Women, Contact Sports, and the Mix of the Two in a Gender-Confused Age

In response to my blog from Thursday on the New York Times piece covering the extreme risks many girls face in playing high-contact sports, I drew some strong responses, and wanted to comment on them in today's post.

Let me first encourage you to check out the article by Michael Sokolove that appeared in this past weekend's NYT magazine. In addition, surf the comments related to the article. There are now 285 (as of this posting), so this piece, "The Uneven Playing Field", has clearly touched on a hot-button cultural issue of critical importance. The paper is to be commended for publishing a piece this controversial precisely because its central assertion works so strenuously and compellingly against gender-neutral myths.

I won't rehash much from Thursday's blog, but I will give you one snapshot quotation that sums up the general drift of Sokolove's writing:

"If girls and young women ruptured their A.C.L.’s at just twice the rate of boys and young men, it would be notable. Three times the rate would be astounding. But some researchers believe that in sports that both sexes play, and with similar rules — soccer, basketball, volleyball — female athletes rupture their A.C.L.’s at rates as high as five times that of males."

This is clearly a situation of grave importance to those who have athletically minded daughters and, beyond this, to those who are raising daughters in an age of supposed physical parity between the sexes. When Gatorade, for example, tells viewers that Michael Jordan and Mia Hamm are athletically and physically of equal gifting, strength, and agility, it is no surprise that the culture at large would begin to accept this notion and put it into practice in the form of their own familial decisions. This mindset has led many parents in our era to plunge their daughters headlong into high-contact sports, oblivious to the dangers (the word is carefully chosen) their daughters face from this decision.

This is not to say, though, that girls are weak, or that every girl will get injured. Sometimes people read the former statement into the biblical principle that women are to be treated as the weaker vessel. Nowhere did I say that women are weak. I noted instead that compared to men, women are weaker in a physical sense. There are of course exceptions to this principle; one can find weak men and very strong women. But these exceptions do not overturn the principle that men are generally stronger than women. I should say that in my life, I have been surrounded by women of considerable agency and ability. My mother was and is a dynamo, always working, always redeeming the time, even when relaxing. She couldn't even watch a television show without knitting! My own wife is in the same mold. She is a very capable woman, and I married her in part because I saw biblical industry and agency in her. She never ceases to amaze me in what she accomplishes around our home. Though she is a good deal less strong than me, I would not characterize her as weak, and I am continually stunned by what she accomplishes. I should not be read to be saying, then, that women are weak. That is an uncharitable and inaccurate reading, one that I cannot affirm based on the Word and my own life experience.

Neither will every girl who competes in a high-contact sport get injured. There are probably many girls who compete in a contact sport who, for a variety of reasons, evade injury. As the NYT article shows, there are also exercises that women can perform that lower the risk of serious injury. With this caution noted, though, we return to the above research finding. Some who study women's athletics very closely think that women tear their ACL's at five times the rate that men do. This statistic--and others--must be reckoned with. The personal angle of the magazine piece add a dreadful personal dimension to this statistic. Girls--and they are girls--playing with two blown knees, all for the "love of the game". This is a horrific reality.

Our sports-obsessed, gender-neutral society exhorts many girls to do nothing less than to sacrifice their bodies for games. No one will remember these contests in the years to come. The women who go on to the activities and responsibilities of adulthood will find that their athletic experience, however large it loomed in their teenage minds, suddenly has precious little importance compared to the duties of the family, the home, and for those who feel compelled to enter it, the workforce. Think of the reality of childbearing and raising. These are tremendously engrossing callings, challenging for the most physically strong and capable woman. They will be many times more challenging, however, with a blown knee and the other results of a career--that's what it is, a career--in youth sports. In women's sports, and in some that boys play, namely, football, the parents of our country are allowing or even leading their children to a path of physical disability and even destruction. This is not simply sad--it is sick.

