When the question of the manliest sport was proposed last week in class, I immediately thought of American football. Our article for this week does nothing but support this conviction. Large males running and knocking each other over, often in violent ways that result in injuries, with a goal to win a few yards.\u00a0\u00a0It basically seems like our civilized version of warfare.\u00a0 What increases the masculinity of this sport also is the juxtaposition of hyper-femininity beside the players – cheerleaders.\u00a0 While cheerleaders epitomize the sexy and worshipful ideal, the players hold up the honor of being tough, aggressive, strong, and very good at handling balls.<\/p>\n
wait…<\/p>\n
But don’t they also use loads of padding and helmets, mouth guards and special gloves, just to play the game?\u00a0 That’s not very tough-sounding.\u00a0 So maybe the manliest sport should be rugby, a game of similar style, but without all the protection.\u00a0 Except, I know that there are women’s rugby teams.\u00a0 Doesn’t that discount it as the manliest sport, if women have a reputation for playing it? Same with boxing.\u00a0 I know there are plenty of following and learning opportunities for women’s boxing, which might disqualify the sport in this manliest-race.<\/p>\n
Sumo wrestling!\u00a0 Women do it too, though, which might detract from the manliest, but going off of an initial image of two very large humans ramming into each other over and over again with no protection (except fat) – that seems very tough, animalistic, aggressive, strong, and a bit violent.\u00a0 It calls to mind an image of two alpha male \u00a0animals\u00a0fighting over dominance of a clan or the ownership of a female.\u00a0Judging from the history books, that’s pretty manly.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
When the question of the manliest sport was proposed last week in class, I immediately thought of American football. Our article for this week does nothing but support this conviction. Large males running and knocking each other over, often in violent ways that result in injuries, with a goal to …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2071,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29805],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-spring-2016","column","twocol"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/masculinities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/masculinities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/masculinities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/masculinities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2071"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/masculinities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=243"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/masculinities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/243\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/masculinities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=243"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/masculinities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=243"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.richmond.edu\/masculinities\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=243"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}