At the Margins of the Minors
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AROUND THE HORN: DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION
This paper investigates groupies and their relationships with players of
the Cheyenne Coyotes Double A baseball team. We discovered a clear
dichotomy of good girl and bad girl groupies, distinguishing these groups from
their common experience in commodifying and exchanging sexuality. The key
distinctions between the groups lie in the rewards that each group anticipates in
return.
Bad girls seek empowerment from their exchanges, rebelling against
the smothering dictates of Victorian morality. While their frank sexual overtures
disqualify them from full acceptance in the ballpark community, their exclusion
represents their successes: They have co-opted the most important members of
the community that others try desperately to protect. To bad girls, their actions
eliminate the sexual double standard, allowing women the freedoms of sexual
conquest and pleasure that men have historically enjoyed and hoarded.
However, while bad girls’ actions challenge patriarchal standards, the
consequences of their partnerships subtly reinforce the patriarchy their actions
overtly reject. Men always gain more than women in the groupie-athlete
exchange networks that house individual exchange relationships. The fleeting
empowerment of the sexual relationships bad girls foster may simply be a sort of
false consciousness in light of larger patterns of male dominations.
Good girls, on the other hand, embrace rather than challenge the maledominated establishment that they recognize, conforming to traditional gender
roles and codes of sexual submissiveness. As marginalized and commodified
actors, good girl groupies utilize their sexuality to achieve a social position they
believe can only be gained through male athletes. They enter exchange
relationships with athletes aspiring to achieve the rewards of long-term
relationships. While bad girls perpetuate patriarchal traditions ironically, good
girls embrace and celebrate them. These actions may also represent a sort of
false consciousness in light of larger patterns of male dominations.
University of Texas-Austin
Texas State University
Connie Brownson
Harold Dorton
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