Gender And Masculinity In Football

Gendered institutions are an integral part of everyone’s daily life. For myself, playing on a football team shaped me into the individual I have become. The locker room talks before and after practices or football games made me realize how gendered relations and masculinity is influenced by football. As Messner mentions, “gender identity [is] not a ‘thing’ that people ‘have’ but [is] a process of construction that develops, and changes as a person interacts with the social world.” Football has always been perceived as being a male dominated sport due to the aggressive and physical nature of the game. This leads to the majority of those initially involved with football constantly trying to prove their dominance through acts of masculinity. While

Due to all the factors that football forces you to be a part of such as the media, classmates, coaches, parents, and fans force you to be in a constant mindset focused on getting better. Whether it’s in school, playing football and even talking to girls you often catch yourself trying to better yourself through confidence which shows by your actions how masculine you are or try to portray to be. From the things I wore to the things I did in public it was all to portray an image of a leader and a role-model to other people, or at least that's what I thought, being a masculine individual was. We walked around as if we were the most popular whether we were or not that’s what we believed. It often made me feel as if I was unstoppable, untouchable, and unbeatable due to the social class that football made me accustomed

Football forces you to pursue and aspire to the social and cultural definition of what a man who plays football should be. The masculinity of football seeps in the individual’s lifestyle where they tend to act in a way that represents a sense of toughness, dominance, and a source of high achievement due to the social expectations that come with playing football. While in high school, I became a very masculine individual due to the environment that I surrounded myself in, which made me the person I am. This is an active practice that is constantly occurring through the approaches to life and the things I get involved with and not involved with. After writing this essay, it help me better understand how masculinity affects me in countless different ways from the way I dress to the way I walk. This essay made me recognize how much someone’s masculinity influences someone’s thinking, belief, and opinion about someone just by observing them. It opened me up to the different beliefs people have about being masculine and what it means to be masculine. Overall, the most important thing about this essay is that it made me a more well-informed person on the influences that made me who I am