February 27, 2012 • 23 mins
The 2012 Summer Olympics mark the official debut of women's boxing, and fans have been waiting anxiously. In this episode, Caroline and Cristen explore the history of women's boxing, along with gender dynamics at the gym and inside the ring.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff Mom never told you?
From House stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Caroline and I'm Christen. So back in
(00:21):
two thousand nine, Kristen the IOC, the International Olympic Committee,
made the decision to add women's boxing to this year's
London Summer Olympic Games. And before this it had been
the only sport reserve for men. So now we're all
equal A story over kind of kind Well okay, yeah,
(00:41):
not really. There actually is a debate raging currently about
women's boxing and basically, should women engage in a sport
whose main purpose is to inflict a damage on the
opponent and that we might even possibly knock them unconscious.
That does not sound very ladylike, Caroline, which it sure doesn't.
We might wet how what I know? It shouldn't be allowed.
(01:05):
Well one one note though, one historical note. Women have
boxed at the Olympics before, one other time at the
nineteen o four St. Louis Games, which was the first
time that the men's boxing debut at the Olympics, but
women's boxing was relegated to a display event. Well they
were actually both display events, but after the display event
(01:27):
they were like, hey, men, come on and the women
women just just keeping the little sideshow act that you are.
Could you go make us some sandwiches exactly? But it
actually it has so much more history or beyond uh
nineteen o four. Back in the seventeen twenties the first
staged women's prize fights took place. This was in in England,
(01:50):
and in addition to punching and kicking, women could mall
and scratch their opponents, so it was more like just
like a cat fight in the ring instead of true boxing.
And then female prize fighting happened in eighteenth and nineteenth
century European fairgrounds and an exhibition halls. But then in
the nineteenth century also people started clamping down on the sport.
(02:15):
They were very uncomfortable was seeing two women in the ring,
and for that reason it was prohibited in many U.
S States and in Europe, and it was officially banned
in Britain, for instance, in eighteen eighty, but that didn't
hold back Barbara Buttrick, a Yorkshire born fighter who was
(02:36):
one of the those early renegades, and let's not forget
in eighteen seventy six, Nel Saunders and Rose Harland got
in the ring and duked it out over a silver
butter dish because you know what a women need with
a coppera medal um and what is considered the first
women's match in the US. So they probably maybe inspired
ms buttrick. Yeah, Because then in the late fifties and
(02:59):
ninety seven, to be precise, Barbara became the first female
boxing license holder UM and she was in Dallas, Texas,
and she fought the second female boxing license holder, Phyllis Coogler,
for the first women's World Championship. And I think it's
worth pointing out that that Barbara was just ninety eight
(03:20):
pounds and four ft eleven. She's a little step fire tiny. Yeah.
So then fast forward to and women's amateur boxing is
finally integrated into the rules of the US amateur boxing program,
and then is a pretty huge year for women's boxing
because of a bout between Christie Martin and dear Dreg
(03:42):
Gogerdy and Christie Martin one and she became the face
of women's boxing and actually made it onto the cover
of Sports Illustrated, thus marking the birth of modern professional
women's boxing in the US. But the funny thing is,
if you go back and read that Sports Illustrated story
(04:03):
interviewing Martin, she could not give a hoot about women's boxing.
She liked boxing, but women, no, no, no, she says,
I'm not out to make a statement about women in
boxing or even women in sports. I'm not trying to
put women in the forefront. And I don't even think
this fascination with women in the ring has much to
(04:23):
do with that. This is about Christine Martin. Well, I mean, yeah,
quite a quite a fighting spirit there, um, but the
whole profile of her just hammers home the thing of oh, yeah,
she's she's a boxer, so in that way in the
ring she's you know, knocking out all these stereotypes. But
at home she's married to her coach and she really
(04:45):
likes to cook him dinner. For instance, include this quote
from her saying, if my house is on fire, I
want Mike Tyson carrying me out, not Christine Martin. So well,
so big first for a professional women's boxing, but Christy
Martin could care less. And then in we have the
(05:06):
first European Cup for women's boxing in the first World
Championship for women is held not too long ago, just
in two thousand one. Yeah, and speaking of there was
this New York Times article talking about how the trend
in women's boxing wasn't so much that all these women
were coming coming out of the woodwork to compete and
(05:27):
go pro so that they were all coming to Jim's
to get into shape. Right. But through this whole exercise trend,
actually a lot of the women who went into exercise
came out champions. Um and that. In that same New
York Times article, they interviewed one of the coaches who
pointed out some gender differences among some boxers. Uh. He
(05:48):
told the Times that women are easier to train than
men because they are more relaxed and not as macho.
But then he goes on to point out how women
boxers do have more fragile psyche. Quote. You can't scream
at them like you would with a man, even though
sometimes I really want to those trouble making women. Um.
(06:10):
One of the women who went into a gym, this
was I believe in in New York, Long Island Baby.
