I'm not a big soccer fan, but I did watch a little bit of the World Cup finals a couple of weeks back. The U.S. women's team was in the news quite a bit for their victories. I kept catching snippets of press conferences after games where the women's captain, Megan Rapinoe, kept fielding questions about the women on the team and how much they were celebrating during or after matches. I think some of the women did celebrate after making a goal, but let's remember that it's not unusual for a soccer match to end 1-nil or even 0-0. That seems to indicate some sort of excitement is called for after a goal.
What gets me is the fact that reporters felt the need to make an issue of these sorts of celebrations on the part of the women. I don't watch football anymore, but I seem to recall many, many instances where a player would make a tackle and then prance around like he just made an awesome play. Isn't the point of being on defense to make tackles? Why does doing your job merit a moment of over-the-top reaction that no one says anything about? Now, there is an obvious question of why does it bother me when football players do it but not soccer players? I mentioned the typical low score in soccer games. A little moment after one of the only goals in the game is one thing, but making a big deal out of a tackle when there might be 40 or 50 plays during the game that a defensive player is involved in seems a bit over the top to me. I see it as a matter of degrees, I guess.
My strong suspicion is that people don't like to see the strong female athletes celebrate. It's fine when the NFL men dance a jig after every play, but the soccer women better not dare have a moment. Men can have all the time in the limelight they want, but women need to be relegated to a lesser role, I suppose.
And while I'm talking about double standards, the U.S. women's soccer team gets paid substantially less than the men's soccer team. And by the way, the women's team is much better than the men's. So I have to ask, why the double standard?