Janet Christie’s Mum’s the Word - When a kiss is not just a kiss, but an own goal
The best thing about having a few decades under the belt (literally in my case but I’m working on it with my online Ladies who Lunge) is that you can see progress.
It’s easy to get downcast about how things never change in world where women are still paid less than men and bear the brunt of childcare and domestic labour, where violence against them is widespread, where online porn where the power dynamic is weighted against females is so prevalent, and conclude that each generation of girls has to fight the same battles over again, but every now and then I realise there has been progress.
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Hide AdSuch as when my friend is talking about our school days and how if we were thinking about jobs and futures now, her aspirations would have been so different.
“I’d have been wanting to be a professional footballer,” she says and I’m surprised because I didn’t know this about the woman who went on to become a head teacher. It just hadn’t occurred to me, even though I’ve known her for decades, just like it didn’t occur to us at school because we had no women playing football role models or get to play it. Instead it was netball and hockey, both of which my friend excelled at, while I merely made up the numbers, lacking any talent apart from showing up for a laugh.
“I know I wouldn’t have been good enough but it wasn’t even a thing for us to consider back then,” she says as we sit watching the news where the Women’s World Cup Spanish Kiss affair rumbles on.
“Look at his hands holding the back of her head,” I say as we watch Luis Rubiales planting one on Jenni Hermosa. “She can’t dodge,” a manoeuvre every woman knows - the head swivel so a ‘friendly kiss’ lands on a cheek instead of the mouth.
“Same old,” she says, “and now no-one’s talking about the football. But it’s good it’s being called out. People care because now football’s a career that girls can aspire to.”
And so the story becomes not ‘women play football shocker’ but how women who play football are treated. Women playing football has become normalised. So much so that when a friend says he can’t come axe throwing with our gang because he’s going to watch the football, my response is “Football? That’s a lassies’ game.”