Jane McManus, an ESPN reporter, wrote about how her middle school daughter was less-than-enthusiastically received by a boy when she chose to learn football at school.
My daughter got off the school bus and came straight to find me in the office upstairs. In gym class, her teacher, Ms. Rivie, asked the students to pick which sport they wanted to learn: football or soccer. She picked football, and persuaded two of the girls in her sixth-grade class to join her.
“That’s great, Charlotte!”
Why “that’s great” isn’t clear, and isn’t given any further thought. McManus’ daughter was given two options and picked one. Wasn’t that the point of options? Perhaps no girl had ever chosen football before, which made it “great.” Perhaps it reflected a choice that finally broke away from gender stereotypes, and Ms. Rivie was thrilled to finally have a girl take the football route. If so, it’s unsaid.
But I could see by the look on her face that what happened next was not good. One of the boys said that girls couldn’t play football, then made a “Real Housewives” comment about the trio and laughed.
“It’s not OK,” she said.
So a boy in middle school made a sexist joke? Alert the media. Boys do it to boys. Girls do it to girls. Boys and girls do it to each other. If anybody wants to ask the hard question, how is it women aren’t protesting the fact that television offers shows like “real housewives” of anywhere, demeaning not only a gender but the intelligence of all of humanity?
This is 2015, and my confident Charlotte, whom we’ve been filling with girl power since she was just hours old, had stumbled upon the same roadblock I’d encountered in the days when the words “Title” and “IX” were still a punch line.
What roadblock? Did Charlotte not just get offered the option of football and soccer? Was she not allowed to make her choice? It seems as if Title IX, to the extent it applied, worked perfectly.
But McManus’ confusion aside, she was offended that her daughter heard the words of challenge by a boy, that “girls don’t play football.” So? Play football. Play it better, faster, smarter and harder than the boy with the big mouth and show him.
According to McManus, that’s what she did when she was younger. She played basketball, and vaguely suggests she was good enough to be allowed to play with the guys.
When my daughter told me about what had happened, I felt 11 all over again. I’d played with boys growing up — with neighborhood kids on hastily assembled football teams, or baseball games where the big rock was second base and a smaller rock was third. By the time I was in college, I played in pickup basketball games where I was often the only woman. I played regularly in local men’s games until after I had kids.
Why was McManus “often the only woman”? Obviously, it wasn’t that the men wouldn’t let women play because of gender, since they let McManus play. Was it because she was the only woman who wanted to play? Was it because she was the only woman good enough to play with the men? McManus never explains, so we don’t know.
Over the years I’ve run into that kid in Charlotte’s gym class. Not that exact kid, but the one who wants to publicly disrespect the lone girl without having any idea of her skill level. Who wants to exclude a girl just for being a girl.
That was always the kid I wanted to beat the most.
Exactly. Want to teach the kid who says girls can’t play a lesson? Kick his butt. The ability to do something isn’t defined by talking about it, but doing it. Not every boy has a future with the NFL. Not every girl either. Merit talks, gender walks.
But a friend of mine raised this point: In the past 40 years, we have revolutionized the way we raise our girls. They grow with higher expectations and redefined gender roles. But have we changed the way we raise our boys?
McManus asks because she only has girls, but makes this observation:
Clearly, on many middle school fields you can still encounter the boys of my own childhood — and probably a lot of fart jokes.
That’s true. And you can still encounter the girls of her own childhood as well. And what’s wrong with kids telling fart jokes? And what’s wrong with girls whipping boys’ butts at football, or anything else, if that’s what they want to do. If they can.
McManus’ post gave rise to a New York Times Room for Debate, asking “Do we need to do more to change the way we raise boys?” It’s a one-sided “debate,” but there was one line that stuck out.
Our daughters can’t reach their potential if boys are going to trip them on their way up.
If your daughters can be “tripped on their way up,” then they can’t compete on equal footing, which means this is all a lie. Girls don’t need boys’ permission to do what they want to do. Just do it. If girls can do it as well as, or better than, boys, then they win.
The sole voice against not turning boys to androgynous Jell-O cubes belongs to Christina Hoff Sommers, who writes:
Girls may be on the wrong side of the junior high school football gap, but boys are lagging when it comes to far more consequential divides. And closing those gaps does not entail treating conventional boyishness as a pathology in need of a cure.
All kids should be able to do whatever they want to do, go wherever their interests and abilities take them. They don’t need to be fixed. They need to be whoever they are. And if that means a girl wants to play football, so play football. But if you want to be chosen for someone’s team, then you will have to play well enough to help the team win. That’s the lesson of sports. And life.
Some women talk too much. Whatever happened to being strong and indominable?
Turns out that being strong and indomitable was a lot of work. It’s “exhausting.”
