Powderpuff plunders progress

paper The Westwind critiqued.

By Rebecca Ireland

Every year, CVHS offers a single game of flag football for girls; informally “Powderpuff”. Many years ago the name officially changed to “Ladies’ Flag Football,” though it is still often called Powderpuff among students, which “reinforces sexist ideologies in adolescents at a young age, such as [that] girls can’t handle the roughness of sports; a woman’s job is to look pretty, not be athletic; and girls and women in sports are a joke” as the Arvada West High School news-

For league football at CVHS, the team is supposedly open to any students interested. In the 2018-2019 school year, Leikela Lunt became the first and only girl on the varsity team and continued the following year. Along the same lines, the cheerleading team is open to any students interested, and there continue to be students of all genders on the teams.

Lunt joined the team to “show other girls that we are perfectly capable of the sport just as much as [boys] are.”

However, I believe designating this one-off game for girls tells students that girls don’t belong on the league football team; especially being a flag football game while the school team plays tackle football.

Lunt said it makes sense that girls stick to flag football, because “more women are not brought up in football” due to societal norms.

However, shouldn’t girls be afforded the same opportunities regardless of their upbringing?

Yes, football is dangerous, and perhaps no one should be risking their safety for a sport, but if people are opting to play the sport they should have the choice to join the same opportunities.

Along these lines, there is also a youth and adult flag football organization–American Flag Football League–changing the football scene to make it equitable and safer for anyone and everyone interested in football.

The California Interscholastic Federation (CIF) decided this year to create a league of girls flag football beginning in the 2023 to 2024 school year.

In talking to leadership students and leadership teacher Thomas Maloney, they have claimed that the Powderpuff game is just tradition–a last opportunity to have fun with

Community members are speaking up at school board meetings and testifying at state congressional hearings to protest drag bans, book bans “ friends before the school year ends. Tradition is often used to mask hegemonic sexism, so maybe we need to re-evaluate this, as we did with Mr. CV (which was a competition between popular CVHS senior boys).

Gender neutral bathrooms are a good start. Bringing awareness to the situation is important since a lot of people are ignorant about it.

Accompanying this game are the spirit boys–cheerleaders for the one-time players. Aside from the sexism of the Powderpuff game, the spirit boys used to make a mockery of the cheer team. Cheer is one of the most dangerous sports, resulting in more injuries than even football. Minimizing the sport, which is still woman-dominated, demeans the efforts of our students. Luckily this has mostly shifted in recent years, as the cheerleaders coach the boys and see them learn to appreciate the sport. It would be amazing to see more cheerleaders of all genders on the official school teams, but this puts people in boxes, saying this is their one chance to try the sport and enforces that boys don’t belong on the cheer team. The regular-season football players also have the opportunity to coach the girls in the annual flag football game. While this provides the valuable experience of learning to teach fellow students, as Maloney said, I believe it places the boys on the football team above the girls, again implicitly saying that girls are not as equipped for the sport as the boys.

Provide more students support where they feel heard and maybe more support of students trying to show who they are can help.

Outside of flag football, women are fighting against the separatebut-not-equal structures; CVHS girls’ teams are not afforded the same opportunities for support according to players on the soccer team, they are not equitably funded, and even the US Women’s National soccer team just fought for equal pay. The Equal Rights Amendment has not been federally ratified, and women and nonmen continue to face systemic discrimination in a way that is only exacerbated by the CVHS girls’ flag football game. The historical and current misogyny makes it difficult to look past the fun of the game and instead forces me to focus on the perpetuation of sexist norms by the sport.