I am watching this on Oprah Winfrey Show. SIck....
Last week the nation was shocked to view the now-familiar hazing
video footage from Glenbrook North High School in Northbrook,
Illinois, a suburban neighborhood north of Chicago. What began as
an annual Powderpuff football game between junior and senior girls
which usually involves an initiation of juniors to their senior
year quickly erupted into a melee in which senior girls beat and
humiliated junior girls in plain view of at least 50 onlookers. The
victims were beaten, choked, dowsed in paint, human waste and
animal entrails, and, according to some reports, forced to eat mud.
A long standing tradition, Powderpuff football games usually
involve practical jokes and humiliation. Yet, the junior girls of
Glenbrook North High School could not have imagined that they would
experience a form of cruelty that would cause five of the victims
to be hospitalized.
Though not the cause of this hazing event, the Powderpuff football
game nevertheless set the stage for dehumanizing behavior. Perhaps
a form of clever amusement to a previous generation, Powderpuff
football has no place in a society that respects gender identity,
and as such ought neither be sponsored by schools, nor maintained
as a hazing ritual in deference to tradition.
In its most common form, Powderpuff football is an annual event
that occurs at high schools wherein junior and senior girls compete
in a game of flag football, while junior and senior boys dress up
as cheerleaders and dance team members, arousing the crowd by
performing stunts, routines and often salacious sketches. Though
sometimes a part of homecoming week, Powderpuff football often
serves as an informal initiation for juniors into the senior class
and as a fund-raising event for school activities or charities.
Glenbrook North High School, however, has not sanctioned Powderpuff
football since 1979, and the events leading up to and including the
debacle took place at an off campus location.
The Powderpuff football tradition requires males to dress up as
females according to an adolescent understanding of femininity.
Exaggerating various body parts using balloons and pillows, males
often wear clothing and accessories that embellish the most sexual
aspects of the female posture. So costumed, males then prance about
whorishly, completing the reduction of the female sex to
caricatures.
Female participants in the Powderpuff tradition, as evidenced by
the events in Northbrook, are not faultless either. Female
participants often verbally abuse both their competitors and game
officials, who are usually teachers within the school. Violence
between junior and senior girls is disturbingly common during and
after Powderpuff games. Competitors deliver cheap shots in plain
view of spectators. Gang fights have broken out as a direct result
of on-field behavior of female Powderpuff competitors. Clearly,
males do not have the monopoly on burlesque portrayal of the
opposite sex.
It is not surprising that sexuality and violence should play on the
same field. Freud even suggested that the two major life urges are
Eros and Thanatos sexuality and death. Nor should it be
surprising that when sexuality is travestied in real life, the
outcome is violent. Failure to respect a persons sexuality and
gender identity is also a denial of his or her personhood. In the
case of Powderpuff football, gender reversal is an occasion fit for
mockery and hence no one respected themselves or each other.
Those who first began the tradition of Powderpuff football were
confined to rigid gender identities the football game served as a
mockery of gender reversal. However, persons in our time are freer
to explore and question the inherited notions of masculinity and
femininity. In our current society, a sport should not dictate how
one views his or her masculinity or feminitiy. We believe males and
females ought to be able to choose their gender identities and have
their respective graces honored by their peers rather than
lampooned. Powderpuff football, by its disparagement of gender,
sets the perfect stage for violent encounters, and no longer
belongs as a rite of passage in the high school experience.
