Throw Like a Girl, Cheer Like a Boy. Robyn Ryle

employed it.

      Not without the Girls

      The deliberations about how Title IX would be implemented reveal that the gender segregation in sports we largely take for granted today was never a given. In that historical moment, congresspeople considered that perhaps the best strategy for achieving gender equality in sports would be for women and men to play together. What might the sports world look like if we’d gone in the other direction? And could we be headed that way now?

      Because of Title IX, we currently live in a world where both girls and boys start playing sports at a young age. Though most programs are gender-segregated, sometimes different genders do play together. Take the example of the St. John’s Chargers, a fifth-grade co-ed basketball team in New Jersey. The girls and boys on this team had played together since second grade. Ten games into their 2016–2017 season, officials with the Catholic Youth Organization league informed them that being co-ed was against the rules for middle school teams. Starting in fifth grade, teams had to be gender-segregated and so the team would have to forfeit their 10 wins up to that point in the season.^[33]

      The Chargers’ 10 wins put them in third place in their division and they would have still been eligible for the league playoffs, but only if they played the rest of their season without the girls on their team. Parents put the question to the Chargers—should they go into the playoffs without the girls, or stick together? With a show of hands, all 11 players voted to stay together as a team. When a coach reminded the players that staying together would mean no playoffs and forfeiting the season, one of the players said, “It doesn’t matter.” For these 11 boys and girls, a gender-integrated team was important enough that they sacrificed larger competitive success so they could go on playing together.^[34]

      Title IX was implemented in a way that maintained gender segregation in sports, but the story of this team of girls and boys is still a testament to the wide-reaching success of the legislation. The culture in which the players on the Chargers team grew up is one where athletic ability and interest in sports among girls is simply taken for granted. Of course girls play sports. Of course they want to win. Of course they’re exceptional athletes. The ruling of the Catholic Youth Organization league was eventually overturned, allowing the Chargers to continue playing together. You can imagine the boys and girls on that team wondering what the big deal was in the first place. That’s the world Title IX created, and maybe kids like these are a sign that gender segregation in sports may be on its way out.

      The Power of Cheering Together

      For now, cheerleading remains one among a small handful of gender-integrated sports. But research on the effects that being on a team with women has on male cheerleaders suggests that gender integration could be a very good idea. As researchers point out, in our current gender-segregated sports system, the organization of many men’s sports systems reinforces a toxic and hierarchical version of masculinity. Though not all men’s sports programs are like this, many encourage a version of masculinity that is both misogynistic (hostile toward women) and homophobic (hostile toward gay men and lesbian women).^[35]

      This harmful version of masculinity is amplified by the fact that in team sports, men spend most of their time around men who are very much like them. This discourages the exploration of alternative ways of being masculine, and also limits men’s exposure and interaction with women. Research shows that male athletes in men-only team sports are more likely to objectify women by seeing them as sexual objects to be conquered.

      But sport itself is not what leads men to have this sort of attitude. One researcher followed heterosexual male college cheerleaders who had played football in high school. Before they started cheerleading, the men reported holding misogynistic views about women as athletes and women in general. But competing with women overwhelmingly changed those attitudes. After cheering alongside women, the men perceived women as good athletes who were strong, capable, and skillful. One participant said, “I used to think women were weak, but now I know that’s not true . . . these women are athletes. They do stuff I’d never be able to do and I bet there are a lot of sports women can do better in.”^[36] This research suggests that when men and women play sports together, it can have an important impact on how male athletes think about gender.

      Sports and the Stalled Revolution

      In the 40 or so years since the beginning of the women’s movement in the United States and the passage of landmark legislation like Title IX, women have made impressive progress in revolutionizing the way we experience gender. But many men have not followed along. Researchers refer to this as the stalled revolution. More women are working than in the past. More women are achieving academic success. More women are occupying positions of power in society. Many more women are playing sports. What it means to be a woman has changed, but what it means to be a man isn’t particularly different for many men.

      As a group, men haven’t caught up. Although the female partner in heterosexual couples may be working longer hours, the male partner has not significantly stepped up his contributions to housework and child care. With all of women’s success in the workplace, men still earn more income across most jobs in the United States, and many men aren’t bothered by that reality. In fact, many men direct their anger and hostility toward women and the gains they have made.

      It might take a lot of hard work to un-stall the gender revolution and bring men up to speed, but perhaps the integration of sports is a good first step. The fact that sports remains a largely gender-segregated area of our social life serves to reinforce our beliefs about the fundamental differences between women and men, as well as women’s “natural” inferiority. Research tells us that when women and men play sports together, it changes the way male athletes think about gender.

      In the not-so-distant past, all cheerleaders were boys and being a cheerleader was a powerful and important thing. Then girls started cheering, and a lot of the power that came with being a cheerleader went away. Today, women and men sometimes cheer together and sometimes play together, and their experiences may be an important lesson for all of sports, as well as the wider world.

      1.

      Jaime Schultz, Qualifying Times: Points of Change in U.S. Women’s Sports (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014), 170.

      2.

      Elizabeth Sherman, “Why Don’t More People Consider Cheerleading a Sport?” The Atlantic, May 2, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/05/why-dont-more-people-consider-competitive-cheerleading-a-sport/524940/ (accessed February 5, 2019).

      3.

      Schultz, Qualifying Times, 170.

      4.

      Ibid., 171.

      5.

      Ibid., 173.

      6.

      Ibid.

      7.

      Ibid., 75.

      8.

      Ibid., 174–76.

      9.

      Sally Jenkins, “History of Women’s Basketball,” WNBA, July 3, 1997, https://www.wnba.com/news/history-of-womens-basketball/ (accessed February 5, 2019).

      10.

      Schultz, Qualifying Times, 76.

      11.

      Ibid., 79.

      12.

      Ibid., 81–82.

      13.

      Ibid., 84.

      14.

      Ibid.,