New to the hobby in 2008, I assumed women could box in the Olympics, and was surprised to find this wasn’t reliably the case and thrilled when things changed. Having failed to secure tickets, I nearly nosebled with excitement when a friend offered to sell me hers. Katie Taylor‘s competing! Hero worship explosion!

So. That’s the background to this post. But what I want to talk about today is the Amateur International Boxing Association’s latest statement about women and boxing, which the Beeb reports thusly:

The latest talking point is not whether women’s boxing should become the newest Olympic discipline at London 2012, but what the boxers will actually wear when they compete.

During last year’s World Championships, the Amateur International Boxing Association (AIBA) presented competitors with skirts, rather than the usual shorts, which it wanted to “phase in for international competitions”.

AIBA asked boxers to trial the skirts, which they said would allow spectators to distinguish them from men.

There’s this, too:

“By wearing skirts, in my opinion, it gives a good impression, a womanly impression,” Poland coach Leszek Piotrowski told BBC Sport. “Wearing shorts is not a good way for women boxers to dress.”

My initial reaction? More flail than the semaphore alphabet. I’ve now slept on it and had a bucket of calming tea. There’s a lot of justified rage already out there. This is a shitty patronising move by AIBA, and one I find quite insulting, but no doubt this surprises nobody. So rather than just spitting WHAT THE BILLIONTH FUCK? about the place forever, here’s a bit of history and a bit of telly, via which we can consider for a moment what all this says about the neurosis we have about women who punch things.

I’m gonna start with Popeye. Bet you didn’t see that one coming.

She’s A Knockout

Never Kick A Woman, a six-minute short in which Olive, with the aid of Popeye’s spinach, goes toe-to-toe for his affections with a Mae West-a-like female boxer who throws punches in a skirt and heeled boots, came out in August 1936.

Contemporary with the Berlin Olympics, this springs from a place where women didn’t commonly box at high profile, and the interaction between Olive, who transforms into a cat for her fighting sequence, and the boxer bombshell, is all a bit ooh-matron (“Not bad for the weaker sex!” remarks Popeye, before declaring a desire to sample “her equipment”). However, women were competing with pretty solid regularity, as they had been throughout the nineteenth century, in underground/amateur events, with varying levels of safety and credence afforded them, although they were often fetishised by the small press coverage they received. In the Victorian and Edwardian eras, the overall feel of women’s events was that of a circus prizefight. There’re many surviving photographs of women boxing from this period, some in skirts, some in bloomers. But things develop, and from about 1920 onwards, if you look at the images on this webpage, they’re also commonly wearing shorts, revealing that Poland coach Leszek “not a way for women boxers to dress” Piotrowski doesn’t really go in for research. Or even Google Images.

Prize-Fighting Amazons

That article also nails the early social response to women’s boxing in the 20th century:

While the battered body of the male boxer was a symbol of the defeat of heroic masculinity, the battered body of the female boxer was the very denial of the supposed essence of femininity and a symbol of brutalization and dehumanization, at the same time creating an image of exciting and animalistic sensuality. For that reason, women’s boxing always attracted male voyeurs – not only working men, but also local dignitaries and businessmen.

This attitude prevails – YouTube’s comments are often a bear garden, but comments left on the Popeye cartoon include quite seriously invested gems like “I love that sexy blonde beating Olive senseless”. Amazon’s fancy dress catalogue also includes some heavily eroticised “boxer babe” outfits, almost all of which are pink and satin, and some of which have skirts.

