20. Hey Girl – Lady Gaga and Florence Welch 2016

Hey girl, hey girl
We can make it easy if we lift each other
Hey girl, hey girl
We don't need to keep on one-in' up another 

 

I know, I know, . . . I know. I’m going to carry-on about women in sport again (have you read Post 14 yet?). However, in my defence I aspire to be a competitive endurance horse rider and endurance, like many other equestrian disciplines doesn’t separate the genders - horses or their riders - for competition purposes.

Anyhow, I’ve already carried on about the situation of netball being the single highest participation sport in Australia (Post 14), yet it’s an amateur sport that isn’t broadcast on TV or reported in the news like cricket, surfing and the various footy codes that men dominate. So now I’m going to carry on about the gender pay-gap in professional sports.

Professional tennis players, both male and female, can earn a bomb (again, my rantings about Ash Barty and others in Post 14). However I feel, as a women, we’re imposing a double standard when female tennis players want to earn the same cash as males, yet only play three sets rather than five.

Yes, of course I think that there should be comparable prizemoney on offer across the genders. However, as long as players compete on a gender basis, the women should be giving the spectators the same value for money as the men do.

This reminds me, I really need to watch that Battle of the Sexes film.

Back to netball. Many years after my fleeting contemplations as to why all the girls at school were infatuated with netball, I realised that there was an expectation that I’d know how to play netball. This realisation came while living in a small rural Western Australian town. Sports in these rural towns form the social backbone of these communities, with netball and football often played side-by-side so the whole family can have an outing.

When we first arrived in the one-horse town that is (was) Nungarin I was asked to join the local netball team. They were struggling to rustle up enough numbers to field a team and were looking at having to sit the season out. Willing to help out, I told the eager faces waiting for me to respond that I’d never played a game of netball in my life. To this they responded that I’d be fine.

It’s true, I had a basic understanding of the game, but no experience in playing it. This lack of experience didn’t stop me from getting out on that court and trying my little heart out for the team. Panting and covered in sweat, at the end of the match one of the refs - or are they umpires, I don’t really know – came up to me and said that she would have cut me some slack if she’d realised I hadn’t played before. I shrugged this off. She wasn’t to know. Then the very people that had been so desperate for me to help make up the numbers said to me something to the effect of ‘We didn’t realise that you’d never played when you said that you’d never played before’!!! I wondered if they’d listened to themselves as they said this.

Clearly there was an expectation that I was a female, therefore I would know how to play netball. This was coming from the sisterhood, not the opposite sex, which indicated to me that even ‘Oh my God! Women!’ expected fellow sisters to conform to gender norms.

Then there’s the situation of the footy teams I support.

I am the product of a New South Wales father and Victorian mother, so don’t feel the need to wade into debates about the merits or shortcomings of N.R.L. versus A.F.L.. That said, my dad dictated which N.R.L. team I was to support and, by proxy, my grandfather dictated which A.F.L. team I was to support. My brother supports the same teams, so presumably succumbed to the same pressure that my sister and I did. However, my brother was provided with the opportunity (more like pressure) to play both brands of footy as a kid while my sister and I were actively discouraged from pursuing all forms of sport.

This shit stays with you as adults and I see my brother still happily playing competitive soccer while I struggle to swing a tennis racket. I often wish that I’d had the opportunity for ANY form of sport as this would have likely helped me to pick up other sports as desired, improved team and social skills, made me more inclined to take up sports as an adult, experienced improved health outcomes, and all of the other benefits that we’ve all been repeatedly told come from playing sports. However, my sister and I were sent home to an empty house rather than to any form of organised sport after school each day. My brother is seven years my junior and nine years our big sister’s junior, so maybe it was circumstances at the time, but it’s hard to not think that there was a lack of inclination on our parent’s part given my dad’s willingness to volunteer his time in support of my brother’s teams.

Transgender athletes? This one’s too fraught with danger and sensitivities, so I’m not even going there.

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i2sxw0K10wQ