Wow! This discussion is one of the most sexist that I have encounter on Wikipedia English.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Football/National_teams#Proposed_change:_consistency_in_article_title_gendering
People are publicly saying that Men's soccer teams have the right to use the category name but women need to shuffled off into a separate category.
I completely agree with Daniel that women soccer players are well known by name in the United States, sometimes more so that men.
In the United States it would not be the least bit controversial to have separate categories for men and women teams at the college level for all sports, I think that in fact it would be expected. And people would not flinch at professional level women and men both being in a category list of players listed by sport. I could see either everyone listed together OR broken down by gender. But it is so very outdated in the United States to consider men the true owner of a category and women to be siloed away.
Sydney PooreOn Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 3:56 PM, Daniel and Elizabeth Case <dancase@frontiernet.net> wrote:
_______________________________________________LtPowers wrote:>I’m having trouble putting into words just how upset I am over this discussion I started:
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Football#American_soccer_player_categories
>To me, this is a completely intolerable situation. Completely! Yet look where I got: immediate and vehement pushback. I don’t get it. I really don’t.
>This is a huge, huge problem. How do we fix this bias if the majority of interested parties don’t even see a problem?
Well, it’s totally speculation but I suspect this is some of the entrenched European bias (outside, I imagine, Scandinavia) against women playing soccer (and I will call it soccer, thank you very much—it’s actually an older term for the game in England than “football” and widely used in a lot of other predominantly English-speaking and white former British colonies besides the USA). The two people arguing against you, mostly, are English (one says as much on his userpage; in the other instance I am deducing that from his edit history). I am not intending to suggest that all English football (OK, exception here) fans are sexist (nor will I make some joke about whatever other stereotypes there are), nor that these two are aware of how they’re coming across.
But ...
It’s often been noted that, for all the disdain that American sports culture has had for soccer (until, I would say, the last decade or so, when cable and the Internet made it possible for both native and foreign-born fans to follow Man U, Juventus or whatever club they liked the most, and it has not become unusual to see people wearing Barca jerseys with Lionel Messi’s number) the US has been way ahead of the curve on women’s soccer. For years as many girls as boys played in youth programs; whereas (so I’ve read) in soccer-crazy Brazil some of the women who played “the beautiful game” on the national team actually kept it a secret that they played. In Offside: Soccer and American Exceptionalism (a book I highly recommend), one of the coauthors, Stefan Markovits, reports that European sports journalists took the national adulation the U.S. women’s team received on winning the first Women’s World Cup as an expression of contempt for the sport in general, because, as every European “knows”, it’s a man’s game (or at least, as the English joke goes (in part) football (exception again) is a game for gentlemen that is played by hooligans).
Just some thoughts ... you and I may not be big women’s soccer fans, or even soccer fans, but we can probably name a few present and former stars of the U.S. women’s team. I don’t think very many English football fans of either gender can name a single star on the English women’s team. There is quite probably a bias out there.
Daniel Case
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