Do you recognize that quote? I'll give you a hint - it has something to do with Anne Hathaway's break-out role. If you guessed "The Princess Diaries" then you're right. Good job, you know your chick flicks. Let me refresh you on the context of this quote. It's towards the end of the movie. Adorkable Anne Hathaway, playing the recently royal and athletically challenged Mia Thermopolis, is up to bat during a PE class softball game. This is right after Mia's been betrayed by her new cheerleader friends, alienated her real ones, and is generally failing at behaving like a proper 21st century noble. On her first try, Mia barely hits the ball and it rolls through the group of cheerleader frenemies who are conveniently practicing their routines next to the softball field...not you know, attending class during an average day at high school because, well, evil movie cheerleaders are, as everyone knows, always cheer leading. On her second try, Mia hits the ball directly into the barely-protected by gym-shorts junk of her former-crush: the very douchey, popular boy Josh. Yessss, classic movie justice of taking out the jerk with a blow to the balls. If only that could happen more in real life. Mia triumphantly sprints around the bases and makes it safely home, winning back her pride and (finally!) passing gym class. Let's back track for a second. I'm happy for MIa and as a fellow athletically-challenged adolescent I completely identified with her struggle and longed for a reckoning of my own. Sadly, I never got that moment. Instead, I was more like the cheerleaders shrieking and running away from Mia's first hit. Long exposition aside, this is where I come back to that quote, shouted at the scattering cheerleaders by their exasperated coach: "Oh come on, girls. It's a ball not a snake!" As a teacher at a private academy, I teach a range of different ages. My youngest students are 5-years-old and my oldest are 16. It's fascinating and sad to watch my female students go through that transition of the ball turning into a snake for pretty much every athletic activity. I think about my third-grade girls who haven't really realized that running full-speed across a soccer field and charging past one of their boy classmates to score a goal will make them appear aggressive, tom-boyish and unattractive in just a few years. Right now, they give zero you-know-what's about how they look when they're playing soccer. They just want to score because screw that, soccer day only comes once a month and the other team is not going to win. Flash forward a few hours and I'm playing one-on-one in the gym with one of my 14-year-old male students.I box him out and sink my next three shots. This kid can be a pain so this one-on-one game is my chance to remind him who's really got the power. Luckily, I haven't totally lost my basketball skills gained from 6 years of bench-warming, uh, I mean, practice. Meanwhile, the three girls in the class are huddled in the corner, pulling at their too-short uniform skirts that had to have been an unfortunate choice made by a male administrator, ignoring my suggestions that they join in. When I toss the ball to Minseo she swats it away like it's a disgusting bug. When Ji Eun actually attempts to make a shot she gives it barely any strength, misses the rim by a foot, giggles (while covering her mouth, of course) and glances to see if the guys noticed - they didn't. Hyo Sheen's throwing Bon Seok into the Kindy ball pit, for the third time. Ok, time to go shout at them again... What's so infuriating is not this age group. What's infuriating is the groups in-between. I can see the girls starting to doubt themselves and their own strength, holding back, shrinking into their own bodies and valuing those same bodies only on how desirable they are to their male peers. It's not like this is something unique to young Korean women and girls. I was thinking back and trying to pinpoint when I first realized that being "lady-like" was more important than being athletic. I can imagine several different scenarios and I'm sure that it must have been a combination of a few of these that really made the impact. Maybe it started when my older brother got signed up for baseball and I went to ballet. Or maybe in elementary school, during a unit about future jobs, when the teacher encouraged the idea of the boys becoming sports stars but reacted with little enthusiasm to girls who had the same dream. Or perhaps it was in middle school, when the girls who were starting to get attention from boys introduced the idea that behaving (and talking) like their brains were just for show - probably learned from older sisters or that god-awful Laguna Beach - is what would land you a boyfriend. Whatever it was, it was somewhere in that intersection of discovering that very specific behaviors are seen as more attractive to men and realizing that as a member of the female sex, I have little choice of when the ball becomes the snake.
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