Undoing rape culture, one sports field at a time

This week we got the chance to see a key plank of rape culture in practice.

Masculinity cultures in men's sports, or rather the dominant men's sports, are without doubt some of the most important ways we learn what it means to be male.  Boys shouldn't "throw like a girl"; you must "toughen up, man up, harden up"; and instead of sports being a contest of skill and athleticism, we are taught to consider them battles, where the toughest of male warriors play on through the pain barrier or they are a "wuss".

So when Australian Rugby superstar David Pocock condemns homophobia he's breaking some masculinity rules and that's a fine thing.  More interestingly though, in this case, is the fact that Mr Pocock broke a key support for rape culture - "what happens on the field stays on the field."

The Sydney Morning Herald says their website comments have been loaded with ugly sentiment: 

"Has sport come to this? I don't agree with comments like that, but neither do I agree with making such an issue of it. Pocock knows the player(s) involved, and he'd be better served having a stern word to them during the game, or after the game. To bring the referee into it is unnecessary, in my view, although I'm sure plenty of the PC crowd will disagree."

Almost immediately, there were people predicting that David Pocock would not captain the Wallabies again.  Pocock was public in his support of Marriage Equality, and recently chained himself to a digger to protest mining in state forests in New South Wales.  He's a man who cares about the world, and isn't afraid to show what he stands for.  This didn't matter to rugby fans or the rugby hierarchy when he wasn't breaking the "what happens on the field stays on the field" rule, because he's a brilliant, brilliant player who wins rugby matches.

Now that he's naming other men's bad behaviour on the field though, he's fair game.  This isn't about the content of the naming - he could have been talking about sexism, racism or homophobia - it's about masculinity and rape culture.

Men consistently overestimate other men's use of and support for gendered violence.  Related to this, men consistently underestimate other men's willingness to stand up to gendered violence, which limits their own willingness to intervene.  Put together, these two planks of what men think masculinity means make it harder for men to stand up to other men when they behave badly.

To end rape culture, that's precisely what we need.  It's not enough, if you're a man who wants to end rape culture, to ensure you actively seek and give consent in your own relationships.  You'll have much better relationships and be a more decent human being, but undermining rape culture means undermining masculinity values which say solidarity with other men is the most important thing.  There are always more men watching than participating in gendered violence.  If those watchers become challengers, gendered violence becomes far more difficult to perpetrate.  "What happens on the field stays on the field" is offensive primarily for the fear it engenders in men challenging other men.

That's why David Pocock should be applauded this week.  He's showing all men that calling out other men's bad behaviour is possible, even in the most sanctified of masculinity shrines, the sports field.  Imagine if other man always did that every time another man made a rape joke; sexually harassed bar staff; groped someone at a gig; put their partner down; threatened or acted out violence towards others for being queer or Black or feminine?  We'd have an end to rape culture before we knew it. 

The more complex gender gets, the more we need male superiority

I first thought about gender testing in sport while reading Mariah Burton Nelson's phenomenal feminist love prose to women's athleticism.  As her target audience - sporty, able-bodied, playing serious representative sports and oh yeah, feminist - her analyis of sports providing a counter-discourse to it being all about the pretty rang true for me.  Sports have given me a sense of my body as functional, useful, strong, competent, all part of an embodiedment that feels privileged rather than typical for women.

Ms Burton Nelson described deliberate gender segregation of sports which had previously been gender mixed, like shooting, as functioning to promote and maintain gender differences, and as importantly, promote and maintain male superiority.  She pointed to sports like gymnastics, in which events were introduced or altered when men started competing, because some of the things women gymnasts could do with their bodies were more difficult for men - and then segregated.  Hence all the upper body strength tests for male gymnasts - complete inventions to make sure men could be good at it.

Women who are athletic and strong are often accused of not being real women.  We break gender rules.  Serena Williams and Martina Navratilova were both called "shemales" repeatedly because of their beautiful muscular tennis; out lesbian Amelie Mauresmo was famously described as "half a man" by fellow player Martina Hingis.  Most recently, weightlifter Zoe Smith had no trouble with being a woman stronger than the majority of men, despite being told her muscles are "unfeminine".  When "throwing like a girl" means seventy metres, is gender inequality just a little destabilised?

I was in the first group of women cricketers allowed access to the elite High Performance Centre in Christchurch in the early 1990s.  We were tested for strength and speed, learnt how to run faster, and got to play with machines that made this sci-fi geek smile.  After the first few of us - all batswomen - had gone through reflex testing, they stopped the tests to make sure the machine was working properly.  Our results, as fast as male cricketers, were pointing to reflexes being a function of the role a sportsperson has in the team, not the gender of the sportsperson.

In 1994 Brian Lara was one of the best batsmen in the world.  Yet he was comprehensively dismissed by star Australian Zoe Goss in a charity match.  If even the best men aren't always better than a woman, what does that mean for other men?

