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 greatest impact on me was during my junior year of high school, during the fall of 2012, when I was seventeen years old. Football made my fellow teammates and myself as dominantly masculine as an individual could be due to the game of football and all of the things that surrounds your participation throughout the entire football season. Beginning with locker room talks before and after practices and also during football games, made me realize how gendered relations and masculinity is shaped 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,

You tend to catch yourself trying to be the dominant one in conversation, and in everyday activities. It enforces you to look down on girls that were not as good looking as other girls. It made me more or less embarrassed to talk about a girl that might not have been as good looking as girls teammates hung out with. So you’ll often shy away from talking about those girls with friends and much rather talk about the good looking girls that we either saw or want to get to know, whether we talked to them or not. That forces an individual that is not as masculine to become more masculine knowing that good looking girls are hanging out with your teammates compared to you. So everyone, especially on the football team is in a constant battle to get the best looking girl in