violence in sports

I was looking through videos of violence in womens sports and the most common sport i found was actually ice hockey. This was most interesting to me simple because I wouldn't have been able to tell that these were women ice hockey players simply by watching the fight. Though I have seen fights in movies with all the slamming into glass and punching each other, something about these fights somehow seemed not as violent, as if they were staged for fun. Yet at the same time, I could tell that these women were really pissed, which made me think that maybe it was just the combination of ice, awkwardly sized uniforms, and skates and hockey sticks that made the fight that much slower. After scanning through the hundreds of connected links to other women's hockey fights, I read through the comments, which were rather depressing. Most of the people watching had commented on the fact that these women 'fought like girls', or 'couldnt throw a real punch if they tried'. It's kind of sad how all the emotion and energy that these women were putting into a sport (whether for a goal or to simply beat up on their opponents) was simply disregarded and commented on with sexist comments and comparisons to their much larger and stronger male counterparts. Much like Robin Hextrum's art on how rowers hurt their bodies in return for the emotional rush of working hard for the team and for the sake of the sport, these women were pushing themselves out of the norm that 'women can't play hockey' to prove themselves in a sport they loved.
The link that struck me the most was titled "why hockey is not for women". Though not a video of actual violence in sports, it implies the (negative) effects that participating in sports, especially violent ones, has on a woman and her appearance and chances of 'getting a guy', which is being emphasized more than her scoring a goal or putting up a good defense. Whether she is being violent or not, the idea of women in sports is still not being looked at fairly when she's not allowed to express the emotions that are always being used to label women in other aspects of life.