Mascots

Let's do an experiment. First, name three college mascots. Now name the mascots of three professional sports teams. Finally, name three female mascots. Which one did you have the most trouble with? An informal discussion with friends failed to produce any stand-alone female mascots at all. What do I mean by “stand-alone”? Sometimes, schools will have a male mascot with a lesser-known female counterpart who gets trotted out at women's sporting events or for the occasional half time skit. Sometimes you see a gender-neutral (or gender-lacking) mascot such as an inanimate object, a meteorological event, or a group of animals. But when do you ever see a lone female as a team's or school's representative? Some internet research unearthed Athena, the mascot of Claremont McKenna, and Rosie the Elephant from the Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. It also turned up this. Sigh.

Most schools or teams chose mascots before we as a society started thinking about marginalized groups. Often, there is no representation, or the portrayal of said group is terrible. Let's take all the Native American-derived mascots for example. Remember Chief Wahoo? I'd rather have no females than to have them cast in the same insensitive light. But with awareness increasing ever more, one wonders why more recently-created teams haven't branched out.

At this point, it is worth examining the concept of a mascot. True, it is a symbol, a representative of sorts. But mascots are also seen as side-kicks, tag-alongs, cute cartoons with no real personality. How much prestige is there in a mascot? The issue here is not so much the burning desire to have women seen in that form- women have been used to sell us things for years. The problem is in the ways of thinking that have led to the lack of women as representatives of athletic or intellectual institutions.

Women often don't take offense at being represented by a male because we are used to it, not only in the case of images, but in many languages and religions. Men are generally chosen as the sole representative of a group of people who are usually of mixed gender, just as white skin is usually considered “the norm” in many Western cultures. But if the tables are turned, would men be just as happy to be represented by a female? Probably not. This isn't because men are terrible, just because it isn't a situation they have been put in before.

And then there's my whole theory of denigration of the feminine, which I'll surely return to again and again in the course of my writings. Of course women are OK with being represented by a male mascot, or more broadly, of course they want to wear pants and have careers. Why wouldn't anyone want to be like a man? Manliness is a worthy aspiration. But why would men want to wear skirts or learn to sew? Well, some men DO want those things, but society as a whole thinks that trying to be more feminine is weird or undesirable. Male has been the gold standard in so many societies for so long that we just can't imagine it any other way.

Qualities that we ascribe to mascots- leadership, strength, speed, endurance, intelligence- are usually considered to be more masculine qualities. This makes it a real bummer to have a woman as a mascot.

Things are changing, but there is a long way to go. Wouldn't it be great to have a respectfully-represented female, transsexual or minority as the mascot of an elementary school? Or better yet, what about a variety of mascots from all walks of life? Maybe someday, we won't feel the need to present ourselves to the world in such a simplistic manner. But until then, we can teach children that people from all walks of life are valuable.