By Af Afreen:
I’m just a normal teenage girl but I have a passion, a passion for sports. I do play sports, but I love watching it even more! I literally wake up all night to watch my favourite team play a football watch or to see my favourite tennis player play the finals of a Grand Slam tournament.
But according to society’s norms, that’s not ‘normal’! Let alone the fact that people think girls can’t play, that’s a distant dream for us, they actually think we can’t even watch or understand sports properly. If I meet new people especially boys and I’m like. ‘Oh yeah I watch football too and this is my favourite team,’ they give me a weird look and ask me the names of the players just to confirm that I actually know what am I talking about or just acting cool. If you ask me that is horrible. If we won’t let our girls even watch sports, then how will we ever train them to take the world by storm?
We live in a society where girls are ‘supposed’ to watch daily soaps and serials and boys only news and sports! Because if you as a girl would want to watch sports then you are termed as a ‘Tom boy’. But why be stereotypical?
I have liked so many sports pages on Facebook, but whenever a female admin posts something about girls watching or loving sports, the number of hate or sexiest comments are staggering! They don’t even make sense. Some people just don’t accept the fact that girls do watch sports, they think that girls don’t really understand sports and just watch it for the ‘hot players’. While others believe that girls pretend to watch sports to look cool among their peers. But why would we do something like that? Yes, I agree players like Neymar are hot and I do like to watch him play but that’s not the only reason I like to watch football.
We should teach our children that it’s OK to watch anything you like. It’s OK if a girl likes to watch football and it’s also OK if a boy likes to watch a daily soap or a serial. It’s the society who shapes the mind of the young generation, we should teach them not to stereotype anything and do whatever they like to do without thinking about what others think or say about you.