play like a girl

a love letter to the 2000s sports films that got us here ✺◟(•‿•)◞✺

Earlier this year I watched Australia’s national women’s soccer team, the Matildas, play France in the Women’s World Cup quarter-finals at my local pub in Melbourne. The pub - a place that regularly packs out for men’s Australian Rules games - was crammed with people.

The pub reached capacity well before kickoff, so we actually couldn’t get in before the game. We watched the first half at home and at half-time we trudged down the street in the rain to try our luck with the ‘one in, one out’ policy. Mercifully, it was applied loosely and we managed to squeeze in for the second half. My friends and I (including a group of pretty traditional ‘footy boys’) squished ourselves into the beer garden, standing room only, watching the agonising penalty shootout on the big screen.

I hate penalty shootouts. They put a terrible amount of individual pressure on the penalty takers and goalies in what is otherwise a team sport. I found myself making deals with myself, like if I stopped watching the screen just before one of the girls kicked, they’d score. When Cortnee Vine kicked the winning penalty, the whole pub erupted. Drinks went everywhere, glasses shattered. People were jumping and screaming and hugging. 

My friend and I looked at each other and started crying. The occasion was so momentous. We were there to witness it. We weren’t just crying because Australia won the quarter-final, but because Australia’s women’s team won, and we were watching it happen in an over-capacity Melbourne pub, celebrating and screaming with so many people. 

It’s a cliche, I know, but it was a movie-worthy ending. To be more specific: it was the ending worthy of a classic 2000s girls' sports film. I wondered if those movies had played a part in how we’d gotten to this moment. Let’s investigate:

Bend it Like Beckham: Sisterhood and Sexuality

This is the best sports film ever made. Soccer! A kick-ass girls’ team! Keira Knightley! Fake Posh and Becks cameo! The coolest halter top you’ve ever seen at a club! The crushing weight of family expectations! 

Obviously, the main love story is soccer, but this film places female friendship front and centre. There is (of course) a male love interest, Jo, whose main character traits are that he is (1) Irish and (2) brooding. He’s hot but boring so I have nothing more to say on that.

Jess and Jules are the characters we are really rooting for, even if, in a classic 2000s movie set-up, they do fight over a boy (the aforementioned Irish and brooding Jo.) The girls’ fight and their temporary split hurts to watch in the way that fighting with your friends as a teenage girl does. Their reconciliation is one of the (many) high points of the film because it makes us care about these girls both as friends and as budding professional athletes. It’s fitting that the next step of their journey - moving to the US to play college soccer - is a journey they take together. 

One subplot that gives me pause in 2023 is Jules’ mum mistakenly thinking she is gay because she likes soccer, is close friends with Jess, and doesn’t like ‘girly’ things. To give the film credit, when confronted, Jules tells her mum that she isn’t but that it wouldn’t matter if she was. This film was released in the 2010s, at a time when mainstream culture still used ‘gay’ as an insult and I knew almost no girls who were out. That says a bit about how sheltered I was, but also that during this time, queer women were close to invisible in popular culture. Thankfully in the real world today, women’s sports are by and large incredibly safe queer spaces where a significant number of players across a range of sports are proudly out. Their sexuality does not inform their sporting prowess, but neither is it hidden within it. It is a celebrated part of their public identity.

Ice Princess: Brains and (ice-skating) Brawn

The movie that got all us southern hemisphere girls truly believing that we too could become ice skaters.

Ice Princess has a stacked cast (Kim Cattrall and Joan Cusack play the two mother figures of the movie) and I RECENTLY DISCOVERED THE STORY WAS WRITTEN BY MEG CABOT OF PRINCESS DIARIES FAME!?!?! On those credentials alone this movie is high up in the 2000s Disney pantheon. 

Though Joan Cusack dismisses ice skating for most of the movie as frivolous dancing around in pretty dresses, the rest of the characters take professional ice skating incredibly seriously. It’s tough, taxing, and requires huge sacrifice. 

Does this movie stretch the bounds of credibility by suggesting Michelle Trachtenberg’s lake skating is good enough for her to be skating semi-professionally in the space of a year - so good, in fact, that the commentators at the final competition suggest she’ll be at the next Olympics? Yes. Does the movie overemphasise her ‘nerdiness’ by having her recite long speeches incorporating physics into her everyday world? Also yes. Do I care? No. 

What I love about this movie is that it shows how much grit is required in traditionally feminine-coded sports (ice skating, gymnastics, cheerleading, dance…) Just because ice skaters wear gorgeous costumes and look ethereal in their routines, doesn’t mean that their journey to competition isn’t gruelling. 

Stick It: Welcome to the revolution 

This movie was almost too cool for me. Our protagonist Haley was edgy, which in 2000s movies meant she dabbled in a bit of light property damage and breaking & entering on bicycles (Euphoria could never).

The key thesis of the film isn’t actually so much about pursuing dreams. For most of the film, Haley hates gymnastics and the gymnastics establishment hates her. The film is really about pushing back against the system when the system isn’t right. When the system punishes girls arbitrarily - specifically, for displaying a part of femininity not acceptable to its conventions - these gymnasts fight back. 

They fight back in the best teenage girl way possible: flicking their bra straps out of their leotards to be visible, in direct violation of the rules. I don’t care if it’s unrealistic, this rebellion is iconic. This was our generation’s version of bra-burning and it awakened my nine-year-old feminist consciousness.

Watching Stick It, does also make me think about the sometimes ugly reality of women’s gymnastics. In 2018, former US team doctor Larry Nassar was convicted of abusing athletes in his care, many of them underage at the time of abuse. Survivors of Nassar’s abuse have been incredibly brave in coming forward and telling their stories. Doing so has required immense courage to stand up against a culture and an establishment that systematically encouraged silence. One of the survivors also happens to be the best gymnast in the world, Simone Biles, who recently came out of retirement (at 26!!) to win gold at the 2023 World Championships. That’s the revolution.

Looking back at this glorious pop culture canon, it’s not difficult to draw a line from what we consumed back then as girls to the absolute moment women’s sport is having now. The Matildas semi-final against England is now the most watched television event in Australia since current records began. 11.15 million people (close to 40% of the Australian population) tuned in, and this figure doesn’t take into account massive viewing parties held in pubs and public sites all around Australia. 

Of course, these films aren’t the sole factor behind women’s sports finally getting recognition - that change has come from years of proper investment and funding, and real leadership within sporting bodies (both of which need to continue to ensure girls have professional opportunities) - but I’m glad they existed. They present a world where a girl’s dream of being a professional athlete is celebrated, not mocked. They teach us about sisterhood and sticking it to the institutions that seek to control girls. About starting a revolution. That even the most ‘feminine’ sports demand your grit, your blood, your sweat. That it takes a whole lot of hard work to be the best. And that’s a dream worth having. 

This edish of Culture Vulture was written by SYSCA bestie Billie Hook. If you want to pitch something for our culture vulture newsy, fill out this form here!