When left to their own devices, boys will tend to play with boys and girls will tend to play with girls. This startling bit of obviousness was stumbled upon by University of Southern California graduate student Michela Musto, as seen by her paper “Athletes in the Pool, Girls and Boys on Deck: The Contextual Construction of Gender in Coed Youth Swimming”.
As is typical with “social studies” academic papers, the author starts with a presumption and then shoehorns in the results to validate it, no matter how much reality is ready to bite her in the proverbial butt.
It is important to note that this “research” wasn’t funded, and was basically the author hanging around children’s swim groups and “hanging out” with the kids…
The abstract:
“Few studies have examined how groups of individuals enact different patterns of gender relations within and across contexts. In this article, I draw upon nine months of fieldwork and 15 semistructured interviews conducted with eight- to 10-year-old swimmers on a co-ed youth swim team. During focused aspects of swim practice, gender was less salient and structural mechanisms encouraged athletes to interact in ways that illuminated girls’ and boys’ similar athletic abilities, undermining categorical, essentialist, and hierarchical gender beliefs pertaining to athleticism. However, in the swimmers’ unfocused free time, the salience of gender was high and structural mechanisms encouraged swimmers to engage in ‘borderwork.’ In this context, similarities between the genders were obscured and girls and boys instead interacted in ways that affirmed essentialist and categorical—but nonhierarchical—meanings of gender. By paying attention to structural mechanisms and the variable salience of gender, we can thus see the various conditions under which children deploy different patterns of gender relations, and how less oppressive gender relations can potentially ‘spill over’ from one context to the next.”
As is usual of these papers, there is a strong feelz over realz element, which in this paper takes the form of a story-like introduction with passages such as: “Girls and boys as young as five years old rummage through their swim bags, grabbing goggles and swim caps as they walk toward the starting blocks. Between races, swimmers slather their arms with waterproof sunblock, laugh with their friends, and offer each other bites of half-eaten bagels.”
This little narrative is only interrupted when the author realizes that her entire pre-conceives narrative has been contradicted:
“Throughout their conversation, Alex, Kevin, and Andrew draw upon multiple and contradictory meanings of gender. Although they agree that it ‘sucks’ to be the ‘only male’ in an ‘all girls’ event, the boys then discuss Sophia’s athleticism in a relatively unremarkable manner. Instead of teasing Alex for being slower than a girl, Andrew nonchalantly informs Alex that Sophia is ‘really fast,’ something neither Alex nor Kevin contests. How was it possible for gender to simultaneously be of minimal and significant interest to the swimmers?”
To most people, it is obvious: Boys and girls are different. Boys tend to like to play with other boys; girls like to play with other girls. Even they are cognizant that they are not the same. However, this does not equate with “hegemonic systems” or each group trying to oppress each other. They are not unequal, just different.
This little truth is an obvious truth that most Americans came to long, long ago.
But the author is at a crisis: How to square with ideology that circle of reality? Easy:
“Because gender is a social structure that is embedded within individual, interactional, and institutional relations, social change toward gender equality is uneven across the gender order”
So, rather than take the reality she witnessed at face value, she twists this into proof that boys and girls are somehow not different and that society can be properly re- combobulated!
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