Pony-tails and Pass Defense
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The line of sixth grade students streamed onto the playground. As we rounded the corner of Center Township Elementary school the line dissolved, students scattering in every direction. I took one running step towards the gathering group of boys on the field, eyeing the football that materialized as we arrived. My teacher Mr. F grabbed my arm.
“Just a minute, Lynn,” he said.
Ever obedient, I stopped, but my eyes stayed on the field. Hurry up, I implored my teacher silently. The teams are being picked!
“You can’t play football with the boys,” said Mr. F.
I stared at him, not understanding.
He stared back, waiting for me to get it.
“It’s okay,” I said, “they don’t mind. They always let me play.”
I was proud that I was the only girl who played sports every day at recess with the boys. Maybe the other girls didn’t want to, but then again maybe they were just too scared, or maybe they had Mr. F-types as parents. I wasn’t wildly athletic, but I was determined and fearless and I knew the rules as well as they did. In my neighborhood everyone played; girl, boy, big, little. I looked again at the field, still green despite the lengthening Pennsylvania fall. It would be covered in snow soon. The urgency grew.
Mr. F shook his head, his dull thinning brown hair flopping out of its comb-over. He reached a quick hand up to smooth it. “No, that’s not it. You can’t play because girls shouldn’t be playing sports like that with boys.”
Huh? I was dumbfounded.
Billy X zipped by us. “Come on Lynn, we’re starting!”
I stared at his royal blue ski jacket as he dashed onto the field and joined the group that had formed on the left. He was probably fifty yards away (I measured everything in yards, very handy knowing football) but it could have been fifty miles.
I would never, not at that age, have disobeyed a teacher. I stood there, without direction. Mr. F looked at me again with a frown, gave a short shake to his head as if he couldn’t believe I even wanted to play sports with boys, as if he couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me, and walked away.
The year was 1976 and I’d put Mr. F at about thirty-five years old at that time, which means he would have been born in 1941. His ideas about girls and boys would have been formed in the fifties and sixties. I can see this from the far future where I now sit, the mother of a multi-sport playing boy and a multi-sport playing girl. I still can remember the rush of shame at disappointing a teacher. He had managed to take away something I loved and make me feel like a freak in one short sentence.
I can still feel the snap of the cold air, the hard asphalt beneath my feet as I stood rooted to the spot. I didn’t question Mr. F. I didn’t do anything. I didn’t know what to do, where to go. I was friends with the girls, but I didn’t have a routine with them on the playground. I didn’t move from that spot for the remainder of the recess. I remember holding my teeth together tightly, like that would hold everything else together, like it would keep me from crying.
Eventually I found a routine with the girls. I stood in groups and talked and watched the boys play. I stood shivering in my thick coat and watched my buddies throw their bodies around with joyful abandon while I stuffed down rage at Mr. F’s unfairness.
I literally stood on the margin. Out of bounds. Out of the game. Out of the action. Out of the fun.
It turned out that there were other Mr. F’s in the world. I learned to hold my body differently. I grew more self-conscious. I forgot the pleasure of a body in motion, running and jumping and sliding away from a tag with a hip swing.
I felt smaller.
In my twenties I discovered running. I found the thrill of putting one foot in front of the other. I found my way back to that sense of mastery in the physical world, to that joyful innocence a child feels in using her body to play.
In my twenties I also went to graduate school in psychology and discovered a lot of other stuff, like Sandra Bem’s work on masculinity and femininity and how masculinity and femininity are not opposite ends of the same continuum, but are each their own separate continuum. You can score anywhere from high to low on each. So, a high achieving, aggressive, athletic, dress wearing, makeup loving girl is probably high on masculinity and high on femininity. And a man who is assertive and strong and also caring and nurturing is high on both as well. Turns out that people who are high on both tend to be more well liked and more successful. I remember the day I read Bem’s theories, a buzz of excitement lit up my whole body, that diminished little sixth grade girl rose back up and reclaimed sports and anything ‘boy’ that had been rightfully in me. I kept running and I felt myself becoming whole again. I felt bigger in the world. And I became a psychologist and a professor and then a wife and then a mother (and that order was not insignificant).
Jump ahead to 2010. I’m standing on another playground, distant in time and miles and attitude from the first one. I’m in California and I’m watching second and third graders in the same scattered energy of recess, just like the one I participated in as a child. As I talk with the teacher I came to see, my eyes scan the playground and I pick out my daughter. Hard to miss in her periwinkle sweatshirt, baggy over her Nike sweatpants. She’s in line to rotate in for four square and I notice that of the ten or so other kids playing or waiting to play she’s the only girl. I know most of these boys and they are fair. Anyone can play, girl or boy. Just line up. I smother a smile of pride, just like me my daughter is drawn to play sports with the boys. I look around and notice another group of boys and girls playing basketball. No one, teacher or student, is questioning the impulse of a girl to play a sport. No adult is separating girls from boys anywhere on the playground.
I know things are still not equal in our culture between women and men. I know women in sports and business still face pay inequity. There is still so much work to be done and no one is a more vocal advocate of equal pay than my daughter (don’t even get her started on the women’s national soccer team!).
But the progress is this: It has never occurred to my daughter that being an athlete, or being fierce and aggressive and blisteringly competitive, is in any way at odds with being female. Given my interrupted football career it gave me immense pleasure to watch my daughter play flag football in one of the largest leagues in the country, in the minority for gender but fully accepted. It gave me immense pleasure for the two of us to watch the news stories introducing Katie Sowers, the first female coach in the NFL. I wasn’t allowed to play football with boys at recess and she is being paid to coach in the NFL. This happened in my lifetime.
The number of Mr. F’s are dwindling. And the Mr. F’s who are still around, still holding those values, are being trampled by giggling, pony-tailed, sharp-cleated girls.
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