Advanced Essay: Primal

Intro: I wrote this essay to explore the ideas of the abnormally large amount of gay slurs and homo phobics that appear in sports. I am proud of how I tied it together but my grammar could have improved and the middle sections of my essay could have been better.

Homosexuality is something in society today that people are slowly coming to accept however there are still outliers such as the Westboro Baptist Church and other hate groups set out to oppose homosexuality. Sports are a huge part of society especially in the United States. When people think of an athlete who plays sports they will most likely think of a masculine, muscular figure, which is a trait and body composition commonly associated with playing sports. Most people will not think of someone flamboyant which is a trait commonly associated with gay men. The homosexuality bias that occurs in sports does not stop there, gay slurs and dissatisfaction towards gays are abnormally high in the sports communities compared to other groups. The reason for this bias comes down to the fact that people do not like what they are not used to. The majority of sports players are testosterone filled men because testosterone fuels muscle growth, but the overall amount of testosterone in a person's body does not just have that one affect. Testosterone also causes hyper competitiveness and aggressiveness. Maybe there are not more people who are homophobic in sports but more people that speak their mind and tend to be insensitive when playing a competitive sport.

Bill Kennedy is a gay NBA referee and basketball is the second most popular sport in the world. When a gay referee is put in a spot where the whole world can see what he's doing it does not always end up with a person saying something positive. ‘‘I am proud to be an N.B.A. referee, and I am proud to be a gay man. I am following in the footsteps of others who have self-identified in the hopes that it will send a message to young men and women in sports that you must allow no one to make you feel ashamed of who you are’’(Morris). Through the limelight Bill Kennedy has become a figure head for the LGBTQ community, what he says matters, it has impact and effects the NBA as a whole. Bill Kennedy Later says something that provides a great insight into sports culture and its homophobic tendencies. “The stigmas are different for gay male athletes, in part because men have made intolerance and slurs a lasting feature of sports culture. And so, tribally speaking, for a star — a male star — to say ‘‘I’m gay’’ is, in a sense, to place himself above the culture of the team”(Morris). The point Kennedy brings up is something important to the reason why sports has a abnormally high rate of homophobic reports. Culture is the deciding factors in these types of situations, the culture of a team is different then the culture of the world that is ever changing.

The culture of the world has changed immensely, but evolution has not caught up. Humans evolved to live in hunter and gathering societies, we are now removed from this scenario. Humans evolved so that men are the ones to hunt and women are the ones to take care of the home, Now gender roles in society are generally open and not conflicted. The male female behavioral differences were pushed further apart by things such as estrogen and testosterone. Testosterone is known to contribute to aggressiveness, competitiveness and muscle growth. Testosterone gives athletes major advantages in sports because of its association with muscle growth. This could be a major factor in the cultural capital of sports, when a homosexual male or women comes into contact with a place that is fueled by primal human instincts due to the excess of hormones they effectively isolate themselves from the rest of their team. There is no science to prove that homosexuals have a different hormonal balance but their difference is seen as a challenge to sports.