lets-smash-the-patriarchy

[lets-smash-the-patriarchy]

Enough is enough. #levelthefield

Sport. It's an activity involving a variety of different exciting games and things to do. Boys and girls enjoy it - yet girls are often being denied the chance to try different sports, aside from traditionally feminine ones.

This is the case at my school, and I know that I am not the only person who is experiencing the sexism that we have to put up with every week.

At my school, girls generally only do either netball, gym and dance for the whole year, whilst on the other hand the boys are able to try a wide range of sports from rugby - cricket, football - Frisbee. The only chances that girls have at a different sport are the only two rugby lessons of the whole year, in fact the only rugby lessons I have ever had in three years of high school PE, and even then we never play proper games nor go into any depth. So what do we do instead? Dance acro, dance, gymnastics and everyone's personal favourite : cheer-leading. *In case you can't tell, that was sarcasm* And then in the summer, girls are denied the chance to play cricket, and we have to play rounders instead. This is not just the case in lessons either, it happens in the school sports clubs too. The girls have barely any sports clubs, the girls football club is messily run and girls were denied a cricket club. 

Every girl I know at my school is sick and tired of this limiting regime that prevents girls from discovering their true potential. And it's time that we put it to an end.

My friend M last year decided to start a petition for equal opportunities for girls and boys in PE, I helped her with this petition, and we gained lots of support, even getting over 90 signatures in a day. When our PE teachers found out they were furious and M was taken aside and shouted at. Why is wanting equal opportunities a bad thing? We just want to level the field. 

Me and M even wrote our headteacher a letter, the letter was about cheer-leading and we suggested some alternatives to it, which were

Choice - So instead of having PE sets, classes would be divided on what sport you wanted to play.

Renaming - For example, we could rename it Gymnastics, since we had nothing to cheer for, we may as well just concentrate on the gymnastic element.

Replace - Replace it with another topic.

We never once attacked the schools regime in the letter nor did we aim to offend anyone. We just gave suggestions about how the school could be improved.

Nevertheless, after all our hard work on writing this letter, we never received a reply to it. And even worse? We have recently found out that our PE curriculum is not set by the government, but by our school, which means that our school - a school that says that it doesn't discriminate by gender, is knowing of this sexism, controls this sexism yet doesn't  even try to stop this sexism.

All we want is equal opportunities, that is all we want, yet we are denied this simply because we are girls. 

So help me to prove to my school that we want equal opportunities in sport by spreading the tag #levelthefield and show that sport is for everyone! 

#feminism #feminist #levelthefield #thisgirlcan #girlsinsport #teenfeminism #teenfeminist #equalopportunities #sport #genderequality #patriarchy #misogyny #sexist #sexism #smashthepatriarchy