Boy Refuses to Wrestle Girl

[MercenaryChef]

our story....so the theme is a girl is involved in wrestling in iowa's state tournament. she is up against a lad in the first round. he forfeits the match as he apparently has religious convictions that prevent him from wrestling a girl. (at least before marriage) actually i added that last bit. she then goes on and gets beaten in her next two matches and is out of the tournament. another girl who was not gifted a first round forfeit win loses her first two and also exited the tournament.

i wrestled from 6 to 17 at club and school levels. when i was a junior a rival school had an exchange student from the czech republic. she wrestled at 106 pounds. i alternated all year between 106 and 98. it just depended on how much i wanted to starve myself that week. well, the week i knew she would be at the tournament i did my best to wrestle at 98. sadly, a teammate did have to wrestle at that weight and face her. he was a good wrestler and likely to win. we talked on the bus ride to the tourney. if he goes out and dominates her he looks like a dick who beats up girls. if it is too close, he almost got beaten by a girl. this kid was full of anguish knowing he would have to face her. i skipped many a meal and ran my ass off in a rubber sweatsuit to make sure i did not have to. he went on to beat her by a margin of 12 to 4 if i recall.

i am terribly for equality of the genders, blah, blah, blah, male feminist, yadda, yadda, yadda, etc. however, for a teenage boy is it necessarily fair to put him in the position where he has to face a situation like the boys above? but, denying the girl the chance to compete is also unfair. some states offer girls wrestling, but not many. are high school aged kids at the emotional maturity to deal with such a quandary?

this is a subject i brought up because of having it be something i have in fact experienced. i was not going to face her. i knew i could beat her, but i was not about to be forced to do it. there was just something to my teenage mind that felt wrong about facing a girl in this test of combat. and it was not as if i just thought they were too soft, weak or unskilled to do it either. there was just something that had been ingrained in me to not commit violence, even restrained and monitored violence upon a female. plus, the testosterone fueled comradeship of the wrestling team itself was being compromised. these things coursed through my mind as i trained up to that tournament. i must have ran no less than ten miles a day for a week to keep myself from being in a situation where my mind would explode.

what say the peoples of the board?

[Res ipsa loquitur]

No, its not fair; there should be boys and girls wrestling. In other sports it doesn't matter as much, but the dominant US social mores do say men should not beat up women.

And even if they are the same weight, are they evenly matched? Men on the vast average do have more upper body strength than women. So, putting men and women on the same team in that category may actually be unfair and inequitable to both. Your team mate beat this girl by a large margin.

Its not being anti feminist to acknowledge that men and women are quite different, and, to know what effects those differences are likely to have.

[Anatole Kuragin]

This was the plot of a classic Even Stevens episode.

[Res ipsa loquitur]

I'm also wondering if the young man's religious rights were violated...why couldn't the wrestling officials have pitted him against another man when they learned of his religious faith? It seems to me that would have been a very easy and simple accommodation to have made?

[MercenaryChef]

I'm also wondering if the young man's religious rights were violated...why couldn't the wrestling officials have pitted him against another man when they learned of his religious faith? It seems to me that would have been a very easy and simple accommodation to have made?

tournaments are set up based on seeding based on records, etc. the number one seed cannot simply be reseeded because he had objections to wrestling the number eight seed. that throws the whole thing out of order.

[Jaime L]

I wasn't a wrestler like you, MC, and I could see that being different, but in the one coed physical sport I have played frequently, Basketball, I never eased up against a girl. Didn't want to have two modes depending on whether I was defending or boxing out a guy or a girl. Also felt like it's cheating them not to play 100% on defense just because I'm defending a girl. Felt like soft bigotry.

Wrestling would be different just based on the amount and type of contact. But I still think the same principle applied. The girls in this case signed up for wrestling, to be treated like one of the guys. And both were good enough to make this tournament. Think it does them a tremendous disservice to treat them differently.

[AverageGuy]

I wrestled between 145-160 in high school. Given my weight class, I never really expected to face the situation until the one time I did have to wrestle a girl. And I forfeited. Officially "due to injury." I felt torn, I didn't want to cheat the girl or look down on her, but it was the first round of an early season tournament, so I justified it by telling myself she had the chance to go on if she could.

It wasn't a religious objection; and while, "You don't fight girls," was running through my head somewhat, mostly it was being fourteen and feeling awkward about the situation. The kids in the 103 and 112 classes occasionally had to wrestle girls. They were good, always placed at nationals, so they always won, but just watching you knew they were trying to finish it quickly. I never thought of them as dicks who were beating up girls. But every time they had to, everyone on the team was looking at them thinking, "Thank God I'm not you." Sometimes saying it. I realize intellectually that men shouldn't dread facing women in a sport, and I never had a problem when I played soccer, but with a contact sport, and adolescents...

