Why women gymnasts compete to music in their floor routines but men don't | Hacker News Reader

Why women gymnasts compete to music in their floor routines but men don't

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The obvious boss move here would be for all the ladies to choregraph excerpts from 4'33" this year.

For those who haven’t yet heard of this John Cage piece:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/4′33″

https://usagym.org/PDFs/Women/Rules/J.O.%20Code%20of%20Point... (Page 230)

Might just work, since it mentions "music".

>The musical accompaniment must be recorded with orchestra, piano or other instruments (without singing/voice). Human sounds are allowed, provided there are no words spoken or sung.

>Absence of music or music with words/song incurs a 1.00 deduction, taken from the average score by the Chief Judge.

They'd better clear it with ASCAP. Dumb as it sounds, 4'33" is copyrighted, and if you make changes that alter it, you may have violated the licensing.

I'm not sure if that applies to music compositions the way it applies to plays, with which I'm more familiar. But when I license a play for performance, I'm usually forbidden from altering lines. (That's one of the reasons I usually do Shakespeare.)

> Male gymnasts competed in the Olympics for the first time in 1896. Women's gymnastics made its debut more than three decades later, in 1928. When women started competing, the sport was tailored to fit the preconceived gender roles at the time, experts say.

When male gymnasts competed in the Olympics in 1896, it was designed from the start with preconceived gender roles with the initial routines highlighting masculine strength. When women started competing, those gender roles were applied again so that while the male version continued to highlight masculinity, the female version highlighted femininity instead.

Other obvious differences are:

  - no beam for men
  - Uneven bars versus parallel bars
  - no pommel horse for women
  - no rings for women
  - vault: height of apparatus

There are others (fe code of difficulty is completely different)

So in essence, they are different sports with the same name. One is mens-only, the other, womens-only.

A bit like decathlon/heptathlon.

If there is an interest, they could split the two "gymnastics", give them different names, and have both genders compete in both disciplines. In the same way that there is a women's decathlon (but not in the Olympics).

In what contest of physical prowess, strength, or endurance can women fairly compete with men?

Mental games are wide open, but there's a reason physical games are segregated. Evolution built us to be good at different things.

You could use gendered world records and averages to weight individual scores in competitions, allowing desegregated competition, essentially giving women a handicap. There's a chance that the psychology of competition could elicit better performance and even things out, or that competing with men directly could negatively impact performance.

Politics du'jour isn't very compatible with reality in some areas. Historically speaking, the strongest and fastest or most endurant person on the planet is going to be male. I don't think it's fair to women to have to compete against the realities of biology without fundamentally changing the way things are being measured. And it's not fair to men to limit the measurement of performance on a direct and literal scale.

There are sports/games (don't know the exact difference here) where there's no advantage for a certain sex. Think chess, darts, biljarts, curling, ... However even there, there's typically a separate competition for women. The only relevant argument is: Is there a market for category X ?

I thought that when it came to chess men do dominate as well. So it would make sense to also have a women’s category. Do any of your examples have women in general as competitive as men and still having their own category.

Chess is a nice example: the strong women will compete in the 'open' category, as will the strong blind players. 99.99% of chess players will get their asses kicked by a 2600+ player (and there are several women at that level)

I don't think parent's comment meant men and women competing against each other. Just that the current sport could be split into two - say, strength gymnastics (following the current rules of men's gymnastics) and choreograph gymnastics (following the current rules of women's) - both with men's and women's categories.

Part of the context for female gymnasts, especially when you are talking about floor exercises, is other somewhat similar activities such as rythmic gymnastics and even things like ballet. So that is one area where two different worlds are meeting somewhat.

To me even more interesting is that these things can be traced back their origins relatively recently and were specific inventions. It's not as if you have thousands of years of these specific movements being done in this way. It something that was created not too many generations back. And its interesting also because the specific format has become so official and accepted as a given.

But also fascinating is the way that these things track (or lag behind) changing values etc.

What's really interesting to me is the circumstances that allow for new traditions to be invented and become officially sanctioned.

I mean, why are they _officially_ all wearing leotards? Call me crazy, but maybe it's literally because your great uncle Bob or whoever who had some oversight at the time thought it was hotter.

Anecdotally, the main reason women's gymnastics is more popular amongst viewers of the Olympics is that it's seen as more "elegant". If it were purely about strength and athleticism, the huge gap between female and male gymnasts in that respect would likely drive viewership to the latter.

Seems crazy because when I watch those athletes mixing those little jerky interludes into their tumbling routine, elegance is the last thing that comes to mind. World-class gymnasts must be the worst dancers around.

That's kind of unfair, in a way. They aren't that bad. It's just that you are used to seeing people who are very good. Try making a video of yourself dancing. It doesn't look like you think. (This is a painful fact learned by any hobbyist dancer, like me.)

But it's true we don't necessarily want to see someone who is not really good. And by not good meaning that they don't spend a lot of time refining that aspect of the routine.

It is up to the sport itself to decide what they want to emphasize and how they want to judge competitions. And it is up to us as viewers to voice our opinions.

