Man’s Domain?

My initial reaction was totally emotional. How can a woman be the Head Coach for a boys’ High School
football team? How can she relate to the guys she is going to lead? Did she play football growing up? Has
she been at the bottom of a pile fighting for the ball? Has she been in the trenches, breathing the stale
breath of her competitor? Has she been hit by a linebacker while running a crossing pattern? Has she had
her eyes poked or taken a knee to the groin? She may be tactically brilliant. She may know X’s and O’s,
but how will she convey more than an intellectual understanding of the game to a team that is operating
on emotion and adrenaline in the critical moments of the game? How is she going to be convincing at “gut
check” time?

I consider myself to be fairly progressive. I am sure I am more prejudiced than I would like to admit, but I
am oriented toward a broad view of human capability. I support an ethic of advancement based on
qualification and achievement. It does not trouble me to think of women in the Board Room, or the corner
office, or the Oval Office. So why did the news of Natalie Randolph, a science teacher at Calvin Coolidge
Senior High School, being named Head Coach for the boys football team, create such an emotional
reaction in me?

She appears to be extremely qualified. She did play wide receiver for the D.C. Diva’s, a women’s pro
football team, so she has game experience. She has a quiet, but forceful demeanor. She commands
respect. She has, by all accounts, exemplified leadership and the ability to instruct. Take gender out of
the equation and she looks more qualified than the Head Coach I had in High School. She sounds like
someone I would have wanted to play for. From an intellectual perspective, it is clearly a good hire for
Calvin Coolidge Senior High School. And I imagine she will be a very good Head Coach.

So why the emotional reaction? Why did it feel “wrong” to me, when I first heard to the news? What is it
that troubles me, or threatens me, about a woman taking the helm on the gridiron?

Again, the distance between emotion and intellect is telling. When I answer that question emotionally, the
answer comes out something like:

“Football is one of the last bastions of American manhood. Where can guys be guys if not in the High
School football locker room? Where are guys supposed to tell their jokes and bark their bravado and
boast of their manhood? Why do women insist on being everywhere we are? Why can’t they let boys be
boys and men be men?”

Ah, interesting. Why can’t they “let boys be boys and men be men”?

Intellectually speaking, that is a very telling question. As women find their way – earn their way – into
more and more places typically occupied by men, men are being challenged to rethink their places. With
every announcement like that of Ms. Randolph, women press forward into new territory, discovering new
ways and new places to be women. Men’s “territory” is shrinking, or so it seems, and we are not being as
aggressive, persistent, or creative in pressing forward, finding new ways and places to be men.

Men could migrate toward roles being vacated by women. And that is happening. Stay-at-home dads are
not as rare as they once were. Male nurses are more abundant. More men are choosing to step off the
career conveyor belt in order to be more present with family. But it is not a comfortable development for
all men (or women, for that matter). And, for centuries, men have not ceded ground without putting up a
fight. So we get reactions, much of it emotional, to news like Natalie Randolph’s, that expose the battle
lines, without examining what is at stake.
And what is at stake is this: an increasingly androgynous culture. As the line between stereotypically
feminine and masculine roles becomes blurred, so do gender identities. It is becoming less and less clear
what it means for “boys to be boys and men to be men”. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Neither is it
necessarily a good thing. It is, simply, a reality with which we will need to come to terms as our culture
lurches forward into the 21st century.

There is something increasingly nostalgic, to me, about the Cleaver family. June and Ward seemed
happy. Their roles were clearly defined. Everyone knew what was expected of each and knew how to be
what they were supposed to be. Ward was the breadwinner. June was the homemaker. And Wally and
Beaver were the adoring, but mischievous sons. Boys wore jeans and girls wore dresses. It was all so
neat and tidy. Did that work well then? It seemed to. Was June as happy as she seemed? Was Ward?
They, and by “they” I am thinking about my parents who were June and Ward contemporaries, they just
didn’t seem to think much about it. That was the way things were. It was simple. It was straightforward. It
was clear-cut.

I would like to think that is the object of my nostalgia – the simplicity of it all. How nice would it be to return
to a day when roles were so clearly defined? Everyone knew what was expected of them and all were
pulling in the same direction. Life has become increasingly complex; choices so vast. But forward we
move. And the complexity will not yield until we find new ground, some new common and comfortable
ground, where roles will be understood, and gender identity will be defined differently than in the past.
And that’s the way it has always been. It is the way the human and social psyche is wired.

So, hooray for Natalie Randolph. I wish her well. And I hope that the next time news breaks about a
woman shattering some glass ceiling or wall, I will be in a different place with it all; I will be more secure in
my own masculinity and less threatened by a woman in “man’s domain”.