As Christians, we need to seriously question the sports culture. We need to make sure that if our boys play sports that we watch their hearts and their bodies very carefully to make sure that they are not idolizing athletics and, in doing so, causing great harm to their bodies. There is nothing smart or biblical or romantic in a boy suffering considerable physical damage in youth sports, no matter what the sports legends or the television shows or the Nike commercials tell us. We need to make sure that if our girls play sports that they avoid the dangerous idea that they need to do what boys do. In some cases, they cannot, and to try to do so will be to bring lasting harm to themselves. We should steer them away from sports that threaten to compromise their bodies and their femininity. Unlike modern culture, the Bible celebrates a dignified, distinct womanhood that is quite different from many masculine qualities. In our homes and our churches, we must work to celebrate this femininity, to embrace it, and to train our daughters that it is absolutely beautiful and biblically right for a woman to be just that: a woman, distinct from a man.

To summarize, then, we must stop buying into the myths that the feminist-influenced society feeds us as Christians. Women and men are different. They have been given different gifts and bodies. A woman's body is not less muscled and differently shaped from a man's by accident; God did not make men and women with the exact same physical capabilities but with different shapes, as if He simply got aesthetically creative with the bodies of Adam and Eve. He made men to be strong because he wanted them to be those who led, protected, and provided for women and children. He made women to be able to nurture children not simply in a figurative sense through their instincts, but in a literal sense, through hips that can stand childbirth and breasts that can feed children. To speak frankly, though a husband justly delights in it, this part of a woman's body was not made for fashion, for the fetishes of unmarried men or the interest of boys, but for function, despite what our sex-obsessed, female-fixated culture says by way of advertising and entertainment. If a man's body is attuned to the tasks of provision and protection, a woman's is geared for physical nurturing. We do not have to derive our understanding of gender roles by some mystical divination of the Creator's will, but through the plain testimony of Scripture and, indeed, the anatomical realities in which we find ourselves.

This sounds to postmodern ears like caveman talk. The funny part is, it's actually older than that. The roles of men and women proceed from the mind of God, who made men and women to carry out fundamentally different roles through fundamentally different physical realities. This is not to say that there is never overlap between the duties of the sexes; there often is. Yet as men live at home with their parents, and treat women well only for the purpose of seducing them, and leave them to fight their wars, and do substantive work, and assume positions of leadership due to a shortage of available (and capable) men, a suspicion might just creep its way into their minds. As fathers watch their daughters brutalize their bodies in order that these dads might live out their athletic dreams through them, a thought may come quietly to mind. As another girl falls in agony on the soccer field, or the basketball court, as a researcher crunches statistic after frightening statistic, a realization dawns. Perhaps the gender-neutral experiment is flawed. Perhaps our whole program is awry. Maybe, just maybe, in seeking our daughter's "liberation", we are watching nothing less than their downfall, right before our eyes, with our permission, under our watch.

Real Life Sanctification: The Century-Old Dilemma of Guys and Sports

As I said a few days ago, I think that when we're talking about sanctification, the progressive growth in grace of the Christian, we need to start with the deeper, higher truths and then carefully but energetically proceed to the workings of everyday life. After all, it is in the cracks of life, the details, the nitty-gritty, that our sanctification is worked out. Much as we might think otherwise, our growth in grace centers not so much in Sunday School, but in how we apply the teachings of Sunday School (or preaching, or our theological reading) to everyday life. We spend way, way more time practically applying our views on sanctification than we do thinking about them.

Am I denigrating theology and the study of it? Not in the least. I'm merely trying to point out to an audience who shades reformed and theologically concerned that while we must richly feed ourselves rich Christian teaching, we must work very hard to break that teaching down and allow it to shape the hum and drum of daily living. Armed with such a mindset, we'll be far less quick to categorize thoughtful reflection on life as "legalism" and far quicker to examine our everyday decisions in the light of higher theology. So with all this said, what should we do about the problem--and I think it is one--of guys and sports? How are we to handle the sports culture and its effect on the church? How can we extricate even thoughtful Christian men (and women, to some extent, but the burden here is on men) from athletic idolatry?

We need first to square with this problem. For young men like myself, for the twenty- and thirtysomething age bracket, we've got to recognize that we grew up in an era in which sports and the celebration of sports figures exploded in the popular media. Boys like myself who grew up in the age of Jordan, Sampras, and Gretzky were exposed to nothing less than glorification of these athletes and many like them. In a society drifting from the port of Judeo-Christian belief and accompanying emphasis on traditional principles like masculine responsibility, traditional commitments to family, church, and society, and important pursuits, sports filled a waiting vacuum. It didn't rise out of nothing. No, it mixed with celebrity culture, entertainment frenzy, and image-driven personhood to shape the modern mind and life. Match these factors with an economy fairly bursting with life and you end up with the sociological marvel that is modern sport. No longer played merely for fun, mostly among friends, and without transcendence, athletics in the last thirty years have become, in the minds of many men, the highest end of life.

