Saturday, December 26, 2009

WRESTLERS SEX

Wrestling is a male-dominated sport in terms of participation, commonly perceived as a masculine sport due to the requirement of muscular strength, courage, fighting spirit, as well as and the element of combat. Integral to achieving wrestling skills and physical capability is muscularity, something which may contradict common perceptions of feminine body appearance. The objective of this study is to examine female elite wrestlers' enactment of the wrestler's role and how they experienced enhancement of skills and bodily structure.Last year, a promising Minnesota high school wrestler had to wrestle a girl at his sectional meet in order to proceed to the state tournament. His school, a private Christian institution, generally requires its wrestlers to forfeit to girls, thereby incurring a loss for both the wrestler and the team. The young man clearly didn't want to wrestle the girl. But given the stakes, after consulting with his father and his coach, he decided to proceed. Our society tends to frame the debate over mixed-sex wrestling in the familiar terms of physical safety and legal rights. Critics frequently note, for example, that the practice poses health risks for adolescent females. Teenage boys have significantly greater muscle mass than girls, and can injure them when wrenching their joints, or lying heavily on top of them. Most boys have absorbed this lesson. The U.S. Air Force discovered this 10 years ago, when its Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) program carried out internal psychological surveys to prepare for the advent of female combat pilots. These surveys revealed that men react with significantly greater emotion when female colleagues are subjected to simulated stress and violence, than they do when male colleagues are similarly threatened. (To combat this tendency, SERE attempted to desensitize men by using a variety of techniques, like a realistic rape scenario, in order to overcome protective attitudes toward women that an enemy might exploit.)