“Sport is political,” said Helen Lenskyj, a U of T sociology professor, last week at the Varsity Deli, coffee in hand. “Sport is a human activity. A human activity practiced by large groups of humans is political by definition.”
If this comment irks you, then there’s a lot more professor Lenskyj could get you riled up about.
Lenskyj, a staunch feminist and lesbian, has recently published her fourth book, called Out on the Field: Gender, Sport and Sexualities. The volume is an examination of female athletes, particularly lesbians, and the heterosexual expectations they face. You wouldn’t know it from her slight build and motherly Australian accent, but she’s got some fighting words to say about women and sport.
As she sees it, many female athletes are pressured to “look” heterosexual out of fear of being called lesbians. She cites what she calls the pony-tail phenomenon as one example: long hair equals good, buzzcuts equal bad. “It’s a trivial point, but it’s indicative of a larger trend: either the women themselves or the women and their peers or individuals are pressuring each other…to look ‘feminine.'”
Out on the Field traces the sources of that pressure. Early beliefs rejected women as athletes altogether, viewing them as too “frail” and unsuited to physical activity. These myths would dissolve over time, but new ones would take their place. “If you were heterosexual and sport was dominated by lesbians, according to this homophobic myth, you’d be recruited and converted [to lesbianism],” said Lenskyj.
This may sound absurd to modern ears, but Lenskyj asserts that such stigmas continue to exist. Lingering questions of female identity in sports hang uncomfortably over many locker rooms, and weaker variants of the female apologetic of the 1970’s-a belief in the necessity of compromising acts to gain public acceptance-remain.
Commerce only complicates the matter. With the commercialization of women’s sports through professional hockey and basketball leagues, the selling of sports-and the women who play them-has become an economic reality. “Sponsors don’t see it as a good marketing strategy to sink their money into a team with short-haired, unadorned women who look ‘butch,'” she said. “You’re not going to sell lipstick.”
Indeed, women’s professional tennis has taken this truism to extremes, where short skirts have become blasé and games now dual as part fashion show.
But lipstick or no lipstick, Lenskyj argues that in the university setting it is the culture of sport and not market pressures that fuel homophobia in varsity locker rooms. “This homophobic climate plays out in women’s sports in extraordinary efforts to present oneself as heterosexually attractive,” she said.
Lenskyj has been vigorously attacked for her outspokenness on women in sports, her area of research. She was told to keep quiet when voicing displeasure with the Olympics and its complicity in stigmatization. She has written, among other things and in two books, how stifling expectations of image and success burden young female gymnasts.
It is surprising to listen to Lenskyj’s radical politics in the context of her early development. Unlike many women in the sixties, Lenskyj got her teacher’s certificate straight out of high school, married, and had a family. But an early teaching experience in Queensland, Australia, a deeply sexist and racist place at the time, radicalized her. Lenskyj’s Master’s work in Women’s Studies at OISE in the 1970’s would complete her feminist awakening.
It is maybe no wonder, then, that the book calls for a radical politicalization of sport. If the book is about one thing, it is that a liberal humanist agenda- one that espouses that homosexuality is and should remain a private matter-doesn’t cut it in the big picture. In fact, writes Lenskyj, the agenda is hampering feminist progress by ignoring other realities like labour and minority rights.
“I’m more critical of liberal humanist organizing that doesn’t take a broad sociological view of the problem,” she said, “and characterizes it as ‘we’ll be nice to the lesbian association, but we don’t want to keep hearing about how oppressed they are or how much harassment they suffer.'” She concluded that “the hidden message is that if [we] would just shut up and stop being so blatantly lesbian then [we] wouldn’t be harassed.”
Given her commitment to the feminist cause, don’t expect Lenskyj to quiet down any time soon.