It was Kathy Collins, who is originally from Georgia. She
dropped a hundred one pounds in the course of her
very strict exercise regiment, and then turned pro. She won
the first women's pro boxing match ever held in Madison
Square Garden and her fights have been on pay per
view and ESPN and USA Networks, and she she loves
(06:33):
the sport and she said that it really gives you
a sense of strength and a greater sense of self.
But here's here's the latest controversy that has come up.
Because we'll get back to the Olympic stuff in a second,
But November two thousand eleven, we've just been we've been
solepaturely making these strides, getting more women in the ring,
(06:53):
toughening up, going into those those all male gyms, not
given a hoot, No hoots given, no who's given. And
then in November of last year, the Amateur International Boxing
Association this brilliant idea that female boxers should put on skirts.
(07:16):
Why not, they're women, right, they should be wearing skirts.
Maybe they should be barefoot in the ring too. Well.
Their argument was, how else are you going to be
able to tell if you're if you flip on a
on a boxing match, how else can you tell if
it's a woman up there but a question that that
I had, and when I first I said out why
I said it out loud when I read this, and
actually a bunch of people commenting on the articles about
(07:37):
this topic said the same thing. Why is it so
important to distinguish female boxers from mail boxers when you're
watching it on TV or whether you know, even if
you're a spectator in the arena? Is it not just
about the boxing? And so all these issues come up
about discomfort with the lack of gender division or obvious
gender division, UM, discomfort with women entering a traditionally may
(08:00):
all dominated sport. Following this, this announcement, the skirt fiasco
UM the they held the European Championships in Rotterdam and
only two nations, Poland and Romania, decided to have their
boxers wear the skirts in the ring. UM and the
Polish coach told the BBC. By wearing skirts, in my opinion,
(08:23):
it gives a good impression, a womanly impression. Wearing shorts
is not a good way for women boxers to dress.
So much ridiculous there in that statement, right, and then UM,
on the heels of all these complaints, not only from
female boxers who are like what, I'm not going to
wear a mini skirt and also outrage from the public.
(08:44):
The president of the Amateur International Boxing Association Association said,
after we hear about its comfort and how easy it
is to compete in the uniform, it may be compulsory.
So he's he's trying to argue that skirts are just
an easy, breezy kind of thing that you could just
toss on and go just hop into the ring. No
need for sure. It sounds like a makeup ad um. Yeah,
(09:06):
well and a B A or excuse me, a I B.
A spokesman recently came out and said that, oh, well,
we never we never intended to make the mandatory after
the president had said that they could become compulsory depending
on people's reactions to them. And on February thirteenth of
this year, boxer Tyresha Douglas was quoted by Sports Illustrated
as saying, we're women, and women should be wearing a
(09:27):
woman's uniform. I mean, women can wear shorts, but it's boxing.
We need to look more feminine under the headgear. You
don't know if it's a man or a woman. If
we don't have boobs. We're women and we need to
let people know we're women because you can't tell. But
not surprisingly, Tyresha was very much in the minority. There
have not only been some amateur boxers who have headed
(09:49):
up a change dot org petition to get the Amateur
International Boxing Association to abandon this skirt plan um, others
have just spoken out in press against it because this
decision um has followed quickly on the heels of the
trials for the Olympics. So there's been all of this
focus on women's boxing lately, and the skirt issue keeps
(10:14):
coming up, and so far, to Rishia Douglas is the
only person I've heard who is really outright in favor.
I found well world champion fighter Mary Calm. She's from India.
She compared female fighters to female competitors in sports like
tennis and wear gender specific uniforms. But I mean, I
think it's stupid and tennis, you know why, I mean,
(10:35):
why should a female athletes have to wear a skirt?
Why can't she just wear what is comfortable or what
her coach wants her to You know what, did it matter?
It just seems with something like boxing too, skirts just
don't It's clearly a thing to feminize these athletes and
it's not it's not that necessary. For instance, Jara Hodge
(10:56):
over at Gender Focus put it very well when she said, um,
the attitude is clearly persisting today. This idea of um
a team of foxes and not boxes, which was a
quote from the nineteen sixty U S Women's chat coach
Um and they. She says that it's clearly persisting today
as many female professional athletes report feeling pressured to act
(11:18):
and look feminine outside of sport in order to compensate
for their masculine strength. And what better segue than into
the gender dynamics of boxing, because, according to some sports scholars,
boxing is the ultimate egalitarian sport if you're a guy,
(11:41):
because once you get up in the ring, it doesn't
matter your class, your race, all your weight and size
obviously will will play a role, but once you're in
the ring, it's all all of that goes away, and
you have one opponent and one mission and that is
to take him down. But when you toss a woman
in there, everything goes top. Feet are to be right, um.
(12:01):
Some researchers went to an Australian boxing gym and talked
to talk to a bunch of people, but really focused
on interviews with three men and three women at this gym.