All of which is to say: skirts in boxing generally collide in two contexts: erotic fancy dress, or “vintage” prizefights as we might popularly imagine them – even if in reality they might’ve looked like this, this or this – it seems to have been a matter of personal preference and the general variation across continents and regional scenes. Reintroducing skirts at this stage in the development of women’s boxing is a bit like citing Edwardian paintings of ‘women wrestling nude in ancient Sparta’ where they’re all looking conveniently sexy and liberated as definite historical fact for what that shit was really like – it’s easy to throw up your hands and say “this is the traditional feminine way for women to box” when the historical truth, or the reality of who this is all for, may contain extra layers of complexity. Exoticising women who box professionally does them no favours, and because it carries with it the aesthetic of prizefighting, insisting they skirt up will do just that. There’s no easy way to divorce the garment from this sort of context, and especially not the way the AIBA are handling it. It reeks of “Cor blimey these girls can punch!” and when tabloid joshing and Popeye-style “wanna check out that goyl’s equipment!” are being encouraged by the governing body… that’s a very sexist problem there.

Rather than promoting the boxers themselves, who work unbelievably hard to get where they are with sweet FA big press recognition, AIBA, whether it intends to or not, is pandering to prizefight imagery with this decision. This, in turn, selects the kind of schoolboy-tabloid-YouTube-comment response to women in boxing as the primary favoured response. Women shouldn’t have to feel that they’re perfecting their footwork for a panel whose engagement with basic principles of equality barely extends beyond the level of a Popeye cartoon. What else are we supposed to feel?

A skirt is not, of course, disempowering in and of itself. Roller derby, for example, makes frequent use of skirts, booty shorts, and so on. The difference is one of context. Derby’s given rise to the whole idea of the ‘rollergirl’, who is free to mix feminine costume elements – thigh-socks, pleats, and so on – with imagery that subversively references horror, punk and violence. It has a consolidated identity as a predominantly female sport. Derby aesthetic pitches at an audience with heavy female participation, and has a significant queer following – so there’s a sense that the skirts aren’t really “for” a dominant privileged gender group, or being imposed from on high on the players. (I do wonder, if male Derby players wanted to wear skirts, whether they’d necessarily be stopped.)¹

Mantastic

Boxing, on the other hand, has deep roots in understandings of masculinity and male violence. “White collar boxing” and “chess boxing” (a round of violence, a round of chess, a round of violence) are popular phenomena within the boxing scene, and usually aimed near-exclusively at male participants. It crosses class boundaries in its universal appeal as a sport for men.

Just as it’s popular in media portrayals of working class male environments – Rocky channels his frustrations, while Billy Elliott longs to escape his mandatory classes – boxing also has a relationship with upper class expressions of masculinity around honour and gentlemanliness: Queensberry rules, and all that. But when we put women in the ring, there’s just something about the purity of action boxing involves – simply punching someone else, with an emphasis on the upper body as the weapon – that makes people actively dislike women across all social classes going near it. In a way that kickboxing or judo doesn’t. Amir Khan expressed his distaste about it a while ago, following in the footsteps of Mohammed Ali and Joe Frazier, who laughed it up in 1978. (Gotta assume they later revised their opinions, since both their daughters went on to box and even fought each other.)

Women have enough crap to deal with in the boxing world without having to get in the ring with AIBA just to earn the right to a pair of shorts. This is a serious sport, which carries a risk of serious injury, and caricaturing women’s involvement in it does them a great disservice. There’s a lot of romance in boxing – the image of the boxer in film is universally that of a lone struggler, with personal issues, addictions and anger management all channelled into the ring. For female protagonists, usually that gritty struggle involves a fight with sexism too. The image these women cut is powerful and often inspiring – but whatever you think of Million Dollar Baby you can’t quite see Hilary Swank shutting up and donning a skirt.

My favourite boxing film? Girlfight. It’s supposed to show fictional examples of sexist behaviour in boxing and in life – partly as part of the pattern all boxing movies tend to follow of lone-struggler-makes-good, and partly in order to affirm a positive message specifically to women who want to go there. It’s depressing to realise just how much truth there is in that film, and how far we have to go.

I hope Katie Taylor’s forthright dismissal of the skirt issue as “a disgrace” forecasts the failure of AIBA’s suggestion; the last thing anyone who’s fought that hard to get into the ring needs is a constant reminder that they’re still being cast as some sort of other.

