Femjocks vs. competitve female athletes

This spring season I’ve had the opportunity to join my first ever all-women’s sports league–PADA (Philadlephia Area Disc Alliance) Spring Women’s Ultimate. And I have to give it to my team in particular. These women are impressive athletes, they’re competitive, they bring white boards to the field in order to set up plays and to teach new people what stacks are and how to mark force. Our team captain wears a full-face mask to protect the bones in her face which have been broken too many times for her to worry about what kind of scary movie serial killer she must look like to the opposing teams. Many of them have been playing with each other for upwards of eight years, and they know many of our opponents, having played on the same teams as them in past seasons. On our first day our captain called us in from the drills we were doing so that we could all introduce ourselves, tell each other what our goals were for the season and to genuinely get to know each other. I couldn’t ask for more, seriously!

Before this season started I was having a lot of anxiety about playing, as a relatively new player, and having finished my last season of (co-ed) Ultimate a year earlier as the woman no one threw to, including my boyfriend. Ultimate Frisbee is supposed to be a kind of friendly adult sport, in that the focus should be on spirit of play while kicking ass, not being an asshole while kicking ass. So everyone I talked to before trying Ultimate for the first time two years ago was very encouraging that it was a teaching game, that new people were welcomed and given a shot at developing skill.

But then I came up against the truth, if I may make some generalizations: most men didn’t want to befriend me and help me to build skill, probably because they couldn’t remember who I was since I had no defining characteristics (”The fast one,” “The tall one that can D anything,” etc) and because I, the new player, made mistakes here and there; and the women wouldn’t befriend me because…well some of them felt the same way as the men–I guess they didn’t subscribe to the whole spirit thing either–and some of them simply were so anxious about keeping what reputation they had with the guys intact that they didn’t have any room in their warm up for as much as a “Hey Becca, you want to toss around?” These ladies I call femjocks. They aren’t necessarily good at much, although many are. They simply have an attitude of conceit, as though the only chance for worth on the field is a person’s skill. Which is too bad if you are new, because that would mean you are worthy of being ignored and smirked at when you drop the disc the first time–and hopefully the last, some of them think–you receive it. Most importantly is possibly that the femjock’s conceit eerily seems to resemble the male jock’s version of conceit–as seen in the femjock’s concent to unwarranted meanness and criticism towards people who are not just like them. I’m sure this could be argued, but meanness in men and women present in different ways a lot of the time, and the meanness I’ve seen in femjocks mimics their male counterparts.

My only guess as to why so many women end up as femjocks is that they are constantly bombarded in co-ed sports by the same attitude from men as they (and the men) gave me. Like Hillary Clinton’s abrasive declarations of national security, these women have had to take up masculine athletic roles, instead of plain athletic roles, in order to “play the game,” as it is defined–by men.

So going into Women’s Ultimate was kind of like my last-ditch effort to ever enter into team sports, with hopes that it would be different without men around. And while my own self-judgments and frustrations are still present when I act clumsily or mishandle a play, or just simply wish I was better at it already, the women are instructional and exude the spirit of ultimate that I was told so much about in the beginning. In fact, there is a women on my my team now who ignored me during my first co-ed season, and I’m pretty sure she’s not a femjock outside of co-ed sports! I’m overjoyed this season to have found out that there is a space for women to be competitive athletes as women, and not femjocks.

To all of you with a lot more experience playing in co-ed leagues, I am sure you could offer a lot more than just generalized analysis and I hope you will share some of your insight here!