If tackle football is too dangerous for girls to play, why do we still allow it for boys?

There’s a seismic shift taking place in the world of high school football. Tens of thousands of the athletes playing it are women — and they’re playing a much safer version of the sport called flag football.

The main difference between flag football and traditional football? In flag football, instead of tackling an opponent to halt their progress on the field, players grab a strip of fabric from their uniform.

Flag football’s popularity is exploding. In 2023, half a million girls ages 6-17 played flag football, an increase of 63% since 2019. It’s an undeniably positive trend from a gender equity standpoint.

But for gender studies scholar Michael Messner, the flag football phenomenon also raises a thorny question: If tackle football is too dangerous for girls to play, why do we still allow it for boys?

Messner explored this question recently in a piece for the LA Times, and he spoke more about it with The Show.

Full conversation

MICHAEL MESSNER: You know, we know more and more about the dangers of playing tackle football now. I mean, there's just, last week, a study of 1988 NFL players. And those older men now have far higher levels of physical pain daily and cognitive problems than other men their age.

And we also know that three years of playing tackle football doubles the chance of developing CTE, chronic traumatic encephalopathy.

So, why do we ignore this with boys and men when we know the risks, and we're saying girls and women shouldn't play this game?

SAM DINGMAN: In your piece, you go back pretty far in history in looking into the answers to that because you point out this is actually a very old debate: What should the role of tackle football be in young men's lives? And you take this all the way back to World War I.

MESSNER: Yeah, and even a little before that, in 1909, there was a lot of national debate about football, because there are a lot of deaths on the field. There's spectator violence, other problems with football. And so a lot of universities were doing away with it.

But then coming out of World War I, there was a lot of anxiety about what was considered kind of lack of physical toughness of a lot of the recruits that had been drafted into the Army. There were a lot of fears — and this is a recurring thing throughout U.S. history — fears of kind of feminization of boys, public schools are gonna feminize boys, book learning, women teachers, modernity, you know.

Michael Messner

DINGMAN: These are active concerns among some on the right to this day.

MESSNER: That's exactly right. And so you see reinstituted, and then by the middle of the century, you know, the football hero really is at the center of the status system of American high school. And I think in many ways, that's still the case today.

So, you know, we've been through several decades of really positive development of thinking about girls and women's health. Whether it's, you know, eating disorders or breast cancer or sexual assault. And we've barely begun to think about the ways in which to narrow conceptions of masculinity really raises risk factors for boys and men's health.

DINGMAN: That was something that this piece brought up for me is, there is such an active conversation culturally at the moment about this idea of men allegedly being ignored, their concerns not being listened to. And this notion that by returning to these older forms of masculinity, these more traditional interpretations of what it means, we can somehow make up for that.

And your piece, it struck me, was making a more meaningful argument. Which is that, yes, the concerns of men and masculinity have not been looked at as closely in recent years, but we should be interrogating and deconstructing those old versions of it rather than just snapping back to them and assuming that will make men feel seen or cared for.

MESSNER: Yeah, that's exactly right. And I think one of the things that keeps us from doing that is the ways in which we have culturally elevated that kind of warrior masculinity and the sort of collective identity and emotional investment is gigantic as well.

I mean, ... high school football really sits at the center of the way schools develop collective identity communities and develop their identities. And there's this whole sort of ritual complex, you know, homecoming celebrations.

DINGMAN: Yes, yes, Friday Night Lights. It's not just the title of a show ... and a book. It's a stand-in for an entire community gathering ritual.

MESSNER: Yes, and that book “Friday Night Lights,” I mean, the show was good, but the book “Friday Night Lights” is a pretty devastating read in a lot of ways in terms of looking straight in the eye at the sort of community investment in football and what it does for the whole community, and their sense of who they are.

DINGMAN: Yes, so just, you know, extending this idea of the relationship between tackle football and male identity, it makes me think about the fact that it's not just sort of hardwired into the American male consciousness that playing football is not just a virtuous but kind of awesome thing to do. But it's also hardwired in that getting together on Sundays with your buddies, and cooking food and drinking beer all day — existing on the periphery of tackle football. It's like the whole reason that a lot of men even have, not to overuse this word, but community at all.

MESSNER: That's absolutely right. And for, for both spectators and fans and also for players ... the research I did years ago, for my first book, called “Power at Play,” it was a life history interviews with, with men who are former athletes. And so many of them in their middle age years were physically broken. And then I'd ask them, "Would you do this again?" And almost all of them said, “Yeah, absolutely, I would.”

And not because necessarily they loved the action or they loved the adulation, but the main thing they talked about was the connection they had with other guys. “I've never had a sense of family like I had when I was on that team.”

And I think there's something about — and as you said, for men who are fans as well — there's something about the sort of poverty of men’s relationships with each other that has to do with sometimes fears of being vulnerable, sometimes it has to do with homophobia. And then we find these things like sports through which we can connect with each other and develop real connections with each other that are really meaningful.

DINGMAN: Yeah, and I hope that what I said earlier didn't come across as minimizing =. Because I mean, I feel this sort of connection, too, in my own life. I mean, for me it's baseball. But like, it strikes me that this is at the heart of why this editorial that you wrote is so provocative. Because for men who have football at the center of their identities — whether it's as players or as fans — the idea of taking it away or even of changing it doesn't feel like a change to the rules of a sport. It feels like a change to the core relationships of your life.

MESSNER: That's exactly right. It's like, you know, ripping away something that has been so foundational for connecting with other people.

And I think, you know, when we think about boys and sort of the future of young people, it's really important to ask questions about, you know, what are the sort of opportunities that we're giving boys to learn to connect with other people in comfortable and intimate sorts of ways? Intimate meaning, you know, that you can be vulnerable with each other.

Is there a range of ways that we can do this? And you know, some people, you know, find music to be a way to do this and, and other people find that other ways to do it. But the sort of cultural valuation of football in high schools and across the country, I think is something that — there's there's a powerful kind of gravitational pull to it for a lot of of boys and men. And I think it's really important for us to rethink that.