[Nas!]

I would like to see some scriptural support for this kid's religious pull-out. Sounds to me like someone was afraid of what his dirty, sinning teenaged body might do to betray him in that unitard.

[tzanth]

It is absolutely fair. Nowhere in the OP do I see a decent reason why boys and girls shouldn't wrestle. The only one that is discussed: "not wanting to look like a dick," depends completely on disgusting machismo. Get over your dicks already.

[MercenaryChef]

I wasn't a wrestler like you, MC, and I could see that being different, but in the one coed physical sport I have played frequently, Basketball, I never eased up against a girl. Didn't want to have two modes depending on whether I was defending or boxing out a guy or a girl. Also felt like it's cheating them not to play 100% on defense just because I'm defending a girl. Felt like soft bigotry.

Wrestling would be different just based on the amount and type of contact. But I still think the same principle applied. The girls in this case signed up for wrestling, to be treated like one of the guys. And both were good enough to make this tournament. Think it does them a tremendous disservice to treat them differently.

it is not like basketball. it is high contact and violent. my favorite thing was to have someone down and force my forearm across their face, latch hard onto their arm and drive my knee into their side turning them over. it is a hard thing to go 'i am going to do this to a girl.' another favorite move of mine was to wrap my leg around theirs, break them down. take the arm on the same side and stretch out pulling their shoulder and ribs painfully until their back touched the mat ending the affair. again hard to say 'i am going to do this to a girl.'

[MercenaryChef]

I wrestled between 145-160 in high school. Given my weight class, I never really expected to face the situation until the one time I did have to wrestle a girl. And I forfeited. Officially "due to injury." I felt torn, I didn't want to cheat the girl or look down on her, but it was the first round of an early season tournament, so I justified it by telling myself she had the chance to go on if she could.

It wasn't a religious objection; and while, "You don't fight girls," was running through my head somewhat, mostly it was being fourteen and feeling awkward about the situation. The kids in the 103 and 112 classes occasionally had to wrestle girls. They were good, always placed at nationals, so they always won, but just watching you knew they were trying to finish it quickly. I never thought of them as dicks who were beating up girls. But every time they had to, everyone on the team was looking at them thinking, "Thank God I'm not you." Sometimes saying it. I realize intellectually that men shouldn't dread facing women in a sport, and I never had a problem when I played soccer, but with a contact sport, and adolescents...

i think you have it right. these are adolescents. these are kids. we can say 'get over you dicks' all you want as adults. but, these are kids of both genders already dealing with adolescence.

[Edda van Heefmstra Ruston]

I say compete, and let him compete as normal. I don't think that he would necessarily have looked "like a dick who beats up girls" unless he went above and beyond what he normally does. (OTOH, I am leaving "dirty tricks" out when I say that, but that's because I don't think they should be a legal move in any match.)

I do sympathise to a certain extent with the objections, but not entirely. If it had turned out that way, your friend shouldn't have "been beaten by a girl", he should have been "beaten by a better opponent". I know it's a societal thing, but as long as it's a legitimate reason not to allow girls to compete, it's detrimental. Yes, individual girls and women can be better at certain things than individual boys and men. It shouldn't be a shameful thing. Baby steps for everybody, and it has to start somewhere. If a wrestler's worried about a physical reaction, well, surely it can't be the first time it would have happened in a wrestling match. I don't just mean that in the sense that there are gay students wrestling out there, although there are, but that I imagine any such physical stimulation might cause an erection.

The "testosterone-fueled comradeship" is something else. If you were bonded as a team, I don't think that should be any different no matter the composition of the team. If you were treating it as a "no girls allowed" club, that's different. Okay, yeah, you might not have been able to spike her jock strap with Tiger Balm, but you could do other things. Or not haze that way at all, of course.*

There's no easy answer, especially when the whole thing is set up to segregate competitors this way. But especially if there is no girls' competition, or not enough to hold their own tournament, I don't see why the boy's right to not feel uncomfortable trumps the girl's right to participate in the sport.

*I wasn't even on a sports team and I still had my underwear strung out with the other 20 or so of us involved in the "orientation" phase of a group activity in high school. It's not like you can't think up ways to embarrass everybody all together. :lol:

[Trebla]

I have sat on the fence for this. I wrestled for several years. On one hand, I saw how it could be a no-win situation for a boy. You win, you beat a girl. You lose? Hoo boy.

However, part of sports is that you can't win them all. You will lose and you may lose BADLY. I had an incredibly embarrasing loss in from of my whole school and 10 family members. It was team Regionals and I faced an opponent I had just pinned in individual Regionals. I got caught trying a switch-roll maneuver I hadn't practiced much and ended up getting pinned. I was utterly humiliated and I didn't want to go to school the next day. My parents made me and looking back it was a character building experience.

