Girls and Sports! Why Are They Dropping Out?

While waiting for “The Dark Knight Rises” to begin, I saw a pre-show commercial (those ads when the lights are still on even before the good previews) that actually caught my attention! No, it wasn’t about buying popcorn or the latest celebrity trivia… this ad was about young girls dropping out of sports at double the rate of young boys. What was most interesting about this commercial is that it blamed this dropout rate, as least in part, on the media for sending girls certain messages. The acknowledgement of the media’s influence is what caught my attention and made me think about/relate the ad to this class…

The ad starts by showing girls on a soccer field. Background voices filter in, speaking the messages that we see every day in magazines and commercials… “ Hide your flaws…“ , “ What guys notice,“ “Are you ready for swimsuit season?”. The girls on the field then turn in to make-up covered, high-heel strutting, hair-flowing females … basically, real life Bratz dolls…. The final message of the commercial is “Don’t let them walk away from their potential”.

This ad is claiming that these media messages are causing females to drop out of sports due to the pressure they put on girls to be feminine and sexy. The background voices in the ad were saying the exact same things as Seventeen magazine says - like my group found during our in-class activity. It was clear in our magazine exploration that the media encourage young girls to be boy-crazy and fashion-obsessed. I don’t think any of our groups saw mentions of sports or other hobbies in any of the magazines we read. The only hobbies we found were facebooking your crush or finding that right shade of foundation.

What struck me the most was the fact that this ad was about media’s effects on girls’ participation in sports. This approach is different than simply looking at media’s effects on girls’ sexual behavior/attitudes/expectation/etc.  In class we have read a lot of studies that look at these latter sorts of effects.  Readings such as Brown et al., (2005) and Taylor (2005) show that media content leads to more permissive sexual attitudes and possibly more sexual behavior. What the readings have thus far failed to acknowledge is how the media are affecting other aspects of youth’s lives. This ad shows that these messages trickle in to every aspect of a girls’ life, from her boy-crush to her after-school activities.

 It seems that people often look at sports and sports organizations directly when they critique the lack of female sports participants - blaming them for not providing as many opportunities or equal quality of instruction. However, it is rare to see the blame being put on the media in direct regards to sports participation. It seems clear, now, that media heavily influence girls in their decisions to not play sports…seeing as how media so overtly tells girls to be docile and pretty - and, heaven forbid they be competitive or athletic.

Overall, this commercial was interesting as it looked at a less commonly acknowledged effect of all the ‘be boy-crazy’, ‘be beautiful’, ‘be sexy’ messages in media.