Soccer Mom II

Stereotypes suck. People don't like to be placed into oversimplified categories of others who are supposedly just like themselves. I like to imagine, for instance, that there are cops who don’t care for donuts, or Mexican folks who do not wear sombreros. As a soccer player and a mom, I am particularly troubled by the stereotype of the Soccer Mom.

Now I know some political pundits feel we probably need a patronizing term describing white, middle class suburban moms whose main duty in life is to drive their kids to after school activities in a minivan, but can’t they be called something else? Minivan Moms? At least that has alliteration.

In my last blog I posted the Family Guy clip in which a soccer mom is mistaken for a man, perhaps due to her deep gravelly voice, hairs sprouting from her chin, or the way she knocks Peter’s beer out of his hand. If you look hard enough, there are definitely some other dodgy profiles of soccer moms you will find in pop culture. Some examples:

• there is a Soccer Mom movie starring Emily Osment (the lesser known sister of Haley Joel Osment of Sixth Sense fame). I can’t necessarily give this movie a definite thumbs down because I refused to rent it after reading in its review that it was “warm-hearted”, and its story was a “wacky charade”. Sounds terrifying. I think we can all agree that things that are described as ‘wacky’ should be avoided whenever possible.

• I found a book of soccer mom poetry (!) called “Suburban Antacid: Poetry for Soccer Moms”. The blurb called it ‘the perfect cure for….those with spouses who don’t replenish the toilet paper'. Barf. It had a wacky (see above) cartoon of a driving mom on the front. I believe used copies were available to buy on Amazon for 1 cent each. Shocking.

• There is a minor character in a Tom and Jerry’s cartoon whose name is Soccer Mom. She describes her ‘likes’ in life as casseroles, gardening and Thomas Kinkade paintings. She then drives into quicksand and is unable to make any decisions about how to save herself without her car’s Onstar system. Unfortunately if I were to be drawn as a cartoon, I would look exactly like her. Here she is (see the resemblance?) , and in case you are lucky enough not to know about Thomas Kinkade, here is one of his paintings:









So I move that we get rid of the negative stereotype of the soccer mom. Can we still call it soccer mom, but have some actual soccer associated with the term? I’ll go first:

I'm a soccer mom! My 'likes' in life are:
- kicking things (if it can’t be a soccer ball, I also don’t mind kicking either casseroles or Thomas Kinkade paintings)
- ranting when things don’t go my way
- sleeping.

You?