Butch or Beautiful

Picture taken from The Great Gatsby, the film

"At his lips' touch she blossomed for him like a flower" (111), says Nick Carraway in F. Scoot Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Nick describes Daisy's behavior as Jay Gatsby romantically kisses her one cool autumn night, and describes her dainty actions as being "like a flower". Upper class women of this era (1920s), such as Daisy Buchanan, were often expected to be proper, pretty, and lady-like nearly 100% of the time, and these established gender roles are often referenced throughout the novel. Though the expectations for women seem to be very different today, gender roles have by no means vanished in today's world.

Believe it or not, the idea for this post came to me after reading blog post by fellow American Studies student, Nate Goss. Goss wrote an interesting post about women athletes competing on men's sports teams and questioned whether or not that practice should be allowed. Although I could delve into that argument, I am more interested in the gender roles female athletes face today.
As a female athlete myself, I receive a lot of comments about how I look or act because I am athletic. To give you some more context, I play softball, and any softball player knows (and probably most of you), we often get associated with words like "butch" or "buff" because surprise, surprise-- softball players have muscles (gasp!).
Despite the fact that it is extremely common for girls to compete in sports in today's society, we still get ridiculed for being strong or muscular--  as if those things make us less womanly. Are gender roles more embedded into our society than we previously thought? Or is possible to be a beautiful flower and a buff softball player?