The strangelings have all taken to playing netball. On Saturdays mornings we drag ourselves out of bed, early, and head off to stand in the cold, watching our daughters run up and down the court, with varying degrees of success. As yet, none of them appear to be gifted sports players, ‘though a couple of them have a fair amount of determination to prevail against the odds (that is, taller players).
As all the similarly cold and becoated, bescarfed, behatted and bothered parents met up on the first day of the season, we exchanged the usual greetings, and some offered platitudes about why we were doing this silly thing. I rather like the parents of the other players in my girls’ netball teams, but the reasons they gave have been bothering me. Reasons such as:
- It gives them physical skills.
- They learn to be part of a team.
- They learn to back each other up.
And so on.
Physical skills – well, whatever. There are myriad ways to acquire those. It’s the lessons of conformity that worry me. You must learn to fit in, to do what the team is doing, to sublimate your own ideals to the team’s ideals.
I find that message worrying. Conform CONFORM CONFORM!
Even worse, you must conform in the pursuit of dominating another group of people. Competitive sports are a zero sum game. Your team wins, and the other teams loses. The object is to beat other people, to force them into acknowledging that you are bigger better faster stronger, in the worst case, to force them into submission. Isn’t that just lovely?
So conform and dominate. My team contra mundi, and not just contra mundi, but damn well on top of the world, posing as the best, and demanding that everyone else be subservient.
Given that ethic in team sports, it’s not hard to see why rugby league players have treated women in horrible fashion, using and abusing them, to the extent of large groups of men taking turns to rape vulnerable women. This issue has been covered all all through the media for the last week or so, but I have not been able to summon the will to write about it myself. The Dawn Chorus has a good summary of the 4 Corners program, the Radical Radish analyses some of the issues, there are extensive discussions at Hoyden about Town and Blue Milk, and Stef debunks common rape myths. The whole thing makes me feel ill, and I feel even worse because none of the men involved seem to be willing to take responsibility for their actions. Any remorse and regret they feel is for their partners, and for letting their team down, and they seem to have not one jot of sympathy for the young woman they lined up to rape.
I can see why it has happened, and I can see that the men have refused to take responsibility. I think that the only solution then is to nullify the toxic mix of conform and dominate, and get rid of team sports altogether. If sportsmen will not take responsibility for their own behaviour, if they will not treat women as people instead of handy objects to be raped, if they will not at least stand up and admit what they have done, then they need to be removed from the environment that allows them to do this. And that environment is competitive team sports.
Sadly, I suspect that rugby league is not the only sport where women are raped by sports teams, and I suspect that sports teams are not the only groups of men who in some backslapping, social bonding, dominating and conforming way will treat women as mere objects to be raped. I know we need to change the whole damned culture. That’s a huge job. But perhaps the place to start is with sports, because we have incontrovertible evidence that men in competitive sports teams rape women. Not all men, but seemingly far too many of them.
In some ways, I don’t want to give up on team sports. Many years ago, I happened to be on the same flight across the Tasman as the Australian netball team. The plane seemed to be full of gloriously fit confident and happy young women. They were a joy to behold, and I’ve no doubt that their success in their sport was a large part of their confidence. I’ve seen groups of people who love getting together in the weekends to kick a ball around, and doing that as part of a social game of netball or cricket or soccer works well. And perhaps that’s the answer. Maybe it’s not so much the team sports, ‘though there’s still that worrying message of conformity, as the valorisation of top sports teams. Perhaps simply getting rid of the gladiatorial show aspect of big sports leagues would do, leaving in place the small scale social leagues, the neighbourhood sportsgrounds and games, the games that are part of the web of everyday life, instead of the huge spectacles served up for entertainment in lieu of lions and christians.
And my own daughters are playing team sports. As I’ve said before, even though Mr Strange Land and I are happy to be non-conformists, to go our own not-so-sweet way, do what we like and to hell with what the neighbours think, either virtual or IRL, that’s a big thing to ask of children. So I won’t be pulling them out of their netball teams, nor making it difficult for them to play.
In the meantime, I’m doing my best to avoid purchasing products from the sponsors of rugby league teams. There’s very little else I can do – I have long since removed my eyes from TV screens showing sports. My personal consumer boycott will be just a small protest, and one that won’t be noticed much, but it’s all I can do.
Click here if you want to know who sponsors the Cronulla team.
Update: Helen has also written about the strange contortionist excuse-making going on in rugby league: B-I