And this was a study in qualitative sociology from Faul
two thousand four called Suffragettes and Satin Shorts, Gender and
competitive Boxing, and it was interesting. They pointed out that
(12:21):
competitive boxing can be studied productively as a paradoxical gender
regime that simultaneously enables and constrains how women quote unquote
do gender. Um there was one scholar that they quoted
um as saying raw aggression is thought to be the
province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women.
(12:43):
The female boxer violates the stereotype and cannot be taken seriously.
She is parody, she has cartoon, she is monstrous. Yeah.
One guy the researcher talked to said, boxing isn't a
female sport. Women are feminine. It's in the society. It's
probably not right. They've got rest that are going to
get whacked. Although they have done research on whether or
(13:05):
not female boxing endangers are breasts, specifically whether or not
it could um uh cause breast cancer down the road,
No risk, Your breasts are safe. Yeah, boxing is pretty
it's a pretty safe sport. But the very fact that
that safety issue is one of the first things that
people bring up when they talk about women's boxing as
(13:26):
opposed to men's boxing, which we have, you know, just
accepted as yes, a little bit more more violent and
aggressive sport, but it's not, I mean, it's not something
that is on the forefront of our minds, it seems like.
And that's one of the reasons why these, uh, this
gender issue with boxing is really fascinating, because people are
so uncomfortable with the idea of women punching at each other, right,
(13:51):
and some of the guys in the gym that these
researchers meant to we're just that they were they were
totally uncomfortable with women who came into the gym on
a regular basis. It's one thing if maybe you bring
your your steady girlfriend or your wife in there, somebody
who's not going to try to distract you with her
her feminine wiles. But yeah, for the most part, women
in these boxing gyms were considered to be distracting or
(14:11):
weakening to men well, and I think that this is
um one of the reasons why this Olympic women's boxing
landmark is is such a good thing, not just because
it's opening up that final sport to women, but because
a lot of the coverage that I've seen of the
boxing trials, which are now over, has been really positive.
(14:34):
You know, it's really painting these these women as athletes
is really strong and diverse and compelling, not terrifying and
monstrous and parodies of themselves. Yeah, exactly, they're just strong athletes. Well,
with that said, should we look at who the winners
of the boxing trials are? Absolutely absolutely starting off with
(14:56):
Marlon Esparza. She's the flyweight. She actually had to gain
six pounds to fit into to fit her small frame
into the really strict weight classes that the Olympic committee approved,
so they only approved weight three weight class divisions for
a hundred and twelve pounds, one thirty two and one
sixty five, which has actually caused a lot of concern
(15:19):
about women either gaining too much, losing too much, or
dropping out. Asparsa, like I said, gained six pounds and
she postponed college because she had her sight set on
the Olympics, and coincidentally, her last bout happened to be
against Tyresha Douglas, who we mentioned earlier who was pro skirts.
Pro skirt just just thrown up. Well. In the lightweight division,
(15:42):
we have Queen Underwood, who was a favorite going into
the trials. And then there's also Clarissa Shields who is
the middleweight Caroline Clarissa Shields is sixteen years old. That's amazing. Yeah,
she's a high school junior from Flint, Michigan who started
boxing at the age of eleven to make her imprisoned
father proud. Yeah, there's a really touching NPR story about
(16:05):
um about Shields and her her boxing journey. You want
to give it a lesson, um. But the thing is,
the journey does not stop for these three women. Even
though they made it through the trials, they now have
to go on to the World Championships in China where
they have to finish in the top eight of their
weight category in order to qualify for the full Olympic
(16:27):
event in London. So three women to pull for. And
you pointed out that they you know, the IOC boiled
it down to the three weight classes for men's boxing.
They've gut ten. Yeah. Uh. And coach Christie Halbert said
that about three thousand women register as amateur boxers in
the US in ten weight classes, and she said that
(16:47):
keeps the sports safe and to make it fair, to
celebrate the diversity of the human body. And so the
Amateur International Boxing Association is actually lobbying the i o
C to get more women into the Olympics. There's also
one quote from Queen Underwood's coach, Bashir Abdullah that I
wanted to point out because it fits so nicely in
(17:07):
our conversation about gender and boxing, because initially he was
very uncomfortable with the idea of coaching a female boxer,
which kind of reminds me of Clint Eastwood. A million
dollar baby um and he said, I didn't want to
see women in this sport, which was based on his
religious beliefs, but he also wanted to keep his job
as a boxing coach with the U. S. Army, so
(17:29):
he adapted when the Army's World Class Athlete program accepted women,
and he was very glad that he did. And he
told inn PR there are great athletes in this women's sport.