I don't want to over-estimate the importance of sport, but culturally it is perhaps one of the last bastions where completely different treatment of women and men is frequently justified on the basis of biological difference.  And where, to be honest, we don't even know how much biological difference actually exists, because we segregate sports, treat athletes completely differently on the basis of a binary gender assumption, and punish women who are "too good" in all kinds of ways.

The sexist assumption that all men are better than all women at all sports was the reason gender testing was introduced in the 1960s to the Olympics.  The fear was, men were pretending to be women to win medals their country was not entitled to receive.  The early gender tests involved female athletes having to parade naked for judges to decide whether their bodies met the grade.  South African runner Caster Semenya has had to endure this as recently as the last couple of years.

Yet testing every female athlete at the Olympics between 1968 and 1998 revealed the fact that gender and sex are complex.

Three decades of unsuccessfully attempting to develop a definitive test for female sex has given the IOC Medical Commission an intimate scientific knowledge about variations in chromosomal, hormonal and morphological sex.  This elaborate knowledge about sex produced an anxious realisation about the myth of dimorphic sex within sport within the Medical Commission.

The gender verification tests have never discovered a male athlete pretending to be a female athlete.  They have identified some people for whom the gender binary does not fit - intersex people - and in some cases, stopped those people competing as women, even when that was the gender they had been assigned at birth.  The process has also involved rewriting stories of gender variance to create gender certainty.

Now the Olympics have decided on a new strategy - test for testosterone, and if female athletes have "too much", they might be allowed to reduce it medically, but if not they won't be allowed to compete.  Again, we assume that having "male" levels of testosterone will make you a better athlete, even though clearly all the people with "male" levels of testosterone are not male.

This assumption turns out to not be that hot, because 25% of male Olympians have lower testosterone levels than "average" for men.  Maybe testosterone inhibits athletic performance sometimes? 

Gender verification has emphatically shown us that many of our assumptions about gender are incorrect.  This would be amusingly ironic, given it's purpose was the opposite, if it wasn't playing out in real people's bodies, and constraining our ability to embrace our gender identity whatever it runs like, swims like, lies around and reads like.  The fact is, there is more gender overlap than gender difference in most physical skills, and when we pretend otherwise not only are we invisibilising gender variance, we are shoring up a false gender certainty and enscouncing ideas that men are inevitably stronger, faster, more athletic than women.

things worth listening to...

in lieu of a proper post, i'll do another plug for radio nz by saying you should listen to these interviews:

• this one with geena davis (nine to noon, friday 12th march, 10.10am) about gender equality in children's film and tv. she founded an institute to do research on this issue - go her!
• this one with leslie kenton (also on nine to noon - you're brilliant, kathryn ryan - monday 15th march, 10.07am) about her experiences of sexual abuse
• and this one with phil wallington (afternoons, tuesday 16 march, 13.24, and about 16 minutes into the clip), in which he tells us why he hates all sport on tv.

in regards the latter, i actually don't hate all sports on tv - i actually enjoy watching tennis, and also managed to catch a reasonable amount of the winter olympics coverage because of prime tv's live streaming. but i do agree with a lot of the points he makes and enjoyed the idea of the anti-soccer club (or some such).

sport is, after all, just another form of entertainment equivalent to movies but not reaching the pinnacles of artistic endeavour quite so often - though there are the odd moments where a particular sporting moment has all the best elements of drama and beauty that you could hope for. highly-paid sports stars are no different in my mind to highly paid actors, and very often behave much worse when they aren't performing.

in any case, back to radio nz, if you haven't joined the save radio nz facebook page, you can do so here. and you can sign a petition to the minister of braodcasting here.

What the hell is wrong with Palmerston North?

First we have the local Girls high school insisting that its students do not have the right to bare arms at the school dance, next up we have the local netball association saying women can't wear shorts while playing the game. I happen to think netball is a bit naff and a throw back to when ladies were seen as being too delicate to play basketball but surely we have moved on enough to let grown women wear shorts if they so desire.

Good Girls and the Business of Losing

Following on from the FIFA U17 success the Herald featured a girls' soccer team that plays in the boys' league. The team performed well with six wins, a draw and three losses. But what interested me the most was the typical gender roles at play.

"Neither of them like losing. The boys hate it - sometimes they don't even shake hands, they're just gutted."

Yup. Apparently there is still nothing worse in sport than losing to a girl and the way to show your disrespect of their abilities is to not offer congratulations to your opponents on their win.

The girls were not too macho about the matches. They become cheerleaders before kick-off - proudly singing out their rousing team cheer - which "the boys get a bit peeved about".

Yup showing emotion and singing before a game is clearly very girly and has no place in real sport. Our top sportsman never perform any show of pride before a sports game. None whatsoever.