Perhaps someone out there scoffs at that rather bold assertion. Well, then, conduct this little experiment: go to a grammar school and ask the little boys what they want to be. Then get back to me. I'm pretty confident that you'll find that the psyche of these little boys has already absorbed on a breathtaking level the transcendence, the importance, of sport. For these boys, and for the men they become, there is almost nothing greater than leading one's team to glory, and than etching one's name in the record books while doing it. Were the Greek poet-historians alive today, they would not celebrate and eulogize the warrior, but the athlete. Of course, we don't need the Greeks--we've got Nike commercials to do this for us. Honestly, some of the most moving moments of my recent life have been had while watching commercials about silly little games and the people who play them. It's not that I wanted to feel moved by these paens to commercialism and the people who fuel it, it's that it's nearly impossible not to feel moved while Nike matches gorgeous slow motion shots with orchestral music. In these little 30-second spots, one discovers the story, the power, the pathos, of modern sport.

Okay, so what does all this mean for we who claim Christ? It means that, if we're men and thereby generally (not, of course, exclusively) inclined to competition and the pursuit of glory, then we're going to feel the pull of modern sports. Furthermore, it means that they're going to tempt us to sacrifice our families, our work, our societies, our sleep patterns, our bodies, our vacations, our conversations, for athletics. Can there be any positive value in sports for men? Surely. It can help men to bond, for example, and relax, and have fun, all things that are good within limits. But can sports get way out of hand for the average Christian guy? Can he--despite what he might think in his mind--fall prey to the cultural obsession with sports, and so compromise in varied ways his walk with Christ? I think that he can. I think that he, on a major scale, does.

I'm not presenting myself as immune to this problem. I'm not. I play basketball a couple of times a week and love it. But I often come home conflicted and sometimes bruised. I sometimes struggle to damp down my competitive streak when the game stops, and I'm aware that continual damage to my body will harm my ability to enjoy such blessings as grandchildren, Lord willing, in the future. So I don't have this all figured out, either in theory or in practice. However, I can see at the very least that I have caught the cultural bug. Left to my own devices, bereft of the Holy Spirit, I could easily go head-over-heels in pursuit of sports. This propensity allows me to see this tendency not only in myself but in other men of God. How many of us stay up too late to watch games, thereby compromising our care of our families? How many of us bruise our bodies week after week, thinking little about the unimportance of such activity (however much we might think differently in the moment) and its long-term effect? How many of us think about how much sports sap our care for our wife, our attention to our children, our hunger for the Word? I'm convinced that many of us struggle in these ways and many more, and that one of the single greatest temptations of your average Christian guy today is to properly balance athletics in a sports-obsessed world.

What do we need, then, if we can see that we are imbalanced? We need accountability. We need the church. We need people asking us hard questions and perhaps giving us direct rebuke for our bad habits. We need to talk about sports with other guys in our churches and to see if we share common struggles. Then, we need to take action. We need our pastors to remember that sanctification is almost never a 30,000 foot issue in the Scripture, but is routinely brought to the ground level of behavior. Therefore, we need pastors who keep in mind the fact that many men (and some women) are obsessed with sports, and need to extricate themselves from sin in this respect. We need to bring up our boys in homes where sports are nothing more than games, things that we can and may well engage in, but that are never, ever construed as being transcendently or even moderately important. They simply aren't. We need fathers to model such a mindset in their own lives by making lots and lots of small, hard choices--to turn the tv off, to resist glorifying an athlete merely for talent, to wax endlessly about mere games.

There is nothing wrong with enjoying sports. It can be a good gift of God. It can bring men together, it can create and deepen friendships, it can bring health to bodies. But we must never let the gift become transcendent. It is not. Instead, we must devote ourselves to God, to healthy fellowship in His church, to devoted care for our wives and children, and allow sports to rest in their proper place, alongside other diversions. We may enjoy them, but we must not let them master us, as they do so many other men. The good of so many around is at stake on issues just like this--men, how will we respond?