Published on
Updated
Reading 3 mins.
In outdoor sports facilities such as “citystades”, these multi-sports grounds in urban areas, the same observation is always made: there are only boys playing. So that girls can find their place there, some cities reserve slots for them and arrange these spaces.
A year ago, the executive launched a plan to build 5,000 local facilities: skate park, multisports stadium, weight training areas, open to all. But, in reality, who will use them?
Of course, the subject is not new.
“The layout of the public space responded to men’s issues“, reminds AFP Edith Maruéjouls, geographer of the genre, who worked on the subject in Gironde several years ago and showed that these places, like the playground, were occupied more than 90% by men. .
“The first time we arrived, with three girls, and we said + we’re coming to play football + the boys replied: + anything girls, it’s not playing football! +, you go behind on the small field“, says Leila Marhi, of the association Sine Qua Non, which promotes equality in the public space and fights against sexist and sexual violence.
“When are you finishing?”
This association, “conquering the street”, benefits from reserved slots in Paris and the suburbs. This is how, in conjunction with the organizers of a social center, little girls and teenagers come and kick the ball at the citystade Reverdy in the 19th arrondissement of Paris, under the instructions of their coach, Fanta, 16, who “wants to pass on his knowledge of football“.
The older ones, aged 13/14 like Fatou, Yayé, Heidi or Maeva, now play in clubs and the little ones fight over them to have them in their teams.
For a year and a half, the association has made its place. Which does not prevent less than an hour after the start of training, that some young boys are stamping their feet, sticking their heads, and launching a timid “when are you finishing?“. At the end of the session, boys are integrated into the teams.
But, without a supervisor, there would hardly ever be any girls playing on this pitch.
For Cécile Ottogali, lecturer in sports history, this equipment is “a typical example of good intentions that may not reach their targets“, namely to be open to all, she recently explained at a symposium of the National Observatory of Physical Activity and Sedentary Life (Onaps).
“Local authorities must observe this, measure it and put in place mechanisms to regulate“, she recommends.
“Stopping the Citystadiums”
Free access,the practice is too exclusively male“, notes Pierre Rabadan, deputy for sport at the Paris town hall. “It is the accompaniment to the use that will make that change“, he explains to AFP, hence the aid to associations for football, basketball or handball to bring girls to the field.
Some equipment is also renovated by artists, and “according to the associations and users, a less austere pitch with an artistic signature leads players to respect the pitch and open up to mixed practices“, he explains. The question of lighting, the arrangement of equipment in the public space, also play a role.
Edith Maruéjouls, she is categorical: “we must stop making citystadiums!She notes that attempts like outdoor fitness “didn’t work”.
For her, “it is necessary +to make a sporty body and to make number+“. And the road is long for women who “decorate the space since their birth” and “are never qualified as a sports body“.
In “women’s bodies, the battle of intimacy“, the professor of political science, Camille Froidevaux-Metterie, takes up the American philosopher Iris Marion Young and her text “Throwing like a girl”: women “apprehend their bodies as an object whose appearance must be taken care of, a necessary tool in romantic and maternal relationships, never as a capacity for implementation or a power of realization“, she writes.