Speaking of Title IX…from Salon: Was Elizabeth Lambert’s meltown a guy thing?
When University of New Mexico defender Elizabeth Lambert faced off against Brigham Young in the Mountain West Women’s Soccer semi-finals last week, she did not bend it like Beckham. She tantrumed like Tyson. She punched. She went old school and pulled hair. She racked up an alarming number of penalties and got herself suspended indefinitely from her team. Inevitably, she also went viral, as footage of her going medieval on her opponents hit YouTube. In the ensuing days, she’s been called “the dirtiest player in soccer” for her “despicable losership.”
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a woman behaving aggressively is still something of a novelty. When Serena Williams got into it with an official at the US Open over a foot fault in September, the Daily News called it a “display of testosterone… proof that women athletes can behave every bit as irrationally as men.”…Adding to the Lambert fascination is that where there are physically fit 20-year-old women playing dirty, there are those who find their actions hot. CBS News’s 48 Hours called Lambert an “attractive, aggressive…” player
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Without disputing the basic fact that men and women are physically, hormonally and socially conditioned to be different, maybe it’s time to put aside the facile explanation of aggressive behavior as strictly maculine. …Maybe anybody, male or female, who’s in the throes of an intense soccer game and gets elbowed and crotch grabbed might react in a spontaneous and physical way. That’s not excusing it, by the way, that’s simply not assuming it’s a guy thing.
Lambert, the most despicable person in sports and the hot warrior babe, is in fact like any other athlete out there. She fouls and fights and screws up and plays her heart out. And she does just like a woman.
One of the things I like about this article is that it acknowledges that not only do women have anger, anger itself is an emotion, too. It’s the one emotion the men are allowed and assumed to have, yet somehow never seems to count in discussions of which sex is more “emotional.”
This article brings up an interesting point that anger is not typically associated with the emotions that women have. But why not? Women are regularly associated with being more “emotional” but I have always heard people associate aggressive women with masculine characteristics. Instead of immediately assuming that an aggressive woman athlete, or any woman, is “manly,” people should understand that anger, like sadness or happiness is an emotion that women experience. Although I believe this idea of what it means for a woman to be “emotional” has been ingrained in our society, this article is a good start to get people thinking about gender stereotypes and what it truly means to be emotional.