They're more focused, they're coachable, they're more determined, and they're
more disciplined than mail boxers, right, which echoes what trainer
Tom malloy said that you mentioned earlier that women are
(17:49):
better at learning how to box, I guess, although malloy
did follow it up with how we might cry if
you yelled at us too hard? Were fragile? Fragile people? Well,
somebody else talking about Queen Hunderwood that I like this
quote US boxing coaches that Joe Zanders was talking about
her and said, Queen can hurt you. Queen is a killer.
(18:10):
She has a nice doll like smile, but you can't
take that seriously because she has some dog in her
and she will get after you. It's great embodying, you know,
both ends of those. Uh, that that gender dichotomy that
everybody harps on so often. You know, Queen Underwood, man,
she's not gonna mount. And speaking of knockouts, we have
(18:30):
talked about, you know, the violence associated with boxing. But
the I A b A, the same association that wants
to put these women in skirts. According to fifteen years
of data, they have shown that women's Olympic style boxing
is safer than men's and compared to other sports, women's
boxing is incredibly safe. Yeah, and it has a very
(18:53):
low rate of concussions and hand injuries and pretty much
no rate at all of lower extremity injury, and not
to mention that the female athlete has a more flexible neck,
less shoulder and neck musculature and less upper body strength
than the male athlete, which means she might not pack
as hard of a punch, but she might take one
(19:14):
a little bit better than the dudes. Um, And just
to hammer home the point of the safety of women's boxing,
according to study from Australia, it is much safer than
pony riding, polo, touch football, even cricket and soccer. Okay,
(19:35):
well there you go. But um, that's study by the
a I b A actually pointed out that you know,
and what we already know this that boxing is an
excellent workout. That's why all those people are going to
boxing gyms to try to get fit. For the average
on forty pound woman, it burns nearly eight hundred calories
per hour, compared with riding a stationary bike at six
(19:56):
d and fifty calories per hour and jogging at nine
in hundred. But women are protected. They wear leather groin protector,
they wear hard plastic cups inserted into a sport spra,
and they wear depending on the weight, they either were
eight ounce gloves for women up two hundred forty pounds
or ten ounce gloves for the heavier women, and of
course amateurs wear headgear two So they're in a safe sport,
(20:18):
they're getting fit and they're they're protecting themselves at the
same time. But the one big restriction women out there
who are thinking about boxing, if you are pregnant, you
are not allowed to box. Although there was a pregnant
curler in the last Olympics, but I guess you know,
curling is a pretty low intensity sport, low contact. Yeah.
(20:39):
If I remember seeing there was, it was like a
big splashy headline like pregnant olympian. Oh she's curling. Nothing
against curlers out there, or pregnant women or pregnant curlers.
We like all of these people, but pregnant boxers, now
that is just a risk that should not be taken, right. Um.
So yeah, three awesome athletes to keep an ear out for.
As the Olympic trials continue to China for those World Championships,
(21:05):
I really hope that they will place so that we
can see them in London this summer. So let's hear
from any of our listeners who do box, male or female,
but you know mostly female. I want to hear if
you got involved in the sport because you want to fight,
or if you want to get in shape, or if
it was intimidating walking into that boxing gym? Right? Did
(21:25):
you have to deal with a lot of angry stairs
from men who you were clearly distracting. Did you have
a Clint Eastwood like coach to help you along the way. Yeah,
someone surly who came to love you. Let us know
all of these things. Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com
is the email address, and I have a letter here
from Justina in response to your episode about gendered toys
(21:47):
and those pink legos that are causing such a curfuffle.
She writes, I have no problem with petitions and putting
pressure on companies to not overdo the gender thing, but
I believe the key to successfully mix it up with
toys is parenting and what you model at home. My
husband and I have one daughter and one son, and
when they were little, we had toys from all over
(22:08):
the gender spectrum for them to play with. But it's
not enough to simply place your kid in a room
full of toys. You as the parent, need to spend
some time playing with him or her. And if your
little girl is building a lego house with her mom,
she is learning that women can build and even better.
Our kids saw and still see mom repairing electronics, doing
computer set up for the home network, and also cooking
and doing embroidery. Their dad also cooks and cleans and
(22:31):
is to go to math and physics tutor. Mom takes
care of chemistry, social studies, and English essay critiques. So
thank you, Justina, and I have a correction here from Julie.
And this is actually a correction we've received from several
people on our Facebook wall, so it's good too. It's
good to point this out. Um. She said that I
listened to the Tattoo podcast recently and realized that you
(22:51):
said in the Bible Rebecca was married to Abraham. In fact,
she was his daughter in law married to his son Isaac.
So thank you. I'm glad could finally lay that to rest. Yes. Um, So,
if you have any boxing stories, random thoughts, corrections, anything
at all you'd like to send our way, you can
get in touch with those myriad ways. Mom stuff at
(23:12):
Discovery dot com is our email address. You can find
us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at mom
Stuff Podcast, and you can see what we're doing during
the week on our home website, how stuff works dot com.
Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff
from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we
(23:34):
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thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff Mom never told you?