1. If anyone has tried this, let me know how it went.

Alright then, Friday Night Lights (the film, not the TV series). It’s the true-ish (true in as much as any Hollywood adaptation of real events is ever true) story of the 1988 Permian Panthers, a highschool American football team based out of Odessa, Texas. Based on the book of the same name by H.G. Bassinger, it’s really quite an amazing depiction of the levels of pressure placed on young players in a town that has nothing else going for it. Odessa is the sort of town where you get into college with a football scholarship, or you stay there and live out the same life your parents did.

It might be a somewhat unusual choice for this site, given that it’s focused entirely on the macho-tastic world of American football, and features less than a handful of female characters – all defined by their relationship to one of the males (the coach’s wife, the quarterback’s mother) – who get maybe 10 lines in total. But stick with me here, because the film does raise a few issues worth discussing.

First up, let’s just cover why this film counts as a favourite. American football, more than perhaps any other sport, is self-mythologising. It builds up a grand narrative, spins out legends, and casts itself as something more than just a bunch of millionaires in armour running into each other. Go watch a highlight video, or an episode of America’s Game, which shows the story of each year’s Superbowl winner. Everything about them, the way the footage is cut, the music, is all part of narrativising the events, making myths. And Friday Night Lights captures that perfectly.

Part of the reason the film captures that feeling so well, and part of what makes it a good film (other than some excellent cinematography and casting) is the soundtrack. The film is almost entirely accompanied by the work of Explosions in the Sky, a sweeping instrumental act native to Texas, where the events take place. Take a listen to this and tell me it doesn’t make you want to go do something grand.

But enough of the fanboying. Let’s look at the issues this film brings up.

The first interesting thing the film handles is issues of race. Texas, particularly the smaller towns, is not well known for its progressive attitude towards racial equality. So when the championship game turns out to be against the state’s first all-black team, Dallas Carter, this is a big thing. And you know what? It’s handled pretty damn well. It can probably best be summed up with one particular quote. The coaches and assorted hangers-on of both teams have met to discuss where the game will take place, and how it will be adjudicated to ensure fairness. Asked about referees, the Panthers’ coach suggests hiring a team of officials. Asked whether these zebras¹ will be black or white the coach replies “I believe a zebra’s got about the same amount of black stripes as he does white ones.”

It’s not just the coaches. The players on the Panthers are a pretty varied mix of black, white and Latino. It’s hard to say how much of this is credit to the film makers, and how much is merely a reflection on the make up of the real life team the events are based on. What is definitely to their credit though is the way these characters are handled. The film makers resist the temptation to give us Male White Lead #27b and make the entire film about the quarterback. Instead we get equal screen time devoted to several of the characters (with the arguable show-stealer being Derek Luke as star running back James “Boobie” Miles). It’s nice to see.

The second issue we get in the film, which I’d argue is relevant to basically everyone, is the pressure placed on young people and the struggles of forming an identity. In the context of the film this identity is mostly about defining yourself as a person beyond what your town expects of you as a player. But the basic principle applies to any youthful deviation from accepted norms, which is probably something a fair few readers here have experienced. Telling the world you identify as a feminist might not immediately seem the same as telling your dad you don’t care that much about football, but I think the film does a nice job of showing the universal pressures of youth that tie both experiences together.

Being the champions is basically all the town cares about. On game day, everything shuts down as people leave their workplaces to go watch the game. It’s made clear to the coach that if they don’t win the state championship he should probably think about finding a different down to live in. Win and you’re a local god, lose and you’re a pariah. The alcoholic former-champion father of one character captures this particularly well, kind and caring when the team’s winning, drunk and abusive when his son makes a mistake. How does someone grow and learn to be themselves faced with that?

It’s a good film, it raises some interesting points, and it gives a fascinating look into the life of small town Texas. And for all that it shows the darker side of football, it’s still the film that made me go out and start playing, so it has to get some credit for that.

1. Zebras being a nickname for referees, due to their black and white striped tops.