Football stuff :: essays research papers

Stepping Outside Traditional Boundaries In Football, Fast Cars, and Cheerleading: Adolescent Gender Norms, 1978-1989, Suitor and Reavis found that adolescents did not change drastically in their views about gender roles from the late 1970s to the late 1980s. The differences they did find were an increase in girls’ reports of sports involvement as a social advancement tool, and a larger increase in boys’ reports of sports as a way for girls to gain status. They also found that, by the late 1980s, more boys noted high sexual activity, a stereotypically masculine characteristic, as a social advancement tool for girls, while girls did not report any stereotypically feminine activities as a way for boys to gain status. Girls, therefore, were more accepted into masculine arenas, but boys did not stray into feminine arenas. The implications of the study are that boys have remained locked into traditional masculine roles. While girls have advanced socially through entering masculine roles, boys have not advanced soci ally through entering traditionally feminine roles.   Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  Ã‚  In the late 1970s, the general trend was that adolescents felt that participation in sports was did not increase girls’ status as much as other activities. Suitor and Reavis found that 33.6 of the students who graduated between 1978 and 1982 reported that sports was one way in which girls advanced in status, while 90% said sports was a way boys advanced in status. Physical attractiveness was the number one way in which girls were said to gain prestige. Through the late 1980s, these trends continued. Similarly, rowdy behavior was seen as a masculine advancement tool, but never mentioned as a feminine tool. This brings into question the ways in which kids learn that boys are aggressive and supposed to pursue sports, whereas girls are not. Children learn gender roles early on in life, as their parents reward and punish certain behaviors that are biologically based and promote gender intensification. For example, girls are complimented for having their hair done nicely in ribbons or headbands, while boys are complimented for playing well and being competitive in a soccer game. While boys are biologically more aggressive than girls, this aggression and roughness is enhanced and encouraged through socialization. Nature and nurture are both at work in early gender development, as characteristics that are by nature masculine or feminine are coded with social behaviors and are overly engrained in children’s heads. As children spend more time with peers, they reinforce these rules with each other, by teaching each other and interacting in the roles that have been defined for them.