Here's a little primer in feminist sports theory that I keep coming back to when I'm thinking through the importance of women's leagues for female athletes and girls growing up playing sports. In 1980, Iris Marion Young, famous feminist philosopher, writes in her essay "Throwing Like a Girl" about how women, from a young age, don't have the ability to "make full use of the body's spatial and lateral potentialities" (p. 142). What she's saying is that girls playing sports experience a restriction of space that results in a significant but fundamental difference between how the World writ large discusses female athletes:
Not only is there a typical style of throwing like a girl, but there is more or less typical style of running like a girl, climbing like a girl, swinging like a girl, hitting like a girl. They have in common first that the whole body is not put into fluid and directed motion, but rather, in swinging and hitting, for example, the motion is concentrated in one body part; and second that the woman’s motion tends not to reach, extend, lean, stretch, and follow through in the direction of her intention. (p. 143; emphasis mine)
So female athletic performance is reduced in some part from the benchmark (read: male). Young explains this by writing that women are taught not to trust their bodies, very much not in the same way young boys are taught to trust and move with their whole bodies (intention + physicality) when they are competing in sports/existing in their bodies for the first time. Instead, young women are taught to compartmentalize—to only punch with the arm instead of with the abdominals, hips, and legs. So young girls are caught up in a cultural narrative, bigger than any one athlete or one sport, which insists that (1) women are fundamentally, normatively unathletic (because they are not men) and (2) women's success in sport is so unreliable or so rare that there is no benchmark of success to strive for that isn't entirely male-dominated. (This has a load to do with stereotype threat, too, for which I recommend Gentile et al., 2018 or Heidrich & Chiviacowsky, 2015, both of which concluded women routinely underperform complex motor skills when they are primed with a statement about women being lesser athletes than men.)
Really, though, what I want to harp on that Young says: it's fundamentally about space. Girls are afforded less lateral space with which to move growing up (encouraged to be smaller, less spastic, less agile or gangly, to not play with balls as much and thereby develop less hand-eye coordination, etc.) But I argue this is literal space being restricted, too. Look at the history of Title IX and women's collegiate sports in the United States. Women have always had to fight for the right to have a fucking space to play on. When we weren't permitted to practice with the men anymore, we fought to found our own leagues. And yet, girls' leagues still struggle to find literal space to practice in. Women's sports aren't given primetime slots and it's harder to find coverage of their sporting events. Those sporting events are sponsored less frequently by major advertising agencies. Women and girls, growing up playing sports, are literally afforded less space with which their bodies can move, train, practice, play, and recover. Young writes:
For many women as they move in sport, a space surrounds them in imagination which they are not free to move beyond; the space available to our movement is a constricted space. (p. 143)
In short, space is the issue. F1 Academy solves the problem of space; so did W Series; so does the WNBA, the PWHL, the WPBL, etc. And women have fought hard for those series to exist because they knew they could not simply shove a girl, or many girls, into the space the men have been occupying for so long, and expect it to go well on the first try or even the dozenth. I think it makes sense to have a women's space, even in motorsport, because it's about making the space first. Space for girls to stretch their bodies and hone their skills; literal space to play the game, grass to run on, tracks to kart and drive on, gyms to train with; space to seek out sponsorships and the time to let those brand deals and network deals develop.
This is why I get so upset when I hear people knocking women's leagues, as though we should be beyond them by now and all people should play sports as equals. I'd love for that to be the case. But there's still not space for girls to grow up and not be accused of throwing like a girl.
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