So looking at this whole situation I think this kid is a coward. Oh his FAITH won't let him? BS. He or his parents just don't want him losing to a girl. It's especially galling to me because he did it at State. This was no regular season match where it just goes down as one loss. He was a wrestler who could have won the championship but chose to chicken out of possibly losing to "the lesser sex". I find nothing heroic about his stand.

For the record, I would have wrestled a girl and would have wrestled her the same as any boy. I would have done my best to pin her. What I had sat on the fence about was whether I would allow a son ( I dont have one) to wrestle a girl or allow my daughter to wrestle. Now I would say yes on both.

eta: fixed typos

[Nas!]

I cannot imagine a convincing argument against letting girls compete, providing that they follow the same rules for qualification as do boys.

If the worst outcome is teenaged boys having to ask themselves why they feel okay about possibly hurting other boys but not okay about possibly hurting a girl, then we are going to be okay.

[Galactus]

I'm also wondering if the young man's religious rights were violated...why couldn't the wrestling officials have pitted him against another man when they learned of his religious faith? It seems to me that would have been a very easy and simple accommodation to have made?

Too easily abusable. You can't let people choose whom to compete against.

EDIT: Same reason Lebanon isn't in the Eurovision.

[Jaime L]

it is not like basketball. it is high contact and violent. my favorite thing was to have someone down and force my forearm across their face, latch hard onto their arm and drive my knee into their side turning them over. it is a hard thing to go 'i am going to do this to a girl.' another favorite move of mine was to wrap my leg around theirs, break them down. take the arm on the same side and stretch out pulling their shoulder and ribs painfully until their back touched the mat ending the affair. again hard to say 'i am going to do this to a girl.'

But they signed up for it. As much as you don't want to be administering this type of "beatdown" to a girl, I think she'd find it more offensive to being treated like some delicate vase when she signed up to wrestle..and everything that goes along with that. If she's good enough to make the team and compete then treat her like a competitor.

Also put yourself in her shoes. Every match she does is against the opposite sex. She's learned to handle it...why can't boys?

[Edda van Heefmstra Ruston]

Girls are tougher, obviously. :P

[kiko]

I say compete, and let him compete as normal. I don't think that he would necessarily have looked "like a dick who beats up girls" unless he went above and beyond what he normally does. (OTOH, I am leaving "dirty tricks" out when I say that, but that's because I don't think they should be a legal move in any match.)

I do sympathise to a certain extent with the objections, but not entirely. If it had turned out that way, your friend shouldn't have "been beaten by a girl", he should have been "beaten by a better opponent". I know it's a societal thing, but as long as it's a legitimate reason not to allow girls to compete, it's detrimental. Yes, individual girls and women can be better at certain things than individual boys and men. It shouldn't be a shameful thing. Baby steps for everybody, and it has to start somewhere. If a wrestler's worried about a physical reaction, well, surely it can't be the first time it would have happened in a wrestling match. I don't just mean that in the sense that there are gay students wrestling out there, although there are, but that I imagine any such physical stimulation might cause an erection.

The "testosterone-fueled comradeship" is something else. If you were bonded as a team, I don't think that should be any different no matter the composition of the team. If you were treating it as a "no girls allowed" club, that's different. Okay, yeah, you might not have been able to spike her jock strap with Tiger Balm, but you could do other things. Or not haze that way at all, of course.*

There's no easy answer, especially when the whole thing is set up to segregate competitors this way. But especially if there is no girls' competition, or not enough to hold their own tournament, I don't see why the boy's right to not feel uncomfortable trumps the girl's right to participate in the sport.

*I wasn't even on a sports team and I still had my underwear strung out with the other 20 or so of us involved in the "orientation" phase of a group activity in high school. It's not like you can't think up ways to embarrass everybody all together. :lol:

While I see what you mean, I would also like to point out that you are a bit unfair. When women want to have their own sports competition, nobody thinks badly about it. There is no call to automatically assume "testosterone-fueled comradeship" as the motivating factor.

[AverageGuy]

If a wrestler's worried about a physical reaction

I doubt that's a concern. It might be hard to understand if you've never wrestled, but the mindset going in doesn't exactly put you in the mood. I'm not going to say it's never happened, just that I've never seen it happen.

[Trebla]

I doubt that's a concern. It might be hard to understand if you've never wrestled, but the mindset going in doesn't exactly put you in the mood. I'm not going to say it's never happened, just that I've never seen it happen.

yeah, never saw anyone get a boner. I did see two different guys crap their pants. :ack: