In the current day and age, one of the most important topics of discussion is gender and the issues surrounding it. Gender issues are central to not only many hot button political topics right now, but also to many different aspects of everyday life. One field of particular interest in the last 40 years is the role gender plays in the sports world. Sports have long been known as an area of male expertise and dominance, and only recently have women been allowed access to that world. While most sports are still separated by gender, women have slowly been working towards leveling the playing field and putting women’s sports on an equal plain as men’s. Even more recently than that, men have started to join in and call for more equality in terms of gender with everything from women simply having as much access as men to sports to equal media coverage.
Dr. Michael Alan Messner is one of those men. Messner is a professor of sociology and gender studies at the University of Southern California. Much of his research and work is done in the field of gender, but more specifically, gender issues in the world of sports. He has created much interest in both understanding and breaking down standard gender stereotypes.This is important and relevant to today’s society, because women are still fighting for true equality today and while much progress has been made, we are still not there.
Messner has written six books on gender and contributed to eight more. He has also written and contributed to many journal articles, and has received numerous awards and honors for his work in the field of gender, including the Outstanding Book Award from the North American Society for the Sociology of Sport for his book Power at Play: Sports and the Problem of Masculinity. He has dedicated his career to working towards gender equality in sports as well as every other aspect of life. All of these things helped to spark discussion among not only academics, but average people who are affected by these issues. This discussion is vital for changing the status quo and thus Messner’s work has been vital for our progression as a society. Messner is what one would call a “public intellectual”.
In 2010, Messner wrote an article for the Huffington Post about the lack of media coverage for women’s sports. In the article, he brings up many issues seriously plaguing our ability to move forward in our march towards equality. He says:
From a high of 9% of airtime devoted to the feats of women athletes in 1999, the coverage plummeted to a measly 1.6% in 2009. That’s significantly lower than what I found 20 years ago. Women sports then received 5% of airtime (Messner).
With these statistics, Messner points out an undeniably enormous discrepancy between coverage of men’s and women’s sports. While it is absurd how little coverage women’s sports get, he fails to address the counter argument many people bring up. He makes sure to state it:
You might object that comparing news coverage of all men’s and women’s sports is misleading — an apples and oranges comparison. After all, there are no fully developed women’s equivalents to pro football and baseball (Messner).
However, he also makes sure to ignore it. He continues on to discuss how if you compare men’s and women’s basketball it becomes very clear that there is a disparity, but that doesn’t address the issue he brought up. As much as gender equality in sports is a fantastic thing to work towards, if there is one thing Messner does fail to do throughout his work it is realistically account for why there is a lack of equality. His approach to solutions for the problem are also unrealistic. While he makes many very good points about problems that need to solved, he fails to address that there are simply more men’s sports than women’s. An obvious solution to this would be to create an equivalent women’s sport for every men’s sport. Though many attempts have been made to popularize, for example, women’s softball and women’s football leagues, those attempts have failed, because none of them have been true equivalents. Messner points out that lack of coverage for women’s sports only perpetuates the small, niche audience that those sports have and he is correct in that assertion. However, he fails to acknowledge that women’s sports leagues and teams do not just come to fruition, especially in this period in time when everything in sports is about making money. Not many people want to back a league or team when the audience (read: money maker) for said team is miniscule to non-existent. The only way to change this is to change society’s view on women’s sports, and societal change doesn’t come easy. Messner does, however, point out that media coverage of women’s sports has declined in recent years, which would suggest that societal change is not only not closer to happening, but is potentially moving farther away as a possibility.
Messner does do research and work on gender outside of the world of sports as well. Recently, he has been working on a project about gender-based violence. The project is a “life-history study of male activists working to prevent gender-based violence. […]The study explores how activists make sense of their anti-violence work and how they strategize to stop men’s violence within shifting historical contexts of gender formation”. This is important, because violence is a large part of masculine culture and is portrayed as a “manly” thing in popular culture, making it acceptable as a social norm. Messner’s research on this topic allows for the discussion about whether or not this is still acceptable to be facilitated. Is it okay for men to still be considered unable to control their natural violent tendencies or is it time to acknowledge that being a man does not make you inherently violent? Messner clearly would like for society to take a more anti-violent stance, and he is correct in his wishes for society. It is time for this world to step out of the dark ages in terms of antiquated gender norms and start realizing that violence doesn’t solve problems, it only masks them, allowing them to grow.
As a public intellectual, Messner faces a dilemma. It is a dilemma noted in Stephen Mack’s “The Decline of the Public Intellectual (?)”. The role of the public intellectual is “simply to keep the pot boiling. The measure of public intellectual work is not whether the people are listening, but whether they’re hearing things worth talking about.” Messner performs the duties of his role. With his work, he has provided the building blocks for a public forum in which we can discuss issues of masculinity and femininity and the role those things play in many different arenas, which is something that is inarguably something worth talking about. The problem he faces with this is a problem brought up in the article, the problem of “American anti-intellectualism.” While, Mack does a good job of breaking this notion down, stating that
It is wrong in the sense that it traffics in the self-serving fiction of American anti-intellectualism. And it is wrong-headed in the sense that it undermines the value of citizen responsibility by subordinating it unnecessarily to the most elitist argument for the public intellectual, the one grounded in the myth of an aristocracy of experts.
there is still some part of it that rings true. It is not that the American people are not intellectual enough to take part in the discussion, it is that they are ignorant to the problem. While most don’t choose to be ignorant about it, most still are, and if people don’t realize there’s a problem, public intellectuals will be hard-pressed to “keep the pot boiling” as it were. This is the case with Messner. He wants to create discussion of the issue of gender equality in sports, and with those who know about the problem and want to change it, he has been immensely successful in contributing to that discussion. However, with those who aren’t aware of how grave the problem is, or do not wish to change what is being largely ignored, therein lies the problem. We, as a society need to accept the problem and then we can hear what it is Messner is saying.
It's A Small World, After All. 