Stereotypes

Why does everything need to be stereotyped? Once in high school couple of friends and I were playing basketball during lunch and this guy just comes up and starts calling names us like "beaner" and other stereotypical Mexican names too. Just because we look Mexican does not mean that everybody is. It also means that not everybody eats beans either. What I'm trying to get across here is that sometimes women are stereotyped as beauty queens, weak, and non-athletic. It is not fair for women to be stereotyped all the time because they play sports. Not all women have the same bodies and are athletic. Same as men there are men out there that might not be able to do a set of push-ups, pull-ups or complete a mile run it takes practice.
Sometimes I hear men saying all the time “Oh that guy is fast," "that guy this.... What about women can’t' they be fast? Women can be as fast as men too. I think society has just grown accustomed to these norms and stereotypes that it is really hard to treat something that is different as normal or acceptable. It is through what the media and society wants us to think and we sometimes take it as something that it is true. In the women in sport class when we talked about norms at the beginning of class, we discussed that society was is in this box and if you step out of that box it is like if someone committed a crime. That person that steps out gets scolded and gets treated differently.
The stereotypes are keeping society from creating social change in women in sport and other areas in society. It makes difficult to change how women in sport are viewed. The question is how can we make that change? Since it is deep embedded in our society it is difficult to get away from stereotypes like that. In addition, another time in class we watched a video about 8 year old girls playing soccer. These girls moved to the boys division for more competition. In one of the games the video showed that some of the parents from the other team were saying things like, "come on, they are just girls we can beat them.” What does that have to do? What if they are girls, can they not play against the boys and be able to beat them? They don't think that girls are capable.
I also would say things like "man you kick like a girl" with out thinking sometimes when played soccer. However, talking about issues like this made me realize that stereotypes like these and judging people by gender we sometimes do not even think about it that it affects that person. We can see how media and society makes it acceptable that we don't even think about when we say it. When in reality, there are women who can kick better and harder than boys. In the future I hope we can realize that stereotypes do affect people and women in sport as well as other areas in society and that we need to somehow change that.
Andres A.