The ‘male preserve’ thesis, sporting culture, and men’s power

Since the mid-nineteenth century, when the modern Westernised form of competition sport took shape, there has been a shifting yet robustly gendered structure to the experience of playing, consuming, managing, teaching and marketing sport. In this regard, save for a number of important examples, sports in various forms were created by men, for men (and boys). In light of this, critical studies of men, masculinity and sport culture have emerged as a major area of research in the sociology of sport (e.g., Dunning, 1986; Messner, 1992; Messner and Sabo, 1990; Pronger, 1990). Drawing on various feminist, social constructionist, or poststructuralist theories of gender, these scholars argued that sport served to sustain symbolic idealisations of male power, normalise the marginality of women, and reinforce rigid status hierarchies among men themselves. In exposing the inequalities enshrined within sports culture, along with the manifold dangers endured by boys and men in the stakes of ‘proving’ masculinity in and through sport, this body of scholarship placed the potentially harmful nature of the masculinity-sport relationship firmly into the academic discourse on sport and society.