From House stuff Works dot Com. Hello and welcome to
the podcast. I'm Caroline and I'm Christen. So back in
(00:21):
two thousand nine, Kristen the IOC, the International Olympic Committee,
made the decision to add women's boxing to this year's
London Summer Olympic Games. And before this it had been
the only sport reserve for men. So now we're all
equal A story over kind of kind Well okay, yeah,
(00:41):
not really. There actually is a debate raging currently about
women's boxing and basically, should women engage in a sport
whose main purpose is to inflict a damage on the
opponent and that we might even possibly knock them unconscious.
That does not sound very ladylike, Caroline, which it sure doesn't.
We might wet how what I know? It shouldn't be allowed.
(01:05):
Well one one note though, one historical note. Women have
boxed at the Olympics before, one other time at the
nineteen o four St. Louis Games, which was the first
time that the men's boxing debut at the Olympics, but
women's boxing was relegated to a display event. Well they
were actually both display events, but after the display event
(01:27):
they were like, hey, men, come on and the women
women just just keeping the little sideshow act that you are.
Could you go make us some sandwiches exactly? But it
actually it has so much more history or beyond uh
nineteen o four. Back in the seventeen twenties the first
staged women's prize fights took place. This was in in England,
(01:50):
and in addition to punching and kicking, women could mall
and scratch their opponents, so it was more like just
like a cat fight in the ring instead of true boxing.
And then female prize fighting happened in eighteenth and nineteenth
century European fairgrounds and an exhibition halls. But then in
the nineteenth century also people started clamping down on the sport.
(02:15):
They were very uncomfortable was seeing two women in the ring,
and for that reason it was prohibited in many U.
S States and in Europe, and it was officially banned
in Britain, for instance, in eighteen eighty, but that didn't
hold back Barbara Buttrick, a Yorkshire born fighter who was
(02:36):
one of the those early renegades, and let's not forget
in eighteen seventy six, Nel Saunders and Rose Harland got
in the ring and duked it out over a silver
butter dish because you know what a women need with
a coppera medal um and what is considered the first
women's match in the US. So they probably maybe inspired
ms buttrick. Yeah, Because then in the late fifties and
(02:59):
ninety seven, to be precise, Barbara became the first female
boxing license holder UM and she was in Dallas, Texas,
and she fought the second female boxing license holder, Phyllis Coogler,
for the first women's World Championship. And I think it's
worth pointing out that that Barbara was just ninety eight
(03:20):
pounds and four ft eleven. She's a little step fire tiny. Yeah.
So then fast forward to and women's amateur boxing is
finally integrated into the rules of the US amateur boxing program,
and then is a pretty huge year for women's boxing
because of a bout between Christie Martin and dear Dreg
(03:42):
Gogerdy and Christie Martin one and she became the face
of women's boxing and actually made it onto the cover
of Sports Illustrated, thus marking the birth of modern professional
women's boxing in the US. But the funny thing is,
if you go back and read that Sports Illustrated story
(04:03):
interviewing Martin, she could not give a hoot about women's boxing.
She liked boxing, but women, no, no, no, she says,
I'm not out to make a statement about women in
boxing or even women in sports. I'm not trying to
put women in the forefront. And I don't even think
this fascination with women in the ring has much to
(04:23):
do with that. This is about Christine Martin. Well, I mean, yeah,
quite a quite a fighting spirit there, um, but the
whole profile of her just hammers home the thing of oh, yeah,
she's she's a boxer, so in that way in the
ring she's you know, knocking out all these stereotypes. But
at home she's married to her coach and she really
(04:45):
likes to cook him dinner. For instance, include this quote
from her saying, if my house is on fire, I
want Mike Tyson carrying me out, not Christine Martin. So well,
so big first for a professional women's boxing, but Christy
Martin could care less. And then in we have the
(05:06):
first European Cup for women's boxing in the first World
Championship for women is held not too long ago, just
in two thousand one. Yeah, and speaking of there was
this New York Times article talking about how the trend
in women's boxing wasn't so much that all these women
were coming coming out of the woodwork to compete and
(05:27):
go pro so that they were all coming to Jim's
to get into shape. Right. But through this whole exercise trend,
actually a lot of the women who went into exercise
came out champions. Um and that. In that same New
York Times article, they interviewed one of the coaches who
pointed out some gender differences among some boxers. Uh. He
(05:48):
told the Times that women are easier to train than
men because they are more relaxed and not as macho.
But then he goes on to point out how women
boxers do have more fragile psyche. Quote. You can't scream
at them like you would with a man, even though
sometimes I really want to those trouble making women. Um.
(06:10):
One of the women who went into a gym, this
was I believe in in New York, Long Island Baby.
It was Kathy Collins, who is originally from Georgia. She
dropped a hundred one pounds in the course of her
very strict exercise regiment, and then turned pro. She won
the first women's pro boxing match ever held in Madison
Square Garden and her fights have been on pay per
view and ESPN and USA Networks, and she she loves
(06:33):
the sport and she said that it really gives you
a sense of strength and a greater sense of self.
