The Waterboy and Gender Roles in Terms of College Sports

College movies tend to promote the idea that men’s sports, mainly football are what defines the college’s reputation, leaving women with more supportive sports like cheerleading. In the movie The Waterboy starring Adam Sandler I decided to take Deborah Tannen’s “How Male and Female Students use Language Differently” article and use her views of gender inequality in the educational system. Men do communicate more through physical sports and taunting whereas girls tend to sit in groups and like to use words. Tannen makes the argument that females tend to stay in smaller groups and share intimate and personal bonding time which helps strengthen their bond as friends. Being a guy I can only believe what I see and read because I do not have firsthand experience, but I can agree that the majority of females that I am friends with or have seen do prefer to hang out with their own sex. While they are talking they are more passive and far less aggressive than guys are when they are together. Going back to Tannens claim that men tend to keep too far less communication with words and more physical activity is completely highlighted by this movie. The scene that I chose to look at is when Bobby Boucher is at one of his first football practices with his new team The Mud Dawgs at South Central Louisiana University. In this scene the coach is trying to bring out the anger Bobby had when he tackled one of the Mud Dawgs after he was taunted. Bobby is then told that the only way that he will be able to tackle well is to visualize someone that makes him really angry and then use it to tackle. He uses this technique and it works throughout the movie.  While all this is happening the cheerleaders are all sitting in the stands talking and drinking. For most of the movie the cheerleaders don’t even cheer.  On the field though College movies portray football as the most important sport and this defines the overall ranking of the college. And of course in this movie as in most college sports movies the team is the male football team. This could masculinize collegiate sports because it discourages women from wanting to pursue a college sports team, but instead will join a more supportive role. This role was shown in the movie is the cheerleading team even if it was a poor example. Now off course this movie has outliers in it as far as all females fitting in with what Tannen believes how girls communicate. Characters like Vickie Vallencourt and Bobby’s mother are very strong females who aren’t scared to get aggressive and role with the big dogs. However these strong females do differ from the strong males in the movie. When Momma needs to be dominant she is not afraid to say what she needs to say even if sometimes it can wreck others’ lives, what I am trying to get at with this is that the strong woman in this move are more verbal than physical, they used their words first to try to fix a problem then resorted to being physical which Vickie has no problem with. Moving on, while the men are headlining the show the girls are off on the sideline sitting around talking and getting wasted. When viewers at home see this they begin to think and accept the idea that men’s football is the headliner and that cheerleading is the only sport worth it for a girl to pursue in college because movies rarely show any other female sports. Leading to my question which is, when did the norm for girls or at least girls in movies be to become the supportive role while the man is scoring the points and in the spotlight.