Wow! This discussion is one of the most sexist that I have encounter on
Wikipedia English.
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 But it is so very outdated in the United States to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 Poore
On Fri, Jun 7, 2013 at 3:56 PM, Daniel and Elizabeth Case <
dancase(a)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_…
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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