I actually considered putting this in GD but felt because of the related thread, this would be a better location.
Why do many (especially high school) teams insist on giving a special label to the team mascot for the women’s teams? I can understand the gender specific names like Stallions, Bulls and Rams but why is it necessary to not permit girls and women to be such things as Rebels, Tigers, Buffalo, and Wildcats.
Often they are called the Lady Rebels, Lady Tigers, etc. The schools don’t call the men’s teams the Gentlemen Rebels or Gentlemen Tigers or Gentlemen Buffalos. Do they? It is as if the girls are not good enough to be a full-fledged Charger or Eagle or Spartan, so they must have the additional name.
Perhaps the worst example of this was in Oklahoma where a team was called the Hens and the girls team were the Lady Hens.
Personally I think it is even worse when they add a cutsy ending to the mascot to suggest the women. Rebelles or Lionettes sound like a cheerleading squad or bad candy at a movie theater or something.
I’ve wondered about this myself, and at a high school yearbook conference an instructor even brought up the example of the Lady Tigers, Gentlemen Tigers. In my high school the girls’ teams were referred to as the Lady Deer, which is definitely a step up from the Deerettes. I don’t read the sports pages that often, so I can’t say how many time I’ve run across the term Lady Longhorns or anything similiar at UT.
I would speculate that this is done, at least partially, for the sake of clarity. Also for the sake of clarity, I’ll use the Longhorns as an example even though I can’t swear to the local media’s practices.
If someone were talking about the Longhorn softball team, I would definitely know they’re talking about women athletes. If a headline reads “Longhorns win football game,” I can be pretty sure men were playing. For sports that men and women play, like basketball, it wouldn’t be clear who was involved if a headline simply read “Longhorns win basketball game.”
In the early part of the past century, most schools had only boys’ teams. As girls’ teams were gradually added, it was often felt necessary to differentiate them fromt the boys’ teams, thus the difference in names. This emphasized that there was, for example, a real basketball team, and a girls’ basketball team. Even as girls teams came to be on a more even level with boys’ the practice had become so firmly ingrained in the culture of American schools that even new schools would adopt different names without questioning the nonsense of such a practice. It is a sexist left-over from the last century.
In the last decade, I taught at a newly incorporated school that adopted as the symbol for its sports teams the Knights. With a few notable exceptions (Joan of Arc), all knights are, by defenition, male, but this did not prevent the school from adopting an exclusively masculine mascot and calling the girls’ teams the nonsensical Lady Knights.
The justification was that this was the “traditional” way of doing things. I had two objections. First, a new school cannot logically have any traditions. Second, a tradition is simply something that is done as it is because it has been done the same way for a long time. That does not make it the right way to do things.
Last, it makes no sense to identify girls’ teams by adding “Lady” to the front of a name with a feminine equivalent. Why Lady Lions instead of Lionesses, or even better, the gender neutral Lions? It makes no sense, but then, it doesn’t have to make sense–it’s tradition.