I think I am with you in my opinion of some of the dancing. I would rather see a gymnast reflect the music less rather than do some unattractive dancing.

And when it comes to differences between men's and women's floor routines, that doesn't bother me one bit.

The way to solve this is to let any gymnast decide if they want music or not and eventually either music won't be used by most or most will want music.

I mean why not? Tradition? That's an illusion. In a generation people won't even remember if men had music or not.

That's not necessarily useful because the issue isn't music per se, it's the "artistic" part of scoring which may implicitly require music due to judge biases.

Artistic scoring is also where a lot of subjective corruption is, so it should be removed.

Oh this so much. Breaking is evidently in the Olympics this year, which is explicitly a form of dance. Why not just add ballet and dispense with the idea that this is about sport at all?

There used to be painting competitions, so you're not exactly breaking exciting new sarcastic grounds here.

Today you learn about competitive ballroom dancing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dancesport

It's in the Paris Olympics, not this one. Breaking actually requires a lot more athleticism than e.g. diving.

I'm not sure it is becoming of any of us on HN to be critical of the athleticism of Olympic athletes.

While I agree that criticizing by-definition world-class athletes' athleticism isn't particularly becoming, I am little curious regarding the "anyone of us on HN" specifier. Is the implication that HNers are, in particular, less likely to be athletic enough to make those kind of judgements?

I've had a few interactions with some HNers that low-key demonstrate knowledge/experience that (in my opinion) probably puts them well above the general population average regarding athletics, and considering the size of the community, I wouldn't be surprised if there might be a few highly-competitive current or former athletes lurking around here.

Also, I realize that your original comment was most likely a little tongue-in-cheek, but it got me thinking about some of the people who I've seen pop up on here that have "don't you know who I am?" creds that are somewhat astonishing.

very tongue in cheek. Much more ' lets not argue athletics on the internet' and I'll admit I do it too. I say it as a, pretty terrible, ultramarathoner who regularly questions decisions other runners make :)

I am equally astonished by the creds on HN - its why I love it and keep coming back. It's sort of how I ended up here in the first place.

In the aquatics part of the Olympic we got swimming women only, swimming men only, and synchronized swimming with women only. Synchronized swimming got recently renamed into artistic swimming.

Separating gymnastics from artistic gymnastics seems like it would follow a pattern. Artistic vs non-artistic versions. There are quite a few different artistic sports during the Olympics and I suspect it would be an unpopular decision to remove them all.

Or maybe even a second category of gymnastics for both men and women, one focused more on rhythmic acrobatics that uses music and another one that's focused more on feats of strength and raw skill without music.

From the sounds of it, they're two different skills with different kinds of training I don't see why there couldn't be room for both kinds of gymnastics for both men and women.

I feel like you just described Rhythmic Gymnastics, which is a sport in the olympics.

If we were going to sign our daughter up for an Olympic sport it’d be this.

The high level reason across all sports is that much of women’s sports is marketed around sex. Women athletes are often required to show more skin, be more sexy, and do things like wear skirts (tennis) to seem more feminine. Add to this of course that the product endorsements typically go to the highest performing men but the most beautiful women in the sport. It’s more than the natural sex appeal that any top athlete would have — it’s encoded in different sets of rules for the women.

Even in gymnastics, the women have to do these little shimmies and shakes between their tumbling passes that the men don’t.

Hence the recent protests against the women’s beach handball outfits, and the ridiculous double standard they expose.

One nice counterexample is the WNBA, which has gained considerable popularity relative to other women’s sports in the US with very little sexualization of the athletes.

The WNBA is subsidized by the NBA. If you want to build a successful sports organization, don’t model yourself on the WNBA because whatever they’re doing isn’t working.

Subsidized or invested in by?

I know your point - today the WNBA loses money.

But the NBA is a business not a charity. And they're a private enterprise. They don't do this out of the goodness of their heart or some social justice cause.

Clearly they believe it's an investment worth making.

They’re 25 years in without turning a profit. If you’re such an optimist that you see that as an investment and not a subsidy, then I encourage you to sally forth because we need more relentlessly optimistic people like you in the world.

OK, so female athletes have to win the game and give the male viewers a hardon? I don’t consider that “working” either.

Not sure why you are being downvoted. I watched the man beach volley abd they wear long shorts.

For some reason it seems to be better from an athletic perspecuve if women in beach volley wear skimpy underwear (there is IIRC a rule for max 3 cm of panths at the side).

This is purely to show off the bottoms, nothing more.

They don't?

Huh.

The article is informative, but the answer is simple and obvious: Traditional sexism.

We’re closer to men adding music than women removing it. The IOC is fully aware that they have to take steps to preserve the popularity and viewership of their sports. Sex sells.

This seems like the latest in a series of articles from CNN that hate women for being feminine. That’s fine for them to have that opinion, but it seems like they’ve slid into disguising opinion pieces as news pieces, just like they used to accuse FOX of doing. If a piece is 10% news and 90% analysis, it’s still an opinion piece.

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