Shooting Like a Guy

Historical and sociological forces unique to each gender cause disparities in the relationship to the body between men and women. Most of us, including the artist of the above cartoon, are likely to agree on that fact even before reading Young's work. As can be implied from the image, because we live in a world where a woman’s value is still associated with her appearance, societal beauty standards have the power to cause healthy, attractive women to feel overweight and self-confident in a way that men with the same body mass index would never imagine feeling. 

              Observations such as this serve as the basis for Young’s explanation on why many have incorrectly perceived the phenomenon of throwing a ball “like a girl” to be the product of a “natural feminine essence”. Her theory, as I understand it, is thus: (1) Society’s sexist objectification of the female body causes women to literally “objectify” themselves, coming to view their own bodies as objects separate from the experiences that their bodies create. (2) This conscious awareness of the body as a separate entity from the psyche, coupled with social conditioning that steers females away from male-gendered activities, actually changes the way in which many of their bodies operate in the three-dimensional world. In short, she posits that differences in bodily existence for each gender are based primarily on differences in cultural status between men and women—she maintains that there is no natural feminine essence.

              The following video presents an example of how differences in gendered bodily existence might be assumed natural by society:

              Based on this, it would seem that women might be more predisposed to hurting themselves with a powerful gun. Even if we ignore the complexities of a statement like that and assume it to be true, however, the question remains, why would women be more likely to cause themselves harm from an improper bodily technique? Some would argue that women’s hands are naturally more delicate, which is why they have such a hard time.  If Young is to be believed, however, it is more likely to be because the women have been socialized into such a position. They have been told constantly that they are fragile or they have had little experience with a gun, and perhaps for these reasons, they assume they are not really in control of their physical situation (which can explain why they have difficulty performing the task).

              The short video for today, “Men Throwing Rocks with the Other Hand,” further exemplifies how this could be so. When men throw with their non-dominant hand, it presents a form that is “unnatural” in appearance, similar to the way that girls are said to throw normally. This emphasizes that even men do not throw great naturally, but rather were conditioned to do so through their relationship with their social environment. We know women have been historically discouraged from doing perceivably masculine activities, so how could we expect them to perform bodily techniques in the same way as their male counterparts if they have not been socialized in the same way?

             

              The larger implication of Young’s theory seems to be that gender is socially constructed just as much as race, sexuality, or any other non-biological identifier. The fact that in everyday life, one bathroom has a dress on the door and one does not is because we as a society have created an “essential” difference between men and women that is not naturally essential. We already knew that this distinction had huge effects on the social realm as well as how men and women viewed their bodies, but now we have learned that the pervasiveness of such a division extends even into the way that our bodies function in physical space.