Taking the Field: Men, Women and Sports.(Book Review)

Taking the Field: Men, Women and Sports. Michael Messner. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002.

The scene is set early, and is so familiar that one cannot help but chuckle at its familiarity. Taking the Field begins with the elaborate yet chaotic opening day ceremony of the youth soccer season in a middle-class American suburb. Hordes of children ages 5 to 17, dressed in pristine uniforms, are socializing, posing for photographs and, as we discover, learning why there are no girls on the "Sea Monsters" team and no boys on the "Barbie Power" team.

This is Michael Messner's third book exploring the cultural environment surrounding sports participation and spectatorship and its relationship with the larger American popular culture environment. It is the fourth volume in the University of Minnesota Press's fine Sports and Culture series. The author delves into the paradoxes of gender treatment in our post-Title IX sports environment. He creates a triadic conceptual framework in which to consider men, women, and sports. The three levels--social interaction, structure, and culture--work together to perpetuate the dominance of males in sports at all levels. Each leg of this triad appears--if not invisible as social creations--part of the normal order of things.

As our soccer tots exemplify, a major point of Messner's triad is the hegemonic ideologies that our everyday social interactions propagate, often unnoticed and rarely ...