Sports in Men, Men in Sports - Gender Inequalities in Sports Essay

Sports in Men, Men in Sports - Gender Inequalities in Sports - Essay Example Burstyn joins several historians and sociologists such as Mangan and Park (1990), Messner (1992) and Roath and Basow (2004) in unraveling the deeply rooted gender identities and practices prevailing and perpetuating itself in the contemporary social landscape. She asserts that â€Å"success in sport is the most powerful social configuration of masculinity that any male can attain in our culture†. In the spirit of feminist scholarship, Burstyn tries to reveal the discrimination and the oppressive forces directed towards women in the multibillion-dollar enterprise encompassing professional sport to include even the ever-expanding Olympics as well. The issue is pressing and deserves attention, according to Burstyn, for ‘the rituals of sport engage more people in a shared experience than any other institution or cultural activity today." (p. 3) Indeed, sports coverage is available to almost all people in the world. The central thesis in Burstyn’s work is that â€Å"h ypermasculinity† or the cultural exaltation of the ideal man is so much present in the way the technology-media complex is employed in the world of sports.  Ã‚   Sports serve as an avenue for the perpetuation of the idea that males should be strong, enduring and victorious and not effeminate. In more popular terms, if you can’t talk sports or be an athlete in some way, you have very little to tell yourself and others that you’re a man. For me, Burstyn was dedicated like Messner and Sabo (1990) in winning the argument that girls and women are placed and regarded as a mere second-class citizen in the hierarchy of sports whether it may be little league or professional in nature for they are unable to replicate the capacities of men in the playing field. According to Burstyn, the world of sports is a dynamic one with rules changing abruptly. While there are indeed certain images still associated in sports such as winners and losers, new stars on the rise, triumphs and defeats, the world of sports has become, albeit unconsciously, a tool for popularizing and commercializing the image of the ideal man.  Ã‚  

States Pursuing Empires Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 500 words

States Pursuing Empires - Essay Example political control by some political societies over the effective sovereignty of other political societies and that it can be achieved by force, by political collaboration, by economic, social or cultural dependence. (19) There are numerous reasons why states pursue empire-building. Economic motives however is the most applicable among these. The case of Western Europe, for instance, highlights this with the intensified political, economic, and military competition among rivals for resources, which by nature were scarce at any given time in any given place. (Deng 1999, p. 207) Here, European states and chartered companies such as the British East India Company and the Portuguese Estado da India, among others, sought new sources of wealth, which resulted to the sudden unleashing of market power, the spectacular growth in trade and the continuous expansion of overseas colonies. In addition, a number of great thinkers endorse empire-building as a means defending a country’s economic and political interests. Notoriously, even Karl Marx agreed in The Communist Manifesto that the gun is the best way to make the point when capitalism encountered â€Å"barbarians†. (Marx & Engels 1963) Machiavelli’s notion of necessita in his Discourse, also fundamentally supports empire building or the expansion of territories as necessary once its dominion had been extended beyond a certain scope. For him, it is important to expand – so much so that, as is well known, Machiavelli measures the quality of different possible constitutions for cities by how suitable they are to this end. (Bock, Skinner & Viroli 1990, 37) In his discussion of the Roman Empire, Machiavelli has argued that expansive government is pushed forward by the dialectic of the social and political forces of the Republic. There are those who criticize empire building including its modern version – imperialism. Hobson, for example, in Imperialism: A Study, wrote that empire-building denies many traditional