Have too many parents abdicated teaching their children self-reliance, competence, and capability to schools and universities? Have such institutions redefined as and limited self-reliance to finding the appropriate administrator to protect students? Do “safe spaces” and anything akin to them enable their occupants to achieve their full competence and capability? Students who age with these soft and cuddly influences and retain them are preparing themselves to be victims rather than survivors.
I thought the phrase de jour was it’s draining
It’s hard to keep up with the phrase du jour (or du minute, as the case may be).
This all seemed much clearer before I had a kid. At least my daughter is comfortable telling fart jokes in mixed company.
It becomes clearer again when your kids grow up and become whatever they’re meant to be.
“When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years.”
– attributed to Mark Twain
I’ve had boys tell me I can’t play football, and soccer, and a host of other things. They were mean. It left me emotionally scarred for life. No, wait, I was emotionally scarred until I realized that I actually sucked at any sport involving a ball, and focused on other ones I was pretty good at. Geez, life was made so hard by all those mean boys, I had to learn my strengths and weaknesses and everything before I could be happy.
One issue here is that transgressing gender norms valued particularly highly by this mother, as a good thing in and of itself. However, it comes at a big price. First, you get a bunch of girls to invest time in learning to play football. Then puberty happens and only 1% of them can play on par with the boys anymore, and there is no infrastructure for them to play against other girls only. Now they’ve invested a bunch of years learning something that has little value to them. Most parents realize this, and don’t think the value of transgressing that particular gender norm is worth the cost, so it will remain a gender norm that football is played mostly by boys. Which is a good thing; it is better to brain-damage only half the population.
While it’s not part of McManus’ issue now (though it will likely be in a few years from now), parents find that their kids pick and choose what they want to do despite our wish that they transcend gender norms. You can’t field a female football team of females don’t want to play. It’s the primary problem with Title IX, where colleges are left to cut male teams because it can’t find enough women to field equivalent teams.
The fallacy of parity can’t be overcome by rhetoric. If there aren’t enough women interested in playing football, there is nothing a parent can do about it. And (another irony), women are allowed to not want to play football.
“…primary problem …”
Indeed. Mine cut its varsity wrestling team while I was there.
Think creatively about which sport gender norms to transgress:
Girlz, learn sports as a wealth-building tool.
You can pay for your college with pool.
It doesn’t take muscle
to run a good hustle.
Twenty grand on the 9-ball is cool!
“Do we need to do more to change the way we raise boys?”
My long standing principle of media interpretations is that whenever a media outlet asks a yes or no question, the answer is almost always NO.
This was a loaded question from the get-go. “Do we need to do more“? It starts out with the presumption that we need to do something in the first place.
I learned from the Federal Government that if boys are allowed to touch girls, and those girls are not invested with the authority to have those boys summarily ejected from wherever they were when the touching happened, then that place is a “hostile environment” that discriminates against women. I think that pretty soon every team will be trying to get a girl on the field, and soon after that, there simply won’t be any football (which is what they really want).
One of many reasons Pat Summit’s women’s basketball teams were so good is that Pat had her teams scrimmage against men.
Men who weren’t good enough to receive major or mid-major scholarships.
Men who routinely beat Pat Summit’s women’s teams in those scrimmages.
As a woman who played competitive sports growing up, frequently played football with the boys, and who currently plays co-ed sports, this makes me sad. Why do we feel the need to do this? The fact of the matter is the best man in virtually any given sport will always be better than the best woman. So what. Of course you have to prove you can compete to play on a team with boys, that is what sport is about, it is one of the purest forms of meritocracy. The same is true for boys who are “too short”, or “too skinny”, or “too fat” for their chosen sports. The joy comes from proving it, and if you can’t, well you don’t belong there and that’s okay too. The most valuable lesson you can take from sports is learning to overcome struggle and adversity. As a woman in a profession that is considered “male dominated”, that has certainly been the case for me. I don’t know why we would want to eliminate the possibility that our girls would have to face any challenges before the game even begins.
Amen. Sports are (or at least, should be) the ultimate meritocracy. Everybody should be welcome to play, but the best will win regardless of anything else. That’s as it should be.
When you say meritocracy, are you referring to those that merited based upon the gift of genetic ability or those that merited based on hard work and discipline? Both perhaps?
Rawls in your court, coach.
Winning!
Not to get too off-topic, but I’m always fascinated that people raise the distinction you do, innate ability v. hard work. Without going all Harrison Bergeron on you, so what? We all come in with whatever we gots, and make use of it how we do. Beyond that, it’s a total irrelevancy. There aren’t two world, so we all compete in the same one and do the best we can.
>> The fact of the matter is the best man in virtually any given sport will always be better than the best woman.
Depends on the sport. Competitive rifle or pistol, not so much. Fishing, not so much. Archery, not so much.
Focus. Stop the need to go off-topic because of one errant sentence that brings out the feminist competitive urge in you.