But here's here's the latest controversy that has come up.
Because we'll get back to the Olympic stuff in a second,
But November two thousand eleven, we've just been we've been
solepaturely making these strides, getting more women in the ring,
(06:53):
toughening up, going into those those all male gyms, not
given a hoot, No hoots given, no who's given. And
then in November of last year, the Amateur International Boxing
Association this brilliant idea that female boxers should put on skirts.
(07:16):
Why not, they're women, right, they should be wearing skirts.
Maybe they should be barefoot in the ring too. Well.
Their argument was, how else are you going to be
able to tell if you're if you flip on a
on a boxing match, how else can you tell if
it's a woman up there but a question that that
I had, and when I first I said out why
I said it out loud when I read this, and
actually a bunch of people commenting on the articles about
(07:37):
this topic said the same thing. Why is it so
important to distinguish female boxers from mail boxers when you're
watching it on TV or whether you know, even if
you're a spectator in the arena? Is it not just
about the boxing? And so all these issues come up
about discomfort with the lack of gender division or obvious
gender division, UM, discomfort with women entering a traditionally may
(08:00):
all dominated sport. Following this, this announcement, the skirt fiasco
UM the they held the European Championships in Rotterdam and
only two nations, Poland and Romania, decided to have their
boxers wear the skirts in the ring. UM and the
Polish coach told the BBC. By wearing skirts, in my opinion,
(08:23):
it gives a good impression, a womanly impression. Wearing shorts
is not a good way for women boxers to dress.
So much ridiculous there in that statement, right, and then UM,
on the heels of all these complaints, not only from
female boxers who are like what, I'm not going to
wear a mini skirt and also outrage from the public.
(08:44):
The president of the Amateur International Boxing Association Association said,
after we hear about its comfort and how easy it
is to compete in the uniform, it may be compulsory.
So he's he's trying to argue that skirts are just
an easy, breezy kind of thing that you could just
toss on and go just hop into the ring. No
need for sure. It sounds like a makeup ad um. Yeah,
(09:06):
well and a B A or excuse me, a I B.
A spokesman recently came out and said that, oh, well,
we never we never intended to make the mandatory after
the president had said that they could become compulsory depending
on people's reactions to them. And on February thirteenth of
this year, boxer Tyresha Douglas was quoted by Sports Illustrated
as saying, we're women, and women should be wearing a
(09:27):
woman's uniform. I mean, women can wear shorts, but it's boxing.
We need to look more feminine under the headgear. You
don't know if it's a man or a woman. If
we don't have boobs. We're women and we need to
let people know we're women because you can't tell. But
not surprisingly, Tyresha was very much in the minority. There
have not only been some amateur boxers who have headed
(09:49):
up a change dot org petition to get the Amateur
International Boxing Association to abandon this skirt plan um, others
have just spoken out in press against it because this
decision um has followed quickly on the heels of the
trials for the Olympics. So there's been all of this
focus on women's boxing lately, and the skirt issue keeps
(10:14):
coming up, and so far, to Rishia Douglas is the
only person I've heard who is really outright in favor.
I found well world champion fighter Mary Calm. She's from India.
She compared female fighters to female competitors in sports like
tennis and wear gender specific uniforms. But I mean, I
think it's stupid and tennis, you know why, I mean,
(10:35):
why should a female athletes have to wear a skirt?
Why can't she just wear what is comfortable or what
her coach wants her to You know what, did it matter?
It just seems with something like boxing too, skirts just
don't It's clearly a thing to feminize these athletes and
it's not it's not that necessary. For instance, Jara Hodge
(10:56):
over at Gender Focus put it very well when she said, um,
the attitude is clearly persisting today. This idea of um
a team of foxes and not boxes, which was a
quote from the nineteen sixty U S Women's chat coach
Um and they. She says that it's clearly persisting today
as many female professional athletes report feeling pressured to act
(11:18):
and look feminine outside of sport in order to compensate
for their masculine strength. And what better segue than into
the gender dynamics of boxing, because, according to some sports scholars,
boxing is the ultimate egalitarian sport if you're a guy,
(11:41):
because once you get up in the ring, it doesn't
matter your class, your race, all your weight and size
obviously will will play a role, but once you're in
the ring, it's all all of that goes away, and
you have one opponent and one mission and that is
to take him down. But when you toss a woman
in there, everything goes top. Feet are to be right, um.
(12:01):
Some researchers went to an Australian boxing gym and talked
to talk to a bunch of people, but really focused
on interviews with three men and three women at this gym.
