Play Like A Girl

I found the video “Not Just a Game” very insightful. Not being a major sports follower I don’t know about a lot of the messages that are conveyed through the vein of sports, but it does make sense. Now I do come from the typical “Football is life”-type town so I am aware of the kind of molding that can have on one’s life. Where boys are validated by football, or at least by participating in sports in general. In this video it was pointed out how to ‘play like a girl’ was one of the worst insults a man could hear, and the question that arose was what does this say about women? Is this demeaning to our weaknesses?? So I asked a few men what that statement meant to them; one response was it’s not that it’s intended to be hurtful to women, but rather hurtful to men because they are in fact not women. He cited there are differences between the two and that is what this is supposed to represent. And that is true, many sports have been modified for women simply because of the physical differences, it’s not meant to be unfair, just fact. I can understand this thinking because much like a man does not want to be termed ‘a girl’ I would be insulted if I were ‘like a boy/man.’ Especially in terms of physicality; I don’t want to be told I look like a man or sound like a man… that would be insulting to me, even though I very much like the way men can look and sound, I just don’t want to mimic it. But even so- when I hear the words ‘you play like a girl,’ it doesn’t have a positive connotation to it. As a majority most girls probably aren’t all that athletic or prone to sports, and might even be uncoordinated or lacking an athletic ability that men tend to have more naturally (I know I do!) but the ones that are involved in sports can be exceptionally fierce. They are strong, driven, coordinated and certainly not the image conveyed by such a statement. Again most of the men I talked to about this did say they didn’t view this statement as being particularly insulting to women, but insulting to men simply because the typical woman is not as naturally athletic as men. I don’t like it, but it makes sense.