The US Women’s Soccer Team Is Being Criticized for Celebrating Too Hard AGAIN

Last month, the U.S. Women’s National Team faced criticism for, as their critics saw it, celebrating their goals too hard.

In a match against Thailand, the team came away with an incredible 13-0 victory, but because this was the World Cup, they celebrated each and every one of those goals. They were proud of themselves and they did the sorts of show-off victory moves all teams do. You see this is men’s sports all the time. But when women do it, it’s considered distasteful. If we win, we’re not supposed to make a big deal out of it.

This week, the USWNT had another victory, this time over England. They won 2-1 and after scoring the first goal, Alex Morgan celebrated by miming sipping a cup of tea.

It was a silly, unexpected, harmless gag.

But that didn’t stop a whole lot of people from finding a way to be really upset over it.

Seriously, it was not this big of a deal:

Randos on Twitter have been calling the women arrogant, rude, disrespectful, and much worse. A lot of these people aren’t English and they’re definitely not even offended. Piers Morgan wrote that with her tea-mocking, “Morgan may as well have declared war on us.” But even he–even Piers Morgan–had to admit that the women had earned their gloating.

No, most of the people expressing outrage don’t care about the specific gesture. They would have laughed and cheered or just ignored it if a male player had done the same thing. These people just wanted something specific to point to when they spew their misogyny. Because that’s all this is. These women are winners and they unabashedly like winning. They’re openly prideful. And that pisses a lot of people off.

Megan Rapinoe had the best possible response to those people.

Wah wah wah indeed. None of the criticism being lobbed at the team deserved any more of a response than that.

(image: Maja Hitij/Getty Images)

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Vivian Kane

Vivian Kane (she/her) is the Senior News Editor at The Mary Sue, where she's been writing about politics and entertainment (and all the ways in which the two overlap) since the dark days of late 2016. Born in San Francisco and radicalized in Los Angeles, she now lives in Kansas City, Missouri, where she gets to put her MFA to use covering the local theatre scene. She is the co-owner of The Pitch, Kansas City’s alt news and culture magazine, alongside her husband, Brock Wilbur, with whom she also shares many cats.

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