Princess Culture and Football

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/lifestyle/2012/11/girl-football-star-sam-gordon-9-wows-with-spectacular-highlight-reel/

The above is a link to an article about a 9 year old girl who is good at playing football. I saw this news story on TV and the show I was watching did not answer all of my questions as to why this girl was playing football. When I went to look up the story of Sam Gordon, I stumbled across the ABC news story. I read the article which states that though football is not her first love in sports, she wanted to take it up after watching some college games with her dad. When she started playing she was really good. She is even tackled and tackles the boys. After getting my answer to if she was pushed by her dad to play and if she had an older brother, I decided to read the comments and see what people were saying. I found that the only two people to comment on the story were blaming her father that she was playing, saying that he wanted a boy so he took it out on her.

This is playing into the princess culture that is out there. Even though she says in the article that football is not her first love, she says she enjoys scoring touchdowns. The first comment by Ron Ruys says that her parents are sick and that they probably wanted a boy. What he does not mention is that in the article the father states that they have an older son and that he would play roughly with her in soccer and that she was unfazed with it. Ruys also goes onto mention that since her parents are probably pushing this boy aspect on her, that she will grow up to be “confused”. This seems to be from someone who has never taken a pop culture class, or he would see that these stereotypes are forced on children. The little girl states in the article that she does have enjoyment playing football and that her first love is soccer. In the princess culture playing sports is not something that little girls are supposed to do, but thanks to Title IX more girls who want to play sports get to play and beat down this stereotype. He may also not have noticed that in the skype interview the girl is wearing a pink shirt and her hair is down. Though if the girl picked this out on her own or her parents told her to wear it, we may never know. The second comment left by T.bayloney says that they are “between the two extremes”. They claim that the dad is “obviously playing out his unrealized dreams”. This claim is unfounded in the article seeing as it never states that the dad played football, all it says is that they were watching a BYU football game together. Which by society standards is the “normal” guy thing to do. After these remarks the commentator then says that he built up their own daughter with encouraging comments. Both these people highlight that in it is popular to fall in line with pop culture. Even though princess and superhero culture are not a natural thing. I personally hope this little girl continues to fight the stereotype that little girls are not good at and should not play sports for as long as she still finds enjoyment from playing them.