fine appreciation of the centrality to masculinity of physical violence: “The boy in America is not being brought up to punch another boy’s head, or to stand having his own punched in a healthy and proper manner...There is a strange and indefinable air coming over the men; a tendency toward a common...sexless tone of thought.”
I also never knew that a woman won skeet shooting gold at the 1992 Olympics, shooting against men. The Olympics responded by...making a separate competition for women. Those fragile boys really were scared of competing against a girl.
It stood out to me as especially cruel that female athletes would be criticized for being too manly and for not being manly enough at the same time:
Even in the 1990s top women athletes were ridiculed as unfeminine. A story in The Washington Post, “The (Lesser) Games Women Play,” said of female basketball players in the 1992 Barcelona Games, “They walked like men, slapped hands like men.”
They may have behaved like men, but of course they didn’t play like men. Rather, this sportswriter gibed, “They played like junior high school boys.”
Things are certainly not perfect today, but it's nice that we've at least mostly left those days in the past. And there's nothing like spending millions of dollars to defend your right to discriminate:
Society continues to fight against the inclusion of girls in sports. From the time Little League was founded in 1939, little girls wanted to join. For decades the Little League organizers said no. In the 1970s, when federal pressure against discrimination against girls in sports grew hot and heavy, Little League officials spent almost $2 million fighting to keep girls out.
Finally, let's not forget about the old "making stuff up and calling it science" tactic—even in the 1980s!
In 1985, for the very first time, a panel of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists introduced guidelines for exercise during pregnancy. The document stated that a pregnant woman’s heart rate should not exceed 140 beats per minute, strenuous activities should not exceed fifteen minutes’ duration, [etc]... Although the panel claimed the guidelines were well grounded in medical fact, detractors took issue, saying that the guidelines were not based on empirical data...
The controversy did spark nine years of research and many studies. In the end, the medical community acknowledged that it had no evidence of any contraindications to exercise during a normal pregnancy. The new data made clear that women who exercise during pregnancy do not have a greater risk of complications than women who do not exercise, and they may, in fact, have a lower risk. In 1994 the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists published a “technical bulletin” rescinding all its previous advice and stating, “There are no data in humans to indicate that pregnant women should limit exercise intensity and lower target heart rates because of potential adverse effects”
Cultural basis of athletic differences
My honest opinion is that men have some biological advantages in athleticism, but the differences we see in our current world are not "natural"—there is a small biological difference and at the same time a big cultural effect pushing girls and women away from sports. And it starts very young:
“Emphasized femininity” begins in the cradle, and it is something girls are taught. A study of parents interacting with their twenty- to twenty-four-month-old children found they treated boys and girls differently in significant ways. Boys were more likely to be left alone in play or joined neutrally by parents. Girls got constant comment, whether praise or criticism, as if parents weren’t comfortable allowing them to just explore on their own. Typically boys got a positive response for playing with blocks, a negative response for dallying with dolls. Girls got positive reactions when they played with dolls, asked for help, or passively watched television. They got negative reactions for running, jumping, and climbing....
A great deal of evidence confirms that girls are often given little encouragement in physical movement. Fathers have long been known to have more physical contact with infant sons than daughters, and this apparently hasn’t changed. Researchers in the 1990s found them still rough-and-tumbling with their sons and coddling their daughters. Both parents continue to overhelp small girls. In one study, moms and dads of toddlers were seated in the middle of a room, surrounded by a barricade of soft cushions. Their toddlers were left outside the barricade, trying to get in. The researchers noticed that parents were more likely to urge boys to climb over barricades. The girls they just lifted over.
And as a result: "On average, girls are two years older than boys when they start participating in sport." They start practicing later and then continue to get less practice. I also never knew that young women also see a big increase in testosterone levels during puberty. There's this idea in our culture that girls are just as athletic as boys until the boys hit puberty. And the boys do see a much larger testosterone increase, but women should be able to step up their athletic game during puberty as well. The reason they often don't is our culture pushing them away from sports at that age:
It’s recently been discovered that girls, too, undergo a major increase in testosterone at puberty, with high levels relative to estrogen levels. A greater factor in girls’ typical physical decline in adolescence is the failure to perform aerobic and strength exercise.
She shares some interesting analysis I'd never seen before: inch-for-inch, women can be faster than men. Instead of measuring how many feet per second a person can run (or swim), what if we looked at how many of that individual's body height they can run per second:
A runner of the 100-meter dash, [Carl] Lewis, who stood 6 feet 2 inches tall and held the men’s world record of 9.92 seconds, had a relative velocity of 5.36 heights per second.
