HUMAN STUDIES 3,
137-156 (1980)
Throwing Like a Girl:
A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment
Motility and Spatiality
IRIS
MARION YOUNG
[...]
The basic
difference which Straus observes between the way boys and girls throw is that
girls do not bring their whole bodies into the motion as much as the boys. They
do not reach back, twist, move backward, step, and lean forward. Rather, the
girls tend to remain relatively immobile except for their arms, and even the
arm is not extended as far as it could be. Throwing is not the only movement in
which there is a typical difference in the way men and women use their bodies.
Reflection on feminine comportment and body movement in other physical
activities reveals that these also are frequently characterized, much as in the
throwing case, by a failure to make full use of the body's spatial and lateral
potentialities.
Even in the most
simple body orientations of men and women as they sit, stand, and walk, one can
observe a typical difference in body style and extension. Women generally are
not as open with their bodies as men in their gait and stride. Typically, the
masculine stride is longer proportional to a man's body than is the feminine
stride to a woman's. The man typically swings his arms in a more open and loose
fashion than does a woman and typically has more up and down rhythm in his
step. Though we now wear pants more than we used to, and consequently do not
have to restrict our sitting postures because of dress, women still tend to sit
with their legs relatively close together and their arms across their bodies.
When simply standing or leaning, men tend to keep their feet further apart than
do woman, and we also tend more to keep our hands and arms touching or
shielding our bodies. A final indicative difference is the way each carries
books or parcels; girls and women most often carry books embraced to their
chests, while boys and men swing them along their sides.
The approach
persons of each sex take to the performance of physical tasks that require
force, strength, and muscular coordination is frequently different. There are
indeed real physical differences between men and woman in the kind and limit of
their physical strength. Many of the observed differences between men and women
in the performance of tasks requiring coordinated strength, however, are due
not so much to brute muscular strength, but to the way each sex uses the
body in approaching tasks. Women often do not perceive themselves as capable of
lifting and carrying heavy things, pushing and shoving with significant force,
pulling, squeezing, grasping, or twisting with force. When we attempt such
tasks, we frequently fail to summon the full possibilities of our muscular
coordination, position, poise, and bearing. Women tend not to put their whole
bodies into engagement in a physical task with the same ease and naturalness as
men. For example, in attempting to lift something, women more often than men
fail to plant themselves firmly and make their thighs bear the greatest
proportion of the weight. Instead, we tend to concentrate our effort on those
parts of the body most immediately connected to the task - the arms and
shoulders - rarely bringing the power of the legs to the task at all. When
turning or twisting something, to take another example, we frequently
concentrate effort in the hand and wrist, not bringing to the task the power of
the shoulder, which is necessary for its efficient performance.
The previously
cited throwing example can be extended to a great deal of athletic activity.
Now most men are by no means superior athletes, and their sporting efforts more
often display bravado than genuine skill and coordination. The relatively
untrained man nevertheless engages in sport generally with more free motion and
open reach than does his female counterpart. Not only is there a typical style
of throwing like a girl, but there is a more or less typical style of running
like a girl, climbing like a girl, swinging like a girl, hitting like a girl.
They have in common, first, that the whole body is not put into fluid and
directed motion, but rather, in swinging and hitting, for example, the motion
is concentrated in one body part; and second, that the woman's motion tends not
to reach, extend, lean, stretch, and follow through in the direction of her
intention.
[...]
For many women
as they move in sport, a space surrounds them in imagination which we are not
free to move beyond; the space available to our movement is a constricted
space.
[...]
All the above
factors operate to produce in many women a greater or lesser feeling of
incapacity, frustration, and self-consciousness. We have more of a tendency
than men to greatly underestimate our bodily capacity. We decide beforehand--usually
mistakenly--that the task is beyond us, and thus give it less than our full
effort. At such a half-hearted level, of course, we cannot perform the tasks,
become frustrated, and fulfill our own prophecy. In entering a task we
frequently are self-conscious about appearing awkward, and at the same time do
not wish to appear too strong. Both worries contribute to our awkwardness and
frustration. If we should finally release ourselves from this spiral and really
give a physical task our best effort, we are greatly surprised indeed at what
our bodies can accomplish. It has been found that women more often than men
underestimate the level of achievement they have reached.
None of the
observations which have been made thus far about the way women typically move
and comport their bodies applies to all women all of the time. Nor do those
women who manifest some aspect of this typicality do so in the same degree.
There is no inherent, mysterious connection between these sorts of typical
comportments and being a female person. Many of them result, as will be
developed later, from lack of practice in using the body and performing tasks.
Even given these qualifications, one can nevertheless sensibly speak of a
general feminine style of body comportment and movement.
[...]
Merleau-Ponty
locates intentionality in motility (pp. 110-112); the possibilities which are
opened up in the world depend on the mode and limits of the bodily "I
can" (p. 137, p. 148). Feminine existence, however, often does not enter
bodily relation to possibilities by its own comportment toward its surroundings
in an unambiguous and confident "I can." For example, as noted
earlier, women frequently tend to posit a task which would be accomplished
relatively easily once attempted as beyond their capacities before they begin
it. Typically, the feminine body underuses its real capacity, both as the
potentiality of its physical size and strength and as the real skills and
coordination which are available to it. Feminine bodily existence is an inhibited
intentionality, which simultaneously reaches toward a projected end with an
"I can" and withholds its full bodily commitment to that end in a
self-imposed "I cannot”.
An uninhibited
intentionality projects the aim to be accomplished and connects the body's
motion toward that end in an unbroken directedness which organizes and unifies
the body's activity. The body's capacity and motion structure its surroundings
and project meaningful possibilities of movement and action, which in turn call
the body's motion forth to enact them (Merleau-Ponty, 1962)
[...]
For feminine bodily
existence, however, the body is often lived as a thing which is other than it,
a thing like other things in the world.
[...]
The modalities
of feminine bodily comportment, motility, and spatiality which I have described
here are, I claim, common to the existence of women in contemporary society to
one degree or another. They have their source, however, in neither anatomy nor
physiology, and certainly not in a mysterious feminine "essence."
Rather, they have their
source in the particular situation of women as conditioned by their
sexist oppression in contemporary society.
Women in sexist
society are physically handicapped. Insofar as we learn to live out our
existence in accordance with the definition that patriarchal culture assigns to
us, we are physically inhibited, confined, positioned, and objectified. As
lived bodies we are not open and unambiguous transcendences which move out to
master a world that belongs to us, a world constituted by our own intentions
and projections. To be sure, there are actual women in contemporary society to
whom all or part of the above description does not apply. Where these
modalities are not manifest in or determinative of the existence of a
particular women, however, they are definitive in a negative mode--as that
which she has escaped, through accident or good fortune, or more often, as that
which she has had to overcome.
One of the
sources of the modalities of feminine bodily existence is too obvious to dwell
upon at length. For the most part, girls and women are not given the
opportunity to use their full bodily capacities in free and open engagement
with the world, nor are they encouraged as much as boys to develop specific
bodily skills. Girl play is often more sedentary and enclosing than the play of
boys. In school and after school activities girls are not encouraged to engage
in sport, in the controlled use of their bodies in achieving well-defined
goals. Girls, moreover, get little practice "tinkering” with things, and
thus developing spatial skill. Finally, girls are not asked often to perform
tasks demanding physical effort and strength, while as the boys grow older they
are asked to do so more and more.
The modalities
of feminine bodily existence are not merely privative, however, and thus their
source is not merely in lack of practice, though this is certainly an important
element. There is a specific positive style of feminine body comportment and
movement, which is learned as the girl comes to understand that she is a girl.
The young girl acquires many subtle habits of feminine body
comportment--walking like a girl, tilting her head like a girl, standing and
sitting like a girl, gesturing like a girl, and so on. The girl learns actively
to hamper her movements. She is told that she must be careful not to get hurt,
not to get dirty, not to tear her clothes, that the things she desires to do
are dangerous for her. Thus she develops a bodily timidity which increases with
age. In assuming herself as a girl, she takes herself up as fragile. Studies have
found that young children of both sexes categorically assert that girls are more
likely to get hurt than boys, and that girls ought to remain close to home while
boys can roam and explore. The more a girl assumes her status as feminine, the
more she takes herself to be fragile and immobile, and the more she actively
enacts her own body inhibition. When I was about thirteen, I spent hours
practicing a "feminine" walk which was stiff, closed, and rotated from
side to side.
[...]
There is, however,
a further source of the modalities of feminine bodily existence which is
perhaps even more profound than these. At the root of those modalities, I have
stated in the previous section, is the fact that the woman lives her body as object
as well as subject. The source of this is that patriarchal society defines
woman as object, as a mere body, and that in sexist society women are in fact
frequently regarded by others as objects and mere bodies.
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