Women in Football

TV Show/Sport

collected on: 4/19/09

Can be found at: watch any professional or college football game or,

NFL football: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oi2gIWDhg00
NFL Cheerleaders: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EdHw5HqTDTM

Football on television is a huge discriminator between women and men. It has very strict and very different roles for women and men. This relates to gender socialization because it basically says if you don't exemplify masculinity as a man or femininity as a woman, than there is no place for you. Only men play football, where they are strong and tough and scary (masculine traits). Only women cheer lead where they are literally on the sideline being supportive (a feminine trait) of the men doing the "real work" on the field. There are some male cheerleaders but they are dressed differently and they do the "masculine" tasks which require physical strength such as lifting the women. As cheerleaders women are expected to exemplify femininity, their most important trait is their appearance, they need to be thin and wear clothes that bear it all. They need to be walking models of beauty ideals. No wonder football is so popular, it reinforces gender socialization and exemplifies gender roles for both men and women in our society.

Relevant topics are masculinity and femininity, gender roles, gender socialization and education, beauty ideals, and women in popular culture, all for the above reasons. A relevant reading is "Short Skirts and Breast Juts" which focuses on cheer leading and its effect on women and society. It talks about every one of the above topics and how they are related to cheer leading and football. Another related reading is the body politic because it talks about anorexia and the trend in society today to desire women that "don't take up much space". Cheer leaders, like models support this trend because they are all thin and all looked up to.

Football as it is represents a step back overall for women and men but it also incorporates small scale steps forward for women and men. It is a step back because it reinforces many harmful ideas about men and women and masculinity and femininity. It shows little steps forward when it does things like allowing male cheerleaders, though that was only a step back to where we were because originally all cheerleaders were male. It wouldn't be a big deal at all if people didn't learn gender roles by watching things like football which portray men as women differently than they naturally and regularly are.