Throwing Like a Girl

Abstract

Objectification theory posits that Western culture socializes girls and women to self-objectify by adopting a third-person perspective on their bodies. Feminist philosopher Iris Young (1990) argued that such self-objectification accounts for “throwing like a girl” and other constrained and ineffective motor performances. The authors’ hypothesis was that higher self-objectification among adolescent girls would predict poorer throwing performance. The authors tested 202 girls, ages 10 to 17 (32% Anglo-American, 47% African American, and 20% other ethnic minorities). Each was asked to complete written measures of self-objectification and to throw a softball, three times, as hard as she could. Throwing performance was coded from video records. Results show that self-objectification predicted throwing performance above and beyond differences due to age and prior throwing experience. There were no differences by race. Discussion centers on how self-objectification limits girls’ and women’s physical activity, with implications for emotional well-being, physical health and safety, as well as cognitive functioning.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 116 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.