Violence Against Women By Nancy Mandell And The Fame Of Whose Lives

At times, it was commonly believed women were not physically long distance we as a society lose if we tolerate violence against women or similarly marginalized populations for any reason. This article talks about the issues of how women can’t play sports and how sports are for men but I feel that sports are for women and men because everybody deserves a chance to play a sport. Women all ages should feel comfortable playing sports and participating in school sports to. (By: Sage, Learn)

When I hear the word “patriarchy”, the first thing I think about is male dominance. Our society has a dangerously narrow view of masculinity, which limits what a man is allowed to be. Phrases like “nice guys finish last”, “stop acting like a girl”, or “be a man” are told to boys at a young age. In Don Sabo’s article “Pigskin, Patriarchy, and Pain”, he shines the light on intermale aggression by sharing his experience as a young football player and the detrimental risk upon ones body in the football culture.

Women in professional sports fits into the Sex and Power: Global Gender Inequality class because many female athletes have experienced the inequalities in a professional sports setting. Female athletes are being put down by gender inequalities, causing less females participating in athletic programs. Women athletes are being paid less than their male counterparts. Along with being paid less, female and males are receiving unequal benefits in the form of scholarship, media coverage, transportation, and stadium conditions. The professional sport’s world is filled with the obsession of body image and sexuality. Through this obsession, female athletes have been abused from the people they trust the most. There is an increasing inequality in women’s professional sports in the form of pay, sexuality, and abuse.

Rebecca Solnit’s article focuses on the ways male violence negatively affects women. Harassment from men directed at women keep women from speaking up, and many women are living in constant fear of male violence. They live in a constant state of fear because they are aware male violence is taking place around them. Women are also afraid of potential male violence because men openly express authoritative behavior. She explains men feel they have the validity to control and abuse women. Specifically, a man will approach a woman with the expectation that the woman will return the man with a sexual favor. For example, “a woman was stabbed after she rebuffed a man’s sexual advances while she walked in San Francisco’s Tenderloin neighborhood late Monday night…”

"Gender Oppression Involving Men's and Women's Sports." : Analysis of a Scholarly Source: Equal Pay? Not on the Basketball Court" by David Woods. N.p., 28 Oct. 2014. Web. 28 Oct. 2015. .

Sports have been a large part of society throughout history. They have brought out happiness, joy, hard work, determination, and teamwork in the individuals that have participated in them. However, there have been negatives involved with sports throughout history also, including gender roles, which are defined as the public image of being a particular gender that a person presents to others. These roles have been created by society and passed down from generation to generation, informing one another of false beliefs that say that one gender, usually males, are better than females. In sports, these often say that women have significantly lower performance levels, show less drive and that women see competition as unnecessary. In reviewing the initial beliefs and problems before Title IX, the role of Title IX, the problems still existing today, and the modern movement, it is seen that progress has been made, but also that there is also more to do.

Violence remains a prevalent occurrence in the United States despite a steady decline in its occurrence over the past two decades. The group that is most responsible for the increases in violent crime in America is the young adult males. Gender violence is to be accounted as the major form of anti-social behavior that is perpetrated by these young men. The violence against women includes issues acts such as sexual assault, physical battering, rape, threats of sexual or physical abuse, and psychological as well as emotional abuse. As such, these facts point to the fact that gender violence is an issue that occurs across all sectors of the US social life. However, there is a concern that such issues are not adequately addressed when it comes to the sporting world. Other sectors of the US society have come up with well addressed procedures that deal with the issues of domestic violence (Withers 147).

Continuing to brain wash the young men today with the “sports is a mans world” mentality only helps to repeat the cycle of nearly oppressing women in the industry. It keeps men feeling secure when it comes to their masculinity, yet making a woman’s fight for respect a never ending struggle.

Within sport, as throughout society, gender differences exist. The socially constructed phenomenon of gender dictates a dichotomous system whereby females are feminine and males are masculine. Focusing on females specifically, society determines the feminine traits and roles ascribed to this gender. Being domesticated, slender, passive and heterosexual are a part of the desirable appearance that society has formed surrounding femininity (Wolf, 1991). On the other side of the dichotomy is the masculine realm that sport plays into. Sport is fuelled by muscle, power and aggressiveness, which are behaviours and images associated to masculinity. Sport therefore, defies all existing female gender ideals. It would be assumed that females have no place within this institution due to the gender clash. However, female athletes do exist, and many are very successful. For this to work, sport has established and reinforced the social constructions of gender that exist in society. Female athletes are viewed as inferior and are pushed into gender appropriate sports. Furthermore, they are often labeled as masculine until they can prove otherwise, and so great attempts are made to reassert femininity. The stigma associated to being masculine or homosexual for female athletes is so great that many have become irrationally fearful of this label. The sexualisation of the female body and overt displays of heterosexuality are used in

Women’s equality is an issue that has been around for awhile. While women have been given many rights to increase equality, including the right to vote and go to college, the problem hasn’t completely vanished. One area that still sees this is in sports. Women’s sports do not draw nearly as many fans and are not covered in the media as much as men’s sports, pay differences between male and female athletes are large, and female athletes have to wait longer to start their professional career than men, which risks their professional career before it even starts.

Barbara Perry’s article “Doing Gender and Doing Gender Inappropriately” addresses violence and gender, and how gender is influenced through the way it is perceived in society. The construction of gender comes in polar extremes, with masculine dominant men and feminine subordinate women. Gendered violence is used to control women as a class. It is a systematic tool used by men to reinforce gender norms and patriarchal ideas of masculine superiority and feminine inferiority. It “terrorizes the collective by victimizing the individual”. Like any dichotomy, it has scripts, and to deviate from these scripts will leave you labeled as ‘unnatural’ and ‘immoral’. These scripts “constrain everything from modes of dress and social roles to ways of expressing emotion and sexual desire”. In Judith Lorber’s “A World Without Gender” we are introduced to the possibility of eliminating gender and how “degendering [would] undercut the patriarchal and oppressive structure of Western Societies”.

Sexism limits our country. In a world where sexism still exists, women face challenges every day as they choose to embark in athletic activities. Even with the efforts of Title IX, which was established in 1972, there is not equality in sports for men and women. Sexism is real with stereotypes and discrimination on the basis of sex. Even with the high level of success reached by numerous female athletes of many different sports, male athletes always seem to have the upper hand. Whether it is pay, media, support, gear, or playing grounds, one sex always has the better of the two. Male athletes dominate a field that truly is shared by both sexes. What if we treated male athletes the way we treat female athletes? That is a world hard to imagine, and honestly, it shouldn't be. Through female athletes sharing their stories of unfair treatment and pay, sexism and generations of inequality in sports can be overcome.

Whenever the thought of domestic violence comes to mind, more than often the visual picture is a women or a child. However, there is another side that has been ignored because it is pushed under the rug. The unfortunate fact is that men are the victims of domestic violence at least as often as women are. While the very idea of men is being beaten by their wives or partners runs contrary to many of our deeply ingrained beliefs about men and women, female or male violence against men is a well-documented phenomenon almost completely ignored by both the media and society (Watson 2013).

Martin Luther King Jr., a famous orator and African American civil rights clergyman once said, “in the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends” (King Jr.). Currently, our global society is characterized by the latter part of Martin Luther King Jr.’s words: the inability of men to acknowledge and fight against gender violence, which is defined as “violence whose meaning depends on the gendered identities of the parties” (Merry 3). Generally, most men call gender violence a women’s issue, which allows males to formulate an excuse and disregard such violence (Katz). However, Jackson Katz, a prominent anti-sex educator and presenter of a TED Talk titled “Violence Against Women - It’s a Men's Issue”, and Sally Engle Merry, author of Gender Violence: A Cultural Perspective, argue through their respective works that gender violence is the result of a flawed aspect of male culture and the only way to end gender violence is by educating males how to be successful bystanders.

Various theories have been used to explain the experience of IPV. The social structure theory stems from the feminist ideology which explains IPV in relation to gender and power relations in society, including the role of patriarchy in providing the requisite grounds for the normalization and perpetration of IPV against women (Kimmel, 2011; Okenwa-Emegwa, Lawoko & Jansson, 2016). For feminists, patriarchy refers to the systematic domination of men in society’s various institutions (Scott & Marshall, 2005). DV is a phenomenon that has always attracted the interest of feminist theorists and it has been explained based on some variant of feminist theories such as radical, Marxist and socialist feminist perspectives. Radical feminists believe that the existence of patriarchy is the root of women’s oppressed and disadvantaged position in society (Beirne & Messerschmidt, 1991 cited in DeKeseredy & MacLeod, 1997). For them, violence is an expression of male dominance over women. They apply this idea to their explanation of the women’s abuse of women and argue that men engage in violent behaviour in their desire to control and dominate women (DeKeseredy & MacLeod, 1997). Socialist feminists believe that not only gender relations but also social class are important and intertwined factors in determining the social order at any particular time in history (Messerschmidt 1986 cited in DeKeseredy & MacLeod, 1997). They argue that most incidents of domestic abuse