sexism in the women’s soccer team

The first Tik Tak sounds today, Thursday, October 27 at WEEK and sounds from the sides of the victories of the Colombian women’s soccer team, which now have us on the verge of winning the World Cup in India and full of pride.

The question is whether the struggle of this group of women to impose themselves in a sports space where, until now, the supremacy of the soccer fields has been male domain is not detracted from, by turning these meritorious women into instruments of the struggle of the sexes and of the fiercest manifestations of feminism, Instead of putting their abilities and sporting merits ahead, they come first.

Well, instead of praising them and being happy for what they have achieved, the first thing you hear 99% of people say is that their merit, the merit of our women’s soccer team, is that they have slapped the men, whose team failed to qualify for the World Cup.

We forget that men also come from making an immense effort to reach these positions, to qualify for their teams, to play good football, often coming from very poor sectors, without the necessary technical support, and there they are playing magnificent football. , they may not have qualified in this World Cup, but they will in others.

We forget that men’s Colombian soccer has given us a lot of joy and reasons for pride, but it’s not to catch them now with balls because women’s soccer has allegedly given them a lesson in how things are done, how play, that is demerit them. I do not believe that they are in a fight to defeat men, but to win a sports competition; they are good not because they are women, but because being women they were also excellent athletes.

It just so happens that when looking back at the origins of women’s football, Netty Honeyball, who as a women’s rights activist founded the first women’s sports club, the British Ladies Club, in 1894, is often cited. If you want to go back further, we can go back to the Chinese Han dynasty, which played a variant of this sport called Tsu Chu.

It is throughout history that women have had to overcome the challenges of inventing rules in the 19th century to avoid violence in the game, in order for women’s football to be socially acceptable. Even the war ironically helped: when the world wars took men to fight on the battlefield, women already massively involved in the labor field created soccer teams in factories, but at the end of the war men regained their hegemony in this sport.

Today women’s teams compete in popularity with men’s teams in countries like the United States, Italy and Japan. Now, in Colombia, women’s soccer is positioned very high, in a popularity that does not envy that achieved by their male peers. In Latin America, however, the growth of this interest in women’s football has been slower, but has been growing. Even the discussion from the point of view of the difference between the sexes, at times, has fallen into trivialities of whether women should play in short skirts or it is more convenient for them to wear traditional shorts, without differences with those worn by men. mens.

Even playing in a bikini is something that has been heard as a proposal at some point by a player, but this is not a competition between who is sexier, but between who practices or kicks the ball better, which is the true essence of soccer. And our women’s team has had to overcome everything, from hurried and miserable concepts that women in soccer are lesbians, to bullying and sexual harassment of coaches and managers.

Which is not very different from what women have had to overcome in other types of activities very different from football, and that will not change as long as the gender struggle is aggressive and stops seeking exclusion instead of inclusion.

Yes, our women in soccer have had a phenomenal result, but let us have respect for what they have achieved in sports and not because they cracked the men in the kingdom of their excellence with their tenacity, because that, in addition to being very sexist, is contemptuous . For now, everyone glued to the final of the Women’s World Cup.