And this was a study in qualitative sociology from Faul
two thousand four called Suffragettes and Satin Shorts, Gender and
competitive Boxing, and it was interesting. They pointed out that
(12:21):
competitive boxing can be studied productively as a paradoxical gender
regime that simultaneously enables and constrains how women quote unquote
do gender. Um there was one scholar that they quoted
um as saying raw aggression is thought to be the
province of men, as nurturing is the peculiar province of women.
(12:43):
The female boxer violates the stereotype and cannot be taken seriously.
She is parody, she has cartoon, she is monstrous. Yeah.
One guy the researcher talked to said, boxing isn't a
female sport. Women are feminine. It's in the society. It's
probably not right. They've got rest that are going to
get whacked. Although they have done research on whether or
(13:05):
not female boxing endangers are breasts, specifically whether or not
it could um uh cause breast cancer down the road,
No risk, Your breasts are safe. Yeah, boxing is pretty
it's a pretty safe sport. But the very fact that
that safety issue is one of the first things that
people bring up when they talk about women's boxing as
(13:26):
opposed to men's boxing, which we have, you know, just
accepted as yes, a little bit more more violent and
aggressive sport, but it's not, I mean, it's not something
that is on the forefront of our minds, it seems like.
And that's one of the reasons why these, uh, this
gender issue with boxing is really fascinating, because people are
so uncomfortable with the idea of women punching at each other, right,
(13:51):
and some of the guys in the gym that these
researchers meant to we're just that they were they were
totally uncomfortable with women who came into the gym on
a regular basis. It's one thing if maybe you bring
your your steady girlfriend or your wife in there, somebody
who's not going to try to distract you with her
her feminine wiles. But yeah, for the most part, women
in these boxing gyms were considered to be distracting or
(14:11):
weakening to men well, and I think that this is
um one of the reasons why this Olympic women's boxing
landmark is is such a good thing, not just because
it's opening up that final sport to women, but because
a lot of the coverage that I've seen of the
boxing trials, which are now over, has been really positive.
(14:34):
You know, it's really painting these these women as athletes
is really strong and diverse and compelling, not terrifying and
monstrous and parodies of themselves. Yeah, exactly, they're just strong athletes. Well,
with that said, should we look at who the winners
of the boxing trials are? Absolutely absolutely starting off with
(14:56):
Marlon Esparza. She's the flyweight. She actually had to gain
six pounds to fit into to fit her small frame
into the really strict weight classes that the Olympic committee approved,
so they only approved weight three weight class divisions for
a hundred and twelve pounds, one thirty two and one
sixty five, which has actually caused a lot of concern
(15:19):
about women either gaining too much, losing too much, or
dropping out. Asparsa, like I said, gained six pounds and
she postponed college because she had her sight set on
the Olympics, and coincidentally, her last bout happened to be
against Tyresha Douglas, who we mentioned earlier who was pro skirts.
Pro skirt just just thrown up. Well. In the lightweight division,
(15:42):
we have Queen Underwood, who was a favorite going into
the trials. And then there's also Clarissa Shields who is
the middleweight Caroline Clarissa Shields is sixteen years old. That's amazing. Yeah,
she's a high school junior from Flint, Michigan who started
boxing at the age of eleven to make her imprisoned
father proud. Yeah, there's a really touching NPR story about
(16:05):
um about Shields and her her boxing journey. You want
to give it a lesson, um. But the thing is,
the journey does not stop for these three women. Even
though they made it through the trials, they now have
to go on to the World Championships in China where
they have to finish in the top eight of their
weight category in order to qualify for the full Olympic
(16:27):
event in London. So three women to pull for. And
you pointed out that they you know, the IOC boiled
it down to the three weight classes for men's boxing.
They've gut ten. Yeah. Uh. And coach Christie Halbert said
that about three thousand women register as amateur boxers in
the US in ten weight classes, and she said that
(16:47):
keeps the sports safe and to make it fair, to
celebrate the diversity of the human body. And so the
Amateur International Boxing Association is actually lobbying the i o
C to get more women into the Olympics. There's also
one quote from Queen Underwood's coach, Bashir Abdullah that I
wanted to point out because it fits so nicely in
(17:07):
our conversation about gender and boxing, because initially he was
very uncomfortable with the idea of coaching a female boxer,
which kind of reminds me of Clint Eastwood. A million
dollar baby um and he said, I didn't want to
see women in this sport, which was based on his
religious beliefs, but he also wanted to keep his job
as a boxing coach with the U. S. Army, so
(17:29):
he adapted when the Army's World Class Athlete program accepted women,
and he was very glad that he did. And he
told inn PR there are great athletes in this women's sport.
They're more focused, they're coachable, they're more determined, and they're
more disciplined than mail boxers, right, which echoes what trainer
Tom malloy said that you mentioned earlier that women are
(17:49):
better at learning how to box, I guess, although malloy
did follow it up with how we might cry if
you yelled at us too hard? Were fragile? Fragile people? Well,
somebody else talking about Queen Hunderwood that I like this
quote US boxing coaches that Joe Zanders was talking about
her and said, Queen can hurt you. Queen is a killer.
