Joyce Carol Oates "On Boxing"

I have been reading some of the classic books about the sport of boxing to help inform my recent work. I found this one passage interesting. The gender roles described in the passage is one of the things I am interested in both revealing and/or discrediting. Here are some words by Joyce Carol Oates, found on page 70 of On Boxing

What time is it?-"Macho Time"!

-Hector "Macho Man" Camacho, WBC lightweight champion

I don't want to knock my opponent out. I want to hit him, step away, and watch him hurt.

I want his heart.

-Joe Frazier, former heavyweight champion of the world

          A fairy-tale proposition: the heavyweight champion is the most dangerous man on earth: the most feared, the most manly. His proper mate is very likely the fairy-tale princess whom the mirrors declare the fairest woman on earth.

          Boxing is a purely masculine activity and it inhabits a purely masculine world. Which is not to suggest that most men are defined by it: clearly, most men are not. And though there are female boxers-a fact that seems to surprise, alarm, amuse-women's role in the sport has always been extremely marginal. (At the time of this writing the most famous American woman boxer is the black champion Lady Tyger Trimiar with her shaved head and theatrical tiger-striped attire.) At boxing matches women's role is limited to that of card girl and occasional National Anthem singer: stereotypical functions usually performed in stereotypically zestful feminine ways-for women have no natural place in the spectacle otherwise. The card girls in their bathing suits and spike heels, glamour girls of the 1950s, complement the boxers in their trunks and gym shoes but are not to be taken seriously: their public exhibition of themselves involves no risk and is purely decorative. Boxing is for men, and is about men, and is men. A celebration of the lost religion of masculinity all the more trenchant for its being lost.