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Tak­ing Up Space: cin­e­mat­ic adven­tures in male-dom­i­nat­ed sports

03 Nov 2023

Words by Nora Murphy

Colourful collage with human figures and sports equipment in vibrant pink and green tones.
Colourful collage with human figures and sports equipment in vibrant pink and green tones.
Emma Selig­man’s Bot­toms promis­es a queer female fight club – how does it per­form in the canon of films about women carv­ing out space for them­selves in hyper-mas­cu­line worlds?

The first thing my coach did when I stepped into the box­ing ring was read­just my posi­tion. The sec­ond thing he did was tell me that if he ever had to move me about, I didn’t need to wor­ry – he’d had a boyfriend for six years. Maybe it was wrong of me to be sur­prised by his admis­sion; not only the vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty it took to dis­close his sex­u­al­i­ty with­in moments of meet­ing me but also his will­ing­ness to do it in a tra­di­tion­al­ly hyper­mas­cu­line space. Either way, from that first encounter, I knew that this was a space with­out judge­ment – a space where I was safe.

Safe spaces for women in male-dom­i­nat­ed activ­i­ties are few and far between. Take a look at the most promi­nent films fea­tur­ing women in sports, and you’ll find that often the exer­cise serves as a metaphor for over­com­ing adver­si­ty, be it sex­ism in A League of Their Own and Mil­lion Dol­lar Baby, racism and the pres­sures of famil­ial duty in Bend it Like Beck­ham, or even inter­nal bias in Fight­ing With My Fam­i­ly and Bot­toms. Sports­women are not only held to high­er stan­dards than their male coun­ter­parts, con­stant­ly made to feel like they have to fight for a right to be there, but they’re also pit­ted against each oth­er – some­times through com­pe­ti­tions, but often by themselves.

As some­one who loves box­ing and has rec­om­mend­ed Shi­va Baby to every­body they know, Emma Seligman’s Bot­toms was one of my most high­ly antic­i­pat­ed films of the year. With its campy themes, queer pro­tag­o­nists, bold colour palette and star-stud­ded cast, includ­ing Rachel Sen­nott and Ayo Ede­biri, I had high hopes for the premise: two gay, ugly and untal­ent­ed” teenagers set up a fight club so they can final­ly pluck up the courage to talk to the pret­ty cheer­lead­ers they have crush­es on. What fol­lowed was a rau­cous, high school ensem­ble com­e­dy rem­i­nis­cent of the John Tuck­er Must Die era, full of campy vio­lence but (from a box­ing point of view) very lit­tle actu­al fighting.

In the case of sports films with women at the cen­tre, often the sto­ries that focus on the love of the game and the grat­i­fi­ca­tion that comes with over­com­ing obsta­cles feel more reward­ing than those that focus on roman­tic nar­ra­tives. In Fight­ing With My Fam­i­ly, it takes wrestler Paige almost los­ing her dream to make her realise how much she wants it. In Mil­lion Dol­lar Baby, box­ing is the mag­ic of risk­ing every­thing for a dream that nobody sees but you”. These women aren’t there for the promise of sex­u­al grat­i­fi­ca­tion or even for the glo­ry that comes at the end of a match, but because they can’t imag­ine them­selves doing any­thing else, and they’re will­ing to risk it all for one more round in the ring.

Bend it Like Beck­hams Jess (Par­min­der Nagra) risks her rela­tion­ship with her fam­i­ly who make no secret of their dis­ap­proval for foot­ball and would rather see her set­tled down with a hus­band than play­ing the sport she loves. Fight­ing With My Family’s Paige, played by the excep­tion­al Flo­rence Pugh risks let­ting down par­ents who’ve pinned all of their hopes on her to final­ly be the one to bring the belt home. In A League of Their Own, Geena Davis’ indomitable Dot­tie Hansen risks her mar­riage and her com­fort­able life to play a game where women are seen as dis­pens­able place­hold­ers. Even Aman­da Bynes’ Vio­la in She’s The Man risks being exposed as a girl, kicked off the team, and los­ing the one thing she cares about. Through the intro­duc­tion of an elu­sive sports recruiter, both Dot­tie and Paige are giv­en a choice: stay at home in the com­fort of the life they have built for them­selves, or do some­thing extra­or­di­nary. The choice to leave is the incit­ing inci­dent that kicks the plot into action and tells us that these are char­ac­ters who make risky choic­es for the chance of a high reward.

Two baseball players wearing vintage uniforms, a man and a woman, smiling and standing together.

