The Atalanta Syndrome:
Women, Sports and Cultural Values

No matter how strong the gender differentiation is, both spheres are homophobic and use homophobia to enforce conformity. No good Atalanta should stoop to conquer the apples of a female fan. These homosocial spaces lock out homosexuality – so vigorously and viciously that they betray a repressed fear that heterosexuality will prove to be unbearably fragile and homosexuality inexorably attractive. The most pervasive and symptomatic fear about modern women athletes is that they will lose their “femininity” and become “Amazonian” or “mannish” and “deviant.” In 1925, the National Association of Secondary Principals warned that “sooner or later, the spectacle of interscholastic contests among girls gives rise to undesirable and even morbid social influences.”¹

Despite their common homophobia, men’s sports and women’s are ranked hierarchically. Today, in the United States, despite slurs against “dumb jocks,” male sports are more lucrative, get greater and better media coverage, and seem to provide more thrills and chills. The insecure man who loses to a woman is – if not fully castrated – a lesser man with some nicks on his masculinity. Of course, because of our gender hierarchies, most if not all of our most honorable, rewarding, and prestigious social spaces have been coded as masculine. Only men have access to them. As Susan Guettel Cole writes of such classical Greek sites as the stadium at Olympia, “Restrictions were especially strong in sacred spaces associated with recognition of male authority and the validation of male prestige.”² Because of American racial hierarchies, the admission of men of color to these spaces has been carefully and often maliciously controlled.

Male authority and prestige are wrapped up in the cultural Gordian knot of athletics and war, which seem formed of barbed wire as well as rope. Today, our warriors are often captains of industry who are more apt to carry a golf club than a sword or spear. The association of male sports, however, with the warrior ethos remains. Not surprisingly, because this nexus can signify courage and piety, women athletes, our young Atalantas, find it attractive. Recently, a young woman in Virginia, ranked among the top ten of women saber fencers, talked about her love for her sport. She chose it, she says, “because of the legends surrounding . . . [it] . . . Kings, noblemen, heroes fenced out of a code of loyalty and honor.” She “identifies with that tradition.”³

Despite our idealistic fencer, many feminists have feared sports because of the deep, strong, and often destructive chain mail links among sports, war, and masculinity. This attitude helped to lead to a split in Second Wave feminist thinking about sports, but one of the many instances of the tensions between “sameness” and “difference” feminism. Going through the library stacks in search of Atalanta, I picked up again a copy of Catharine A. MacKinnon’s Feminism Unmodified, and there, with all its force and sass and legal brilliance, was her 1982 speech on sports that maps this historic fissure, “Women, Self-Possession, and Sport.”⁴ As she spoke, two groups were struggling for control over women’s intercollegiate sports, the Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women and the far more established, ultimately victorious, and, some might say, patriarchal National Collegiate Athletic Association.⁵

MacKinnon, by her account, had spent two hours a night, five nights a week, for five years learning martial arts, but because of sexism’s thrall, had only begun to think of herself as an athlete. She now applies the distinction between liberal and radical feminism to sports. The former sees the differences between men and women as irrational, the consequence of arbitrary constraints. The task of feminism is to get rid of them. “Those things,” liberal feminism argues, “that men have been, psychologically and physically, so also women should be allowed to become.” (118) The latter, far preferable to her, finds the “ritualized violence (of sports) . . . alien and dangerous as well as faintly ridiculous.” (123) It seeks to create a “new standard . . . a new vision of sport.” (123) The radical woman athlete disrupts sexism simply by being an athlete and claiming her body. She re-invents sport by defining it not as combat but as “. . . pleasure in motion, cooperation . . . physical self-respect, self-possession, and fun.” (121) If asked why climb Mt. Everest, the man responds, “Because it is there,” the woman, “Because it is beautiful.” (124)⁶

Divided responses to sports – which are visceral as well as theoretical, psychological as well as political – have continued into Third Wave feminism. Again searching for Atalantas, I found an autobiographical essay by two self-defined Gen X feminists. One of the two voices is that of a champion runner, fierce, single-minded in pursuit of victory, a model of rugged individualism, sacrifice for a higher end, and American performance. Estimating that she has spent 25% of her life since adolescence working out, she finds this “my sanity, my identity, my life.” Seeking a major high school championship, she was proud to be accepted as one of the guys, at least the JV guys. Yet, after being known for her championship, she feels dislocated. Later, in college, she is both depressed and frequently physically ill. Her difficulties have political resonance. Her quest for fitness, once autonomous, has become incorporated into a life-style movement, co-opted, domesticated, marketed. When she turns to feminism for a sense of collective action, she finds mouthy power feminism, which yammers on that the world is competitive and to get with the program if you want to succeed. She is reminded, she sighs, of her old male coachs.⁷

