If tackle football isn’t safe for girls, why do we let boys play?

As summer turns to fall, roughly 1.2 million U.S. teens are suiting up to play high school football. But something is shifting in this annual autumn rite. Tens of thousands of those young athletes are now girls, and they won’t be donning shoulder pads or helmets because they’re not playing tackle football.

“All eyes are on flag football as the next emerging sport” for girls, according to Karissa Niehoff of the National Federation of High Schools. By 2024, Niehoff noted, 11 states (including California) had sanctioned flag football competition for high school girls, while 17 others had launched pilot programs. Given how girls are now flocking to the sport, it’s a sure bet that more states will be stampeding to offer flag football for girls.

The explosion of enthusiasm for girls’ flag football has led some to wonder why girls don’t play tackle football, like the boys? As a scholar who has studied gender and sports since the 1980s, I am interested in how girls’ and boys’ sports have developed historically along parallel but distinct tracks, and what the similarities and differences in girls’ and boys’ sports tell us about our current gender relations and beliefs.

The simple answer to why most high school girls are channeled into flag football seems to be that people see tackle football as too violent and too dangerous for girls. But it’s not just girls’ football that gets special treatment: There is a long history whereby the rules of girls’ and women’s sports have been adapted and constrained to accommodate girls’ and women’s supposed physical limitations. Boys play baseball; girls play softball (despite a deep history of girls’ and women’s baseball). And as the game of lacrosse has expanded in American high schools in recent years, the boys’ full-contact game requires players to don helmets and protective equipment on their hands, arms and shoulders, while girls, shielded by rules that limit contact, wear only eye guards and protective mouthpieces.

Critics say that flag football and other adapted sports for girls echo outmoded protective labor laws that treated women as “the weaker sex,” in effect barring them from participating in higher-status positions in public life. But too often another question goes unasked. If we know that tackle football is dangerous for girls, and now understand the human costs of playing football — how every 2.6 years of playing tackle football doubles one’s chances of developing the degenerative brain disease CTE, how playing tackle football seems to render a person more likely to develop Parkinson’s disease — why do we tolerate this game, even celebrate it, for boys?

In a time of feminist progress for girls and women, we have not yet thought as deeply about the health dangers of narrow forms of masculinity for boys and men. Boys are still too often taught to inflict pain on others, as they are rewarded for ignoring or even celebrating their own injuries. And the public celebration of tackle football, for athletes and for fans, is a national pedagogy through which boys internalize this self-destructive underbelly of patriarchy. Moreover, the long-term health costs of playing football are disproportionately paid by young working-class men of color.

American high schools are deeply invested in football — emotionally and financially. I saw this in my analysis of 120 years of sports, cheering and student life at Salinas High School, in Central Coast California. At that school and around the nation, football remains at the center of a ritual complex — homecoming celebrations and all-school rallies led by cheerleaders, drill teams and marching bands — that anchor powerful traditions through which students, faculty, alums and community members celebrate a collective identity. Sustaining these traditions takes ongoing investments of time, labor, emotion and loads of money to pay for stadium upkeep, turf maintenance, coaches, travel, uniforms and other equipment for hundreds of football athletes and coaches on each campus.

Given this civic investment in boys’ tackle football, it is not surprising that difficult questions about the health costs of playing the game are routinely brushed aside. But this wasn’t always the case. The start of the 20th century was a time of considerable turbulence in high school sports. In 1911 — and echoing similar developments at Stanford University and UC Berkeley — Salinas High School abandoned football for rugby, a game that was deemed to be less tarnished by gambling, spectator violence, on-field violence, injuries and deaths that had spiked nationally in 1909.

Football’s return to campus after World War I — again, following the lead of the Stanford and Cal collegiate teams — was colored by the militarization of physical education, driven by postwar anxieties about Army draftees’ supposed lack of toughness. By the 1930s the “football hero” had become the paragon of masculinity on campus. In the post-war years — fueled by the rise of television and Cold War fears of the feminization of U.S. boys and men — football seized the high ground on high school and college campuses and came to represent “the American way of life.”

High school football, and its accompanying spirit rituals, remains a key nexus of group pleasure and collective identity. But the dangers of playing tackle football are seeping into the public consciousness. A 2023 Washington Post article examined how growing public awareness of “the toll of a sport linked to brain damage” has contributed to a decline in the number of boys who play tackle football. Meanwhile, according to NFHS’s Niemoff, “The popularity of flag football — for boys and girls — has been growing at the youth levels for the past 10 years. In 2023, about 500,000 girls ages 6-17 played flag football — a 63% increase since 2019.”

Sometimes, when we think about gender equity we ask the wrong questions, based on the assumption that equity means girls and women striving to do what boys and men have been doing for decades. In this case, instead of asking why girls don’t play tackle football, more people are starting to ask why boys do, while suggesting that it may be time to start moving boys — starting with youth sports and extending into middle school and high school — into flag football.

Michael A. Messner is professor emeritus of sociology and gender studies at USC Dornsife. His new book is “The High School: Sports, Spirit, and Citizens, 1903-2024.”