(18:10):
She has a nice doll like smile, but you can't
take that seriously because she has some dog in her
and she will get after you. It's great embodying, you know,
both ends of those. Uh, that that gender dichotomy that
everybody harps on so often. You know, Queen Underwood, man,
she's not gonna mount. And speaking of knockouts, we have
(18:30):
talked about, you know, the violence associated with boxing. But
the I A b A, the same association that wants
to put these women in skirts. According to fifteen years
of data, they have shown that women's Olympic style boxing
is safer than men's and compared to other sports, women's
boxing is incredibly safe. Yeah, and it has a very
(18:53):
low rate of concussions and hand injuries and pretty much
no rate at all of lower extremity injury, and not
to mention that the female athlete has a more flexible neck,
less shoulder and neck musculature and less upper body strength
than the male athlete, which means she might not pack
as hard of a punch, but she might take one
(19:14):
a little bit better than the dudes. Um, And just
to hammer home the point of the safety of women's boxing,
according to study from Australia, it is much safer than
pony riding, polo, touch football, even cricket and soccer. Okay,
(19:35):
well there you go. But um, that's study by the
a I b A actually pointed out that you know,
and what we already know this that boxing is an
excellent workout. That's why all those people are going to
boxing gyms to try to get fit. For the average
on forty pound woman, it burns nearly eight hundred calories
per hour, compared with riding a stationary bike at six
(19:56):
d and fifty calories per hour and jogging at nine
in hundred. But women are protected. They wear leather groin protector,
they wear hard plastic cups inserted into a sport spra,
and they wear depending on the weight, they either were
eight ounce gloves for women up two hundred forty pounds
or ten ounce gloves for the heavier women, and of
course amateurs wear headgear two So they're in a safe sport,
(20:18):
they're getting fit and they're they're protecting themselves at the
same time. But the one big restriction women out there
who are thinking about boxing, if you are pregnant, you
are not allowed to box. Although there was a pregnant
curler in the last Olympics, but I guess you know,
curling is a pretty low intensity sport, low contact. Yeah.
(20:39):
If I remember seeing there was, it was like a
big splashy headline like pregnant olympian. Oh she's curling. Nothing
against curlers out there, or pregnant women or pregnant curlers.
We like all of these people, but pregnant boxers, now
that is just a risk that should not be taken, right. Um.
So yeah, three awesome athletes to keep an ear out for.
As the Olympic trials continue to China for those World Championships,
(21:05):
I really hope that they will place so that we
can see them in London this summer. So let's hear
from any of our listeners who do box, male or female,
but you know mostly female. I want to hear if
you got involved in the sport because you want to fight,
or if you want to get in shape, or if
it was intimidating walking into that boxing gym? Right? Did
(21:25):
you have to deal with a lot of angry stairs
from men who you were clearly distracting. Did you have
a Clint Eastwood like coach to help you along the way. Yeah,
someone surly who came to love you. Let us know
all of these things. Mom Stuff at Discovery dot com
is the email address, and I have a letter here
from Justina in response to your episode about gendered toys
(21:47):
and those pink legos that are causing such a curfuffle.
She writes, I have no problem with petitions and putting
pressure on companies to not overdo the gender thing, but
I believe the key to successfully mix it up with
toys is parenting and what you model at home. My
husband and I have one daughter and one son, and
when they were little, we had toys from all over
(22:08):
the gender spectrum for them to play with. But it's
not enough to simply place your kid in a room
full of toys. You as the parent, need to spend
some time playing with him or her. And if your
little girl is building a lego house with her mom,
she is learning that women can build and even better.
Our kids saw and still see mom repairing electronics, doing
computer set up for the home network, and also cooking
and doing embroidery. Their dad also cooks and cleans and
(22:31):
is to go to math and physics tutor. Mom takes
care of chemistry, social studies, and English essay critiques. So
thank you, Justina, and I have a correction here from Julie.
And this is actually a correction we've received from several
people on our Facebook wall, so it's good too. It's
good to point this out. Um. She said that I
listened to the Tattoo podcast recently and realized that you
(22:51):
said in the Bible Rebecca was married to Abraham. In fact,
she was his daughter in law married to his son Isaac.
So thank you. I'm glad could finally lay that to rest. Yes. Um, So,
if you have any boxing stories, random thoughts, corrections, anything
at all you'd like to send our way, you can
get in touch with those myriad ways. Mom stuff at
(23:12):
Discovery dot com is our email address. You can find
us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter at mom
Stuff Podcast, and you can see what we're doing during
the week on our home website, how stuff works dot com.
Be sure to check out our new video podcast, Stuff
from the Future. Join how Stuff Work staff as we
(23:34):
explore the most promising and perplexing possibilities of tomorrow. The
House Stuff Works iPhone app has a ride. Download it
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