Strug­gle in female sports films comes not only from the pres­sures of the sport but also the pres­sure to prove them­selves in male-dom­i­nat­ed spaces where they are under­es­ti­mat­ed at best and harassed at worst. Despite being a bet­ter foot­baller than her male mates, Jess is con­stant­ly berat­ed by the men she plays foot­ball with until she finds sanc­tu­ary among the Houn­slow Har­ri­ers – a team only set up after Jules begged their coach Joe for an oppor­tu­ni­ty to play. Sim­i­lar­ly, in Mil­lion Dol­lar Baby, Mag­gie expe­ri­ences abuse and harass­ment as the only female box­er in a male-dom­i­nat­ed gym, with her body being the focal point of hard-hit­ting Shawrelle (Antho­ny Mackie)’s under­min­ing com­ments. There’s a degree of respect around men in sports that women aren’t afford­ed the lux­u­ry of; women have to work twice as hard to be giv­en half the amount of attention.

These women are fight­ing not only through their sport but fight­ing to even be con­sid­ered for a seat at the table in the hope that they might be thrown some crumbs. In She’s The Man, dis­guis­ing her­self as a man serves as both a plot device and a safe­ty mech­a­nism for Aman­da Bynes’ Vio­la. Like her Shake­speare­an coun­ter­part in the film’s source mate­r­i­al, Twelfth Night, Vio­la is afford­ed free­doms and oppor­tu­ni­ties in the guise of a man that she would not oth­er­wise be grant­ed. The choice to revise Shakespeare’s mis­tak­en-iden­ti­ty com­e­dy as She’s The Man for a con­tem­po­rary audi­ence only serves to demon­strate how, over four hun­dred years after Shake­speare wrote the orig­i­nal play, women in male-dom­i­nat­ed activ­i­ties are yet to achieve equal­i­ty, still fight­ing for their place on the pitch – or in Twelfth Night’s case, on the ship.

Dou­ble stan­dards are rife in A League of Their Own, where it takes a war to allow women out of the home and onto the pitch, and the end of the war sig­nals the end of women’s base­ball. Despite the Rock­ford Peach­es’ fierce ded­i­ca­tion, play­ing with sprained ankles, bro­ken bones, and rid­ing the bus all night to play a dou­ble-head­er the next morn­ing, the women play only on the con­di­tion that when the men come back, they’re sent back to the kitchen’. The women are there on the con­di­tion that they play well, look pret­ty, and serve as a dis­trac­tion while the men are off at war. If they refuse to play ball in a short skirt, then there are 38 girls get­ting train tick­ets home who’ll play in a bathing suit” if the league asked.

Twen­ty-six years after the release of A League of Their Own, women are still seen as sub­or­di­nates in Crys­telle Moselle’s 2018 fea­ture Skate Kitchen. Fea­tur­ing the real-life NYC Skate Kitchen, who chose their name after a com­ment on their YouTube chan­nel sug­gest­ed that they get back in the kitchen’, female skaters are referred to as posers’ sim­ply for doing some­thing they love. But it’s that adver­si­ty and the strug­gle to be seen as equals that spawns the col­lec­tive the film takes its title from, who play fic­tion­alised ver­sions of them­selves in the film. In the same way that Mil­lion Dol­lar Baby’s Mag­gie finds the father fig­ure she’s been lack­ing in coach Frankie, there’s found fam­i­ly in Skate Kitchen, ampli­fied by the authen­tic­i­ty of using real skaters from non-act­ing back­grounds. The girls in the film hang out every day, skate togeth­er, sweat togeth­er, bleed togeth­er, and it shines through the film. We feel like we’re look­ing in on an estab­lished friend­ship group, and it’s eas­i­er to root for them because we’re invest­ed in the sol­i­dar­i­ty between them.

Sim­i­lar­ly, in Fight­ing With My Fam­i­ly Paige must work not only to earn the respect of the oth­er girls but to over­come her own bias­es towards them. Ini­tial­ly, Paige uses beat­ing the oth­er girls as her moti­va­tion to get bet­ter – she wants to beat the girls who are there to jig­gle their arse and tits” and prove her­self as a real wrestler”. But it’s only when she con­fronts her own inter­nalised misog­y­ny that Paige is able to improve as a wrestler, learn from these women, and in doing so trig­ger audi­ences to re-eval­u­ate their own judge­ments about the mod­els-turned-wrestlers she’s thrown into the ring with. Sol­i­dar­i­ty between women might exist in Bot­toms, but it feels earned in Fight­ing With My Fam­i­ly because of Paige’s strug­gle, not only to earn the respect of the oth­er girls but to over­come her own bias­es towards them.

Two men in a boxing ring, one with arms raised in victory gesture, the other man shirtless, with a woman standing nearby.

There are moments with­in Bot­toms which emblemise the impor­tance of sol­i­dar­i­ty in num­bers and female strength. In one scene, it’s revealed that all of the women in the self-defence group have expe­ri­enced vio­lence at the hands of men. Con­sid­er­ing the impact of the Me Too con­ver­sa­tion and the con­tin­ued preva­lence of male vio­lence against women in the news, it’s no sur­prise that female film­mak­ers use their medi­um to con­vey the mes­sage that women don’t feel safe. Sim­i­lar­ly, it’s no sur­prise that week-on-week, the female-only ses­sion at my box­ing club con­tin­ues to rack up mem­bers. Women want to feel like they can pro­tect them­selves because they’ve learned to believe that this world isn’t built to nur­ture them.

Sup­port­ive com­mu­ni­ties are the first step to build­ing resilience – and while that can come through fam­i­ly, the found fam­i­ly that exists with­in these films is often more impor­tant than blood ties. In Coach Frankie, Mag­gie finds the sup­port she had nev­er received from her blood rel­a­tives. While for Kit, base­ball has always been about the love of the game, for her sis­ter Dot­tie it’s about the com­mu­ni­ty. I’ll tell you what I’ll miss,” says Dot­tie, when she leaves the team to return to the dairy fol­low­ing her husband’s dis­missal from the war, I’ll miss the girls”. Ulti­mate­ly, Dot­tie wants a fam­i­ly, and while the team tem­porar­i­ly meets that need for her, her husband’s return sig­nals the start of a new chap­ter in her life. One that doesn’t involve baseball.

It’s great to see a rise in main­stream cin­e­ma with Queer women at the helm – some­thing that was severe­ly lack­ing when I was a teenag­er – but in order to be com­plex, rep­re­sen­ta­tive and val­i­dat­ing, Queer char­ac­ters need to have aspi­ra­tions and goals that extend beyond just their sex­u­al­i­ty. It’s a shame that in Bot­toms, there’s a lack of pas­sion for the fight club which incites the film’s plot. What binds char­ac­ters like Paige, Mag­gie, Jess and Kit togeth­er is the fact that they’re will­ing to risk every­thing, includ­ing com­fort, rela­tion­ships, and some­times their safe­ty, because sport brings mean­ing to their lives. With the excep­tion of Hazel, the fight club doesn’t seem to real­ly mat­ter to any of the char­ac­ters in Bot­toms; it was a by-prod­uct of serv­ing the high­er goal of woo­ing cheer­lead­ers, less con­cerned with self-defence than it was with slap­ping, shov­ing and rolling around on the floor. Bot­toms had an oppor­tu­ni­ty to inspire the next gen­er­a­tion of female fight­ers, but instead, its atten­tion is focused sole­ly on get­ting the girl.

Although Bot­toms didn’t offer the nuanced take on female sol­i­dar­i­ty I had come to expect from watch­ing Shi­va Baby, it prompts a con­ver­sa­tion about the safe­ty of young women and the impor­tance of a net­work who you can be vul­ner­a­ble with. West­ern soci­ety has come a long way in increas­ing the vis­i­bil­i­ty of women in sport – in foot­ball England’s Lioness­es made his­to­ry this year in the World Cup Semi-Final and Nico­la Adams’ box­ing career brought her Olympic Gold in 2012 and world cham­pi­onship title in 2019. But there’s still a long way to go.

In a 2022 study car­ried out by Women in Sport, it was found that almost half of girls who engage in sports drop out dur­ing their teenage years due to a lack of con­fi­dence, wor­ries about being judged, and con­cerns about their safe­ty. Film holds a mir­ror to these con­cerns, with harass­ment and judge­ment exist­ing across the canon of cin­e­ma fea­tur­ing women in sports, but it’s not enough just to rep­re­sent these women; we need to cham­pi­on them, and in doing so, do right by the next gen­er­a­tion of girls so that they don’t become just anoth­er sta­tis­tic, giv­ing up their goals because a gen­der bias has forced them out. There’s no rea­son that PJ and Josie couldn’t dis­cov­er a pas­sion for box­ing or wrestling along­side their roman­tic endeav­ours – after all, women can (and fre­quent­ly have to) do it all, behind the cam­era or on the play­ing field.

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