Jock


[[File:Tom Brady 2019.jpg|300px|right||thumb|A typical American Football jock]]
A '''Jock''' is a sports player or a bodybuilder. Females are often not called jocks, though female athletes are often [[Stacy|stacies]] (see women's track and field, beach volleyball, surfing and gymnastics for copious examples), the female counterpart to the archetypal jock Chad. The common stereotype is that they are facially handsome; indeed the term 'Chad Thundercock' has been memetically associated with the former high school football jock Jay Gould, also known as Greensboro Jock or Greensboro Chad.<ref>https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/jay-gould-greensboro-chad-chad-thundercock</ref> In contrast to this common perception, a study showed no correlation between general physical fitness and facial attractiveness among men in general.<ref>https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513806000754</ref> This means most jocks are probably not [[Chad]] or [[Gigachad]] in terms of possessing outlier high facial attractiveness, though other evidence suggests there is a positive association between men's athletic performance in certain sports and certain roles and their facial attractiveness. 

Regardless of their facial and overall physical attractiveness, there is evidence that being a jock, particularly when playing team sports, is broadly associated with greater mating success, increased popularity, higher income later in life and other desirable outcomes for men. This is despite the negative stereotypes that frequently surround jocks, such as 
frequent depictions of them in popular culture as being overly aggressive boneheads and sexual harassers and even rapists. 

==Jock popularity and sexual success==
Jocks are often sexually attractive to women and have many sexual partners.<ref>https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513803000643</ref> Women see men that play team sports in an aggressive manner as being particularly attractive, even for the long-term relationships which are typically believed to be the domain of beta males.<ref>https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886912002322</ref> The incel researcher, psychologist Brian Gilmartin, claimed that social withdrawn, timid and passive [[love shy|'love shy men']] are generally averse towards 'rough and tumble sports', and their inability to partake in these sports without being bullied by aggressive jocks was detrimental to their sociosexual development. He thus advocated banning mandatory team sports events in high schools in the US.<ref>https://zhenles.files.wordpress.com/2013/03/gilmartin-shyness-and-love.pdf, p. 249</ref> This suggests that incels are rarely jocks.

Cross-culturally, athleticism is associated with social status more strongly for men than women.<ref>https://labs.la.utexas.edu/buss/files/2020/07/BussDurkee_etal_JPSP_corrected.pdf</ref> This is possibly because prowess in team sports signals adaptive personality traits that are associated with intergroup co-operation in realms such as warfare and hunting, as well as the athletic ability needed to carry out these activities successfully.
As young as 4th grade, high athletic ability has been found to predict popularity fairly strongly, along with high facial attractiveness, both moreso than academic success.<ref>https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02701367.1992.10608764</ref><ref>https://sci-hub.ru/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/02701367.1992.10608764</ref> Other evidence shows that the frequent [[cope]] that jock bullies inevitably [[Peaked in high school|peak in highschool]] and trend towards being indigent and socially unsuccessful in adulthood is false, as people who identified as 'jocks' in high school had higher incomes and more secure attachment styles compared to self-identified 'nerds',<ref>https://web.archive.org/web/20171108215536/http://neepsociety.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/NEEPS-Program-2017_Full-Version_FINAL_6_14-1.pdf</ref> which suggests they also tend to have more stable romantic relationships and that [[High school never ends|high school never ends]].<ref>https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886919302673</ref>

==Are jocks handsome==
A study showed no correlation between general physical fitness and facial attractiveness among men in general, though physical fitness was moderately correlated with [[body attractiveness]] and therefore probably (weakly) positively correlated with overall physical attractiveness.<ref>https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1090513806000754</ref>

However, other research does indicate that success in certain prestigious and prominent team-sport positions, like that of quarterback in American Football, is positively associated with facial attactiveness<ref>https://www.si.com/nfl/2016/02/02/nfl-quarterbacks-attractive-your-brain-on-sports</ref> Further evidence shows that professional players in the most prestigious positions in soccer and ice hockey are also more facially attractive on average.<ref>https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886907001894?</ref> The general trend is to attempt to explain this association between facial attractiveness and attained rank in team sports via recourse to [[Halo effect|halo effects]] and expectancy effects (i.e attractive men are expected to be better players and are more popular etc.).

Some evidence, however, indicates that more facially attractive men are actually better sportsmen<ref>https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0191886909003845</ref>, which aligns with evolutionary psychological predictions that facial attractiveness is a marker of [[Good genes hypothesis|'good genes']]. Other evidence has suggested that male performance in certain individual sports, such as cycling, is also positively predicted by their facial attractiveness.<ref>https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/full/10.1098/rsbl.2013.0966</ref> However, in contrast with the hypothesis that facial attractiveness is a reliable and robust signal of overall athletic ability and thus good genes in general, some studies have only found positive effects for facial attractiveness and athletic performance among female athletes, such as in the individual sport of tennis, which suggests some selection/reinforcement effects may indeed be at play in determining any associations between facial attractiveness and broad athletic performance.<ref>https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/kykl.12090</ref><ref>https://www.econstor.eu/handle/10419/126551</ref>

==Race of jocks== 
In the United States, Gridiron football is the most popular sport,<ref>https://www.ranker.com/crowdranked-list/most-popular-american-sports</ref> with quarterback being the most prestigious position. Basketball and Baseball are the second and third most popular sports, respectively. The value of being a top recruit is exponentially more popularity, culminating in a large national social media following. 

In 2022 only 10 out of 100 top star high school football recruits were white, the rest were African American, and of the top 1,000 4-5 star high school football recruits, nearly all of them are African American with no East Asians, South Asians or Native Americans/Mexican Americans.<ref>https://www.on3.com/db/rankings/consensus-player/football/2022/</ref>. The top 100 basketball players in the nation are also nearly entirely African American, with only 14 players being white.<ref>http://www.espn.com/college-sports/basketball/recruiting/playerrankings</ref> Finally, among baseball, of the top 100 high school athletes, 75 were white with 3 Hispanics and the rest African American.<ref>https://www.baseballfactory.com/recruiting-and-promotion/the-top-100/</ref> This suggests that Blacks are more likely to be successful jocks in the US.

==See also==
*[[Chad]]
*[[Gymcel]]
*[[Dominance hierarchy]]
*[[Body attractiveness]]
*[[Mogging]]
*[[Peaked in high school]]

==References==
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