Gender Issues in the Ceremonial First Pitch

blogs.voanews.com

A 1996 article from The Atlantic examines how doing something "like a girl" has become synonymous with doing it badly.  More specifically the article looks at baseball and what "throwing like a girl" means. Bill and Hillary Clinton both threw the first pitch in different baseball games on April 4th of 1996. Newspapers got a kick out of comparing the throws of the president and the first lady. 

The article in The Atlantic comes to the conclusion that "the crucial factor is not that males and females are put together differently but that they typically spend their early years in different ways. Little boys often learn to throw without noticing that they are throwing. Little girls are more rarely in environments that encourage them in the same way." The article also states that skills such as sports are easier to learn when younger and that anyone, male or female, will have a harder time learning them later in life. So this idea of girls throwing badly "is not gender, it's acculturation."

www.politico.com

One question that came to mind as I read this article was "what would the response have been if Hillary Clinton had not thrown like a girl?" A first lady had never before thrown the first pitch at a baseball game. Hillary Clinton was already symbolically breaking established gender norms within the political world.  The behavior of political leaders is so closely scrutinized by the American public and the media that I cannot help but wonder if the Clintons were advised before the game on how exactly they should pitch. Throwing a pitch aggressively, as her husband did, could have affected Hillary Clinton's public image more negatively than throwing badly. Hillary Clinton's pitch has mostly faded from people's memories. Besides, there are other celebrities to make fun of as shown in the Time's list of the ten worst first pitches.