As a fan, I am neither radical nor liberal but both. I want to avoid getting trapped on one side or the other of a binary opposition, to traverse each position, and then to honor bits and pieces of each. Some athletic women have negotiated far more difficult passages. I think of Hassiba Boulmerka, an Algerian Muslim and champion middle-distance runner.⁸ Opposing the fundamentalist Islamic politics of her homeland, she entered the arenas of the highest level of international competition, learned to speak its language, and developed “a robust and healthy sense of self.” (348) Yet, the experience deepened her patriotism and commitment to the values of a non-fundamentalist social co-operation.

So positioned, I can imagine using both liberalism and radicalism to re-imagine being competitive. Being competitive, under comparatively benign conditions, is psychologically strange. One wants to win. I certainly do. That means turning one’s rival into the Other that must be vanquished. Yet, one’s rival is also like one’s self, a shadow self in the playing of the game. The game, then, both divides and merges the players. What would happen, feminist theory has asked, if we were to glory in competition but reject it as combat or as a zero/sum game? Could we then engage in competition as if it were a “cooperative challenge”? We would play against the opposition, the Other, the rival, but we also play with the opposition, our shadow self. We would co-operate in respecting the rules of the game and each other. The game would be a way not to death but to an enhanced sense of life.⁹

On balance, the Utopian feminist fan thrills to the radical vision and uses it as the horizon of possibility. I hope that the presence of women in sports will be a rebuke to corruption and a murderous desire to win; that it will provide a moral and psychological leavening; and that it will weaken gender as one of life’s organizing principles. Interestingly, the currently major study of collegiate athletics found the women athletes less materialistic than the men.¹⁰ At the same time, the liberal feminist fan believes in that old shibboleth of “being effective.” I seek gender equity in sports. Women should have as many athletic opportunities as men, be able to play as hard and well as possible, be recognized and rewarded with an income and the currency of hard-earned celebrity for it.

1. James L. Shulman and William G. Bowen. The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001, p. 117. [↩]
2. Susan Guettel Cole, Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Spaces: The Ancient Greek Experience. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004, p. 102. [↩]
3. Rita Simon, “Young Woman Master’s (sic) the Sport of Kings,” The Women’s Freedom Network Newsletter, 9, 5 (September/October 2002): 1, 7. [↩]
4. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987, pp. 117-124. [↩]
5. AIAW ceased operations in 1982 and lost an anti-trust suit against NCAA in 1984. [↩]
6. A charming feminist re-imagining of the Atalanta story tells of a race between Atalanta and young John from her town. They race, but he refuses to marry her unless she wishes to do so. They talk, and become friends, and then happily go off on their separate adventures. See Betty Miles, “Atalanta,” in Free To Be You and Me, ed. Marlo Thomas. pp. 128-135. [↩]
7. Leslie Heywood and Jennifer Drake, “We Learn America like a Script: Activism in the Third Wave, or, Enough Phantoms of Nothing.” Third Wave Agenda: Being Feminist, Doing Feminism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 40-54. [↩]
8. William J. Morgan, “Hassiba Boulmerka and Islamic Green: International Sports, Cultural Differences, and Their Postmodern Interpretation,” in Sport and Postmodern Times, pp. 345-365. [↩]
9. I am grateful to Kathryn Pyne Addelson’s essay, “Equality and Competition: Can Sports Make A Woman of a Girl?”, Women, Philosophy, and Sport: A Collection of New Essays, ed. Betsy C. Postow. Metuchen, NJ and London: Scarecrow Press, 1983, pp. 133-161. In the same book, Mary Vetterling-Braggin, “Cooperative Competition in Sport,” pp. 123-132, traces the debate between “competitive” and “cooperative” models in the 1920s and 1930s. [↩]
10. Shulman and Bowen, The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, p. 138. [↩]