Women, Sport and Film :: Argumentative Persuasive Essays

Women, Sport and FilmOut of all the material we covered in this course, the ones that bear most directly on this examination I think are the documentary slightly women in sports, and the picture show Girlfight. However, I felt that both of these films focussed on the issue from womens point of view. This is non to say that it isnt important or necessary to do so, but I started thinking about how men are also greatly affected by sex stereotyping. Being in a womens college, I feel like we focus a lot on the ways in which women are pressure into certain roles, but we neglect to also look at how men are forced into certain roles. Last semester I watched the movie nightstick Elliot, about a young boy growing up in Newcastle, England, during the time of the miners strike. I think the movie illustrates very well the costs and benefits of breaking gender stereotypes. Billy grows up in a mining family and his family consists of himself, his father, and his elder brother. He is surround ed only by male role models, and that too men who reside in manual labour. His father and his brother are both very masculine in the traditional sense of the word. The basic plot of the movie is that Billy wants to be a ballet dancer. His father wants him to learn boxing, but he sees a group of girls having ballet lessons at the same time and he starts fetching ballet lessons on the sly. He turns out to be very talented, and his teacher wants him to apply to go to ballet school on a scholarship. The rest of the movie follows his progress and his struggle to be real by his family once hes been discovered. At first his father prohibits him from doing ballet, and calls him a pouf, but Billy persists and is finally accepted by his family and community. I found it interesting that even though Billy is pre-pubescent, the mere fact that he wants to learn ballet induces people to question his intimateity even at such an early age. At an age when children arent supposed to be sexual being s yet, Billy is under constant pressure to decide what his sexual orientation is, both by his family in that he has to defend himself, and by a friend of his in school who fits a certain stereotype of homosexualism and is romantically interested in him.