Why Women Can't Play Sports

Unless they're Black or queer...

🚨 Spoiler Alert 🚨 : It’s patriarchy, SURPRISE!

Do You Know Your Body?

The other day I was in the gym being the person every new gym goer fears. I was watching a woman fail miserably at an exercise her trainer was trying and failing to assist her with. I am naturally very villainous so it was the only thing I could concentrate on while I was near her.

Seeing her struggle, and truly a struggle it was I thought she was finna pull something, got my mind swirling. Why DO women have such a hard time with physical activities?

I’m a volleyball player, played D1 NCAA volleyball in college. Now, I’m a coach for the bestest players ever <3. They’re on differently gendered teams and each has very different needs from me.

Me being a volleyball superstar

The men’s team needs me to teach them how to be people in a room. They are sooooo mean to each other OMG! Like they’ll come in laughing and then as soon as someone isn’t holding up to another person’s standard they throw their hands up in frustration, suck their teeth, and at their worst directly start raising their voice at each other. It be too damn much for me, especially with their British accents 🤨.

The mixed team is the best people from the men’s and women’s team so the play is much better, but getting the men to have any trust in the women players makes me feel like I’m back in 3rd grade gym class. The men take up so much space and the women turn inward. I can see them shutting down as games go on when this happens. I don’t even wanna get into the process of getting men to trust me as a woman coach. Y’all, when I say I could wipe the floor with them I’m not even playing.

The women’s team operates on a completely different plane. The women love me, they trust me, they’re kind to each other, yeah they talk a lot but it’s an art school they’re all neurodivergent let’s be fucking forreal. The hardest part about coaching them is their lack of control over their bodies. They be moving like those baby giraffe’s do when they pop out they momma pussy and fall 5 stories to the ground.

If you’re one of my players and see this, I’m not talking about you x.

It ain’t JUST my current team neither, this is a pattern I’ve seen pretty much every time I coach women, especially when they’re juxtaposed to men players. That’s how I got to the place of questioning women’s connection to sport. I don’t think I need my too many degrees in political blah blah blah to know the patriarchy is to blame.

Before you pop out the womb people are projecting their gendered wishes and dreams onto you. Baby boys are expect to represent people’s fantasies of masculinity whether it be societal control (CEO), controlling women (player, ladies man), or physical prowess (sports player, tall). While baby girls are projected to represent femininity through their looks almost exclusively (pretty girl). Not much else is given to girls when born.

If you swear you’re different and don’t relate to this off the basis of being raised completely gender neutral (fucking doubt it), bask in that and stay out my comments section pls and thnx.

As we continue to praise the behavior of young boys and girls for existing within that binary we simultaneously shame them when they step outside of it. That means for young girls a connection to their bodies is shamed out of them. 

This is true for both physicality and sexuality. I’ve never met a man who didn’t know how to bust a nut from a very young age, meanwhile there are grown ass women that still don’t think they can cum.

Real life picture of me hearing someone say they can’t cum. Just let me lick it bae.

Girls are taught to bippity boppity boop their physical systems and urges into oblivion. With that comes the stunting of proprioception. To be a good woman the only thing you have to learn how to do is be beautiful and small. No need to learn how your body is moving in space except to take up less of it. Your period is dirty, hide it. Your pussy smells like fish, scrub it with chemicals that definitely won’t make it significantly worse and possibly give you cancer.

I always say I was lucky to learn sports because I was the third of three girls and by the time my parents had me my dad had given up the dream of a son. All his aspirations of sporting success were placed into me. He taught me how to throw and catch and kick and jump. Contrary to popular belief these are not innate actions. They are passed down through our generational human knowledge systems. The secrets are being kept from women and girls. Having to teach adult women how to throw is much harder than teaching someone whose body is one quarter of its size as a kid.

The Black Exception

My mother and grandmother were dancers, my grandmother was even a teacher, so not moving was never an option. Black people don’t need to have close proximity to any formal dance training to exist in a space of rhythm and movement. And that is the essence of what sports is. Yeah I said it, I’m one of those annoying sports people with analogies connecting it to dancing, but it’s true! I am always expressing the beauty of collective movement in volleyball. When done right, nothing is random and everyone moves as an amoeba, collectively shifting based in the created trust of one another through continuous practice.

