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 person’s 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.