But was he faster than Flo-Jo at the 100 meters? You probably have guessed the biomechanical answer. Joyner, who was 5 feet 61⁄2 inches tall, ran the 100-meter dash in 10.49 seconds and thus had a relative velocity of 5.64 heights per second.
In other words, there's about a 10% difference in the average height of men and women, and a roughly 10% difference in many running world records.
In our current culture, there seems to be an idea that if there's one thing that women are better at athletically, it's endurance. The Frailty myth came out in 2000, but even then this was starting to be known:
Recent studies suggest that the hormone long associated with women’s reproductive functioning buffers them against muscle soreness after exercise. Soreness results from microtears in muscle tissue. “The animal data are very clear,” says Dr. Priscilla Clarkson, an exercise physiologist at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Male rats show much more muscle damage, postexercise, than female rats. “Estrogen seems to explain the difference.”
Frisbee makes one appearance in the book, and leads into one of the most interesting paragraphs, in my opinion:
A few years ago a friend’s three-year-old son was teaching me the proper way to throw a Frisbee... When I got it right, he pumped his little arm in the air and shouted, “I gave you the Power!”...Getting a Frisbee to arc beautifully over a summer lawn may seem magical, but it isn’t. It simply requires knowing what to do with your body—a certain positioning of shoulder and elbow, a deft flick of the wrist. When you have this information, you have “the Power.”
Once teachers and coaches spy differences in the performances between boys and girls, they tend to accept them as physiological. Then their expectations of the two sexes change, and the type and quantity of instruction they offer change concomitantly. “Girls generally are provided with less (or lower-level) instruction, encouragement, and opportunity for practice and performance of their motor skills; subsequently their personal expectations generally are lowered,” note Toole and Kretzschmar.
In my experience as a coach, I've felt some tension here, pulling in a few directions. First, there's my desire to be a great teacher for the women I coach—to teach them to "play like the boys", to teach them the "right way", and normalize women being able to run fast and throw far. But at the same time, I feel I have a duty to meet people where they are in their relationship with ultimate frisbee—not everyone wants to go through the pain and frustration of learning the right way to throw as an adult. I would just be taking all the fun out of their frisbee-playing experience.
And finally, it's hard to find the perfect balance between "there's a right way to throw" and "everyone will throw slightly differently based on their individual body". I believe there's some truth in each of those phrases, and that makes it hard to tell someone they're throwing the "wrong" way unless I'm very confident in understanding my relationship with them and their relationship with frisbee.
"Throw Like A Girl"
Ms. Dowling shares a similar take on this phrase that I wrote about in a previous post about throwing frisbees. Here's how she puts it:
Lack of torsion (which essentially is what is meant by “lack of follow-through”) results from failing to put the whole body into the motion. Girls often hold themselves back from full, complete movement. Although it’s usually something girls are unaware of, they actually learn to hamper their movements, developing “a body timidity that increases with age.”...
By limiting the degrees of freedom (and this is done unconsciously), one keeps the task rudimentary, so that the brain doesn’t have an overwhelming amount of motor information to organize. Gradually, as the skill is practiced, the mental organizing becomes easier and the player is able to let go of the unconscious restraints she puts on her range of motion...
So now we have it. Throwing “like a girl,” running “like a girl,” or hitting “like a girl” is little else but freezing. Females have been kept stuck at this awkward stage because cultural proscription against using their bodies discouraged them from practicing enough to reach “thaw.” The assumption that females differ in some fundamental way—in the construction of their shoulders, say, or in their general muscular development—that makes it hard for them to throw a ball correctly (or do anything else in sport) is part of the frailty myth. The girl is given to believe she can’t throw, and one day she tries to and fumbles, then she knows she can’t, so she stops trying. For girls in our culture it’s a classic sequence. Yet there is no inherent biological reason for girls not to throw as far, as fast, or as hard as boys do.
She shares this study as a hint of what might be possible if it wasn't for our culture:
The dominant-hand results were typical of those reported in earlier studies. One of these, for example, reported second-grade boys as throwing 72 percent faster than second-grade girls. But when the use of the nondominant hand was compared, what do you know? There were no differences in how fast boys and girls threw!
What could this mean? Simply, that practice is what gave boys superior throwing skills.
I'm not sure I agree with her that "there is no inherent biological reason for girls not to throw as far, as fast, or as hard as boys do" (speaking in averages, of course). Having broader shoulders may convey some biomechanical advantages. But I absolutely believe that most women would be able to throw much farther if it weren't for our culture. The 10% difference between a 50-yard throw and a 55-yard throw is not very noticeable.