Rhythm is entangled deeply into nearly all African and African diasporic cultures and is accepted as such. Dancing is not taboo, it is an essential piece of expression that creates connection between people. This along with a history of laboring against their will in depraved conditions means that Black people, women included, have a strong connection with the physical capabilities of their body.

Black women have, historically, not been held to the same standards of subjugation to patriarchy as white women, at least not by white men. While white men have held white women to specific standards of fragility, this was never given to the Black women they held power over. However, Black women have been held to more classic forms of patriarchal oppression by Black men looking to create power for themselves in ways that are easy to enact. Thus there is still a suppression of Black women’s connection to their bodies, but work standards and traditions of rhythm make it much more likely for Black women to access physical parts of themselves. In this way sports become more available for Black women.

The Queer Exception

I have always been lured in by the wonders of sexual attraction. Actually, lured makes it sound bad, let’s say I’ve been intrigued. In first grade I got caught sharing nipple discoveries with my friend in the same bathroom stall. By the time I was like 12 I was eating bitches out in the basement bathroom of my church, dry humping my friends, and being excommunicated from some other friends for being gay. The craziest part is I’m so delusional I did not think I was gay. I saw it all as “practicing for boys”…what?

Subconscious religious shame aside, there was a distinct discovery and experimentation that exists in coming into queerness, whether it be sexual or gender identity. You must be in some form of connection with yourself. In attempting to deny it you learn to contain yourself in ways that require extreme control. When thinking about same sex attraction you get to discover yourself as a means to familiarize with what attracts you to others who have similar systems. You aren’t held to the mystery of not containing the same functions as those you’re attracted to. You got titties I got titties, guess I’ll just twist this button right here and see if it’ll work on me before I try it out on you.

This may not be a direct translation to your way around a court or playing field, but it can sprout an interest in bodily movement that doesn’t appear for others being held back from discovery. For a lot of trans masc and masc women, there is rebellion through connecting yourself to outward physicality. This places these people in a space where learning to utilize your body through traditionally masculine means is a direct line connector to the heart space.

At the End of the Day…

There is a violence that exists in disconnecting women from their bodies. Patriarchy has curated a means of making their target of oppression defenceless. Knowing and holding the ability to control your body should not be reserved for the masculine, but is done so to make subjugating women easier. Women controlling their own bodies in ways that don’t conform to gender binaries is scary to those who want to keep women folded into themselves with a pretty little bow on top.

Playing sports is not an innately masculine activity. Volleyball is a precious entity that extends a concept of fragility through the ball everyone plays with. It teaches you about momentum, power dynamics, collective effort and so much more. Outside of this sport these are all virtues I had been taught by the women in my life.

What I find really interesting is how this dynamic does not exist the same in certain places around the world where femininity is not shamed the same way. I play on this one mixed team where it’s me, two Filipino women and three gay Filipino men. The three best parts of playing with them are as follows:

1. The food they pack for tournaments is BOMB 🤤

2. Everyone HATES us because we always win and the most flamboyant person on the team is the tallest man who blocks every ball they put over, then bends over to shake his ass in celebration LMFAO.

3. The men play WITH the women, in stead of fightin against their own teammates. The women are what grounds the team’s defence and allow the team to show case its offensive power. There is a trust that exists for each other that was extended to me immediately when I got on the court with them for the first time. There was an adjustment period where they got to know me because I was new and not because I was a woman.

An acceptance of the feminine in Filipino culture benefits queer people, all women, and society as a whole. These superimposed binary barriers of gender don’t have to be kept up with to keep their world views from shattering, instead they thrive in wholeness.

Of course women can play sports, but they are only able to do so if they aren’t shamed into disconnecting with their physical vessel.

I snatched bodily autonomy for myself at a young age and was encouraged by the people around me to express physicality. Volleyball is a spiritual practice for me. It has healed me more than any one person ever could. To think that there are so many women having this opportunity held hostage from them makes me exceptionally angry. Ominous as it may seem, we can take it back together. Teach someone how to throw, join a physical activity class or group, start one! There is knowledge to be distributed.

All this to say SEE ME ON THE COURT HOE! I WILL WRECK YO ASS!

---

Thank you again for reading Spit It Out! I cry every time I write something. In this I transfer my emotional space through my bluetooth keyboard I stole from school. <3 I hope you come back to hold me again.

Let me know what your experience with sports has been like.