Pam R. Sailors

No Net Gain: A critique of media representations of women's Olympic beach volleyball

Representations of women athletes have always been complicated and often controversial (Paul Davis 2010), but perhaps none more so than in the case of beach volleyball. Current media representations of beach volleyball confine the players to established gender roles— sexual object or mother—and recent uniform rule modifications do nothing to change that state of affairs. In 1996, the Fédération Internationale de Volleyball (FIVB) added beach volleyball as a second volleyball discipline at the Olympic Games. Since its inception as an Olympic sport, the FIVB, in conjunction with the host city organizing committee, has determined the uniform requirements. For example, the 2004 edition of the FIVB’s Olympic Beach Volleyball Tournaments Specific Competition Regulations, which governed the women’s and men’s beach volleyball tournaments at the Olympic Games in Athens, described the women’s required uniforms:

Mixed Competition and Mixed Messages

A survey of the philosophy of sport literature reveals that arguments regarding the issue of sex segregation in athletics have been advanced from time to time, but there has been little sustained discussion, no consensus, and no change in existing practice. In this paper, an effort to advance the conversation, I begin with Jane English’s seminal 1978 article as a springboard and employ existing literature on the question of sex segregation in order to raise difficulties with English’s analysis and outline the basic alternative positions that have been taken on the issue. My own contribution to the conversation is in the introduction of four distinctions – between individual and team sports, direct and indirect competition, contact and non-contact sports, and amateur and professional sports – that have not been part of the discussion about the conditions under which men and women might compete against one another. These distinctions resolve several difficulties noted by others and suggest a more nuanced conclusion about desirable changes to the structure of sporting competition.

Gender Roles Roll

Roller derby, once known for scripted theatricality that made it more like a stage play than a sport, has reinvented itself as a legitimate athletic endeavour. Since its rebirth as the Womens Flat Track Derby Association in the early 2000s, it has experienced exponential growth, from 30 flat track derby leagues in 2005 to more than 450 leagues in 2010. This translates to more than 15,000 skaters worldwide. Roller derby provides a unique case of a womens sport that is not derived from, or a diminutive version of, a mens sport, proudly stating as its philosophy a commitment to be ‘by the skaters, for the skaters’. This do-it-yourself aspect opens the way for examination of what a sport wholly created by women looks like and how that differs from sports created by men. The WFTDA claims that roller derby is empowering and revolutionary, yet some critics have claimed that the skaters reinforce rather than dismantle gender stereotypes. Using tools from previous gender critiques, I analyse several aspects of roller derby for their emancipatory potential and conclude that, while not completely unproblematic, the sport can function as a force for reshaping ideas about women, femininity, and sport.

Off the beaten path: should women compete against men?

Abstract Are women capable of competing against men in sporting events? If they aren’t, might there be good reasons to encourage them to make the attempt anyway? If they are, might there be good reasons to prohibit such competition? I suggest four possible answers to the question of whether women are capable of competing against men: (1) No, so there’s no point in talking about it; (2) No, but they should make the attempt anyway; (3) Yes, so mix all the competition and get on with it; and (4) Yes, but there are good reasons not to allow it. I review these positions, each of which is made plausible by supporting evidence, and suggest that the arguments can be strengthened through the inclusion of four distinctions (between individual/team sports, direct/indirect competition, contact/non-contact sports and amateur/professional sports).

Mercy Killing: Sportsmanship and Blowouts

The author <pamelasailors@missouristate.edu> is with the Dept. of Philosophy, Missouri State University, Springfield, MO 65897. In a high school girls’ basketball game on January 13, 2009, The Covenant School defeated Dallas Academy by a score of 100–0 and rekindled the debate over lopsided victories. Ratcheting up the emotional response was the fact that the Covenant School is a religious (Christian) school and Dallas Academy is a school for students with learning disabilities, whose basketball team had never won a game. Media outlets across the United States picked up the story and within 10 days, the Headmaster of The Covenant School issued a public apology, stating that the incident was “shameful and an embarrassment,” as it failed to “reflect a Christ-like and honorable approach to competition.” He went on to indicate that the school would submit a formal request to TAPPS (the state’s governing body for private and parochial schools) to forfeit the game. Covenant’s coach, who by some reports didn’t instruct his team to stop pressing until after they scored their 100 points, was publicly and forcefully unapologetic, saying “my girls played with honor and integrity,” and “if I lose my job over these statements I will walk away with my integrity” (11). Shortly thereafter, he took that walk, having been fired by the Covenant School. Do such uneven contests violate the spirit of sportsmanship? Nicholas Dixon has formulated a thesis that would answer in the affirmative. The Anti-Blowout thesis (AB) holds: “It is intrinsically unsporting for players or teams to maximize the margin of victory after they have secured victory in a onesided contest” (3). Dixon, however, did not formulate the AB thesis to support it, but rather to contest it. In response, Alun Hardman, et al. and Randolph Feezell, among others, have argued that the AB thesis should be upheld. Hardman, et al., base their conclusion on the psychological harm they believe may be done to the athletes who are on the losing side of blowouts (9). Feezell proposes a Revised Anti-Blowout thesis (RAB), which adds to the AB thesis the qualification that blowouts are only prima facie, rather than intrinsically, unsporting. Thus, for Feezell, blowouts, while generally morally problematic, might be acceptable under some circumstances. Feezell also suggests strategies for “easing up” in lopsided contests, whereby the game would go on but the winning team would change its tactics in an effort to stop scoring (7). Against this background, I examine various “mercy rules” used in different sporting contexts to attempt to avoid prolonging athletic contests when they have become blowouts. I argue that, regardless of the moral status of blowouts, most such rules should be upheld, and perhaps Mercy Killing: Sportsmanship and Blowouts

More Than a Pair of Shoes: Running and Technology

The sunglasses Radcliffe wears are to prevent tension that is caused by squinting into the sun. Even the smallest bit of tension in the face could filter down to the lower body. The sunglasses also hide her emotion from competitors and help break the dust kicking up from the street and the wind. Radcliffe’s mother, Pat, prefers that Radcliffe wear them, because she does not want to see her daughter’s eyes involuntarily roll to the back of her head, as they often do.

Lentius, Inferius, Debilius: the ethics of ‘not trying’ on the Olympic stage

This article examines whether elite athletes have an ethical obligation always to try their best, especially when representing their countries at the Olympic Games. Through an analysis of cases of athletes failing to try their best at the London 2012 Olympics, this paper analyses the moral acceptability of not trying. By applying the sport ethics literature on personal bests, duties to ones self, and game flaws, this article distinguishes when failing to try ones best can be considered a legitimate strategy in line with the ethos of the game, and when failing to try should be condemned.

Prescription for “Sports Medicine and Ethics”

While Testoni, Hornik, Smith, Benjamin, and McKinney (2013) do a good job of identifying ethical questions raised in sports medicine, we suggest three areas in which their analysis needs supplementation. First, the authors’ discussion of autonomy needs to be more robust, most crucially concerning what counts as autonomous decision making, particularly in the context of external pressures. The authors neglect to include the significant and extensive sport philosophy literature on sports medicine and ethics, which contains considerable analysis of several of the questions the authors pose. A final gap the article does not address in detail regards the doping-related obligations for team physicians working with sports federations and leagues that are signatories of the World Anti-Doping Agency Code (WADA Code) and thus held to additional standards and requirements. Although Testoni and colleagues consider at length issues of autonomy and informed consent, there are significant gaps in their discussion, stemming from a lack of acknowledgment of how ethical decision making has been analyzed in the medical context. The authors presume the existence of a standard and static definition of autonomy, suggesting that true autonomy requires the absence of “controlling influences,” and go on to identify elements of the sporting environment that might count as such. An immediate, but not fatal, objection is that more than once the authors’ examples involve a high school student, but high school students are not granted the same rights as adults. Thus, the question of the desires of the student may be irrelevant, or at least not decisive, as we would generally defer medical decision making to a parent or legal guardian. Setting this to the side, the discussion of autonomy and controlling influence suffers from an omission of important issues that have been given extensive attention in the field. First, the conception of autonomy as a capacity that is possessed and exercised by atomistic individuals has been challenged by those who think it more accurate to characterize individuals as embedded in and defined by relationships. Tauber, for example, suggests this view in which “autonomy shifts from an expression of radical selfgovernance in a world organized and determined by the individual, to one in which individual actions are decided and constituted within a universe of complex social inter-

Autonomy, Benevolence, and Alzheimer's Disease

Medical ethics has traditionally been governed by two guiding, but sometimes conflicting, principles—autonomy and benevolence. These principles provide the rationale for the two most commonly used standards for medical decisionmaking—the Substituted Judgment Standard shows our concern for autonomy, whereas the Best Interest Standard shows our commitment to benevolence. Both standards are vulnerable to criticisms. Further, the principles can seem to offer conflicting prescriptions for action. The criticisms and conflict figure prominently in discussion of advance directive decisionmaking and Alzheimers disease. After laying out each of the current standards and its problems, with Alzheimers issues as my central concern, I offer a new standard that avoids the problems while honoring our concerns for both autonomy and benevolence.

Don’t bring it on: the case against cheerleading as a collegiate sport

The 2010 Quinnipiac cheerleading case raises interesting questions about the nature of both cheerleading and sport, as well as about the moral character of each. In this paper we explore some of those questions, and argue that no form of college cheerleading currently in existence deserves, from a moral point of view, to be recognized as a sport for Title IX purposes. To reach that conclusion, we evaluate cheerleading using a quasi-legal argument based on the NCAA’s definition of sport and conclude that cheerleading fails to qualify as a legitimate sport. A philosophical argument leads to the same conclusion, primarily because of the essential entertainment-aspect of cheerleading. We then examine a consequentialist moral case for making cheerleading an intercollegiate sport and argue that the balance of moral reasons is against doing so. Finally, we look at cheerleading’s newest offspring – Acrobatics and Tumbling, and STUNT – and express our moral reservations about their current claims to be worthy of Title IX recognition. While we would not claim that any single one of our arguments is decisive, we are convinced that the cumulative weight of the arguments against granting intercollegiate sport status to any of the forms of cheerleading or its derivatives is, at present, irresistible.