/lit/ - Literature

>>18587110
Read this instead

Reading this book has changed how I view myself as a women. It has really inspired me to be strong.

I want to see the myth of female frailty end.
If you are interested pick up The Frailty Myth: Redefining the Physical Potential of Women and Girls by Colette Dowling. I was really hoping to discuss my experiences with the lingering societal conditioning that has created the myth that women are by our nature physically inferior to men. In the past few years, women and girls have made great strides in sports, many in sports considered impossible for female athletes to compete in, let alone exceed. Even with these breakthroughs, most people still hold the belief that women are smaller, weaker, frailer, and more vulnerable than men. Either they ignore the evidence or see these athletes as somehow different than other women and girls (at the same time not seeing a difference between top male athletes and the average man). Dowling takes this assumption and examines where we have come in history, especially since the Victorian era, and how we raise children to show why this "natural" frailty isn't born but created. She shows how women's institutionalized sports and physical education have long been devised to reduce women's athletic development, rather than build it. She notes that young girls and boys test much the same physically, until about the age of 12 when many girls become less active and boys start to become better trained. That girls "throw like girls" only because they are not taught to throw correctly and that boys throw "like boys" because they are taught to. And when girls are taught how to throw, they CAN. She notes that involvement in a good sports program (that is one that does not involve abusive, sexist coaches or a push towards starvation) builds girls' sense of self and belief that they are powerful. And that girls involved in sports are less likely to engage in self-destructive behavior. I can't recommend this book enough, not only for women who are interested in the warrior path, sports, or physical fitness and their place in the feminist movement, but also for any parent of a young girl. And I'd love to force many who assume that the Frailty Myth is actually a reality to read it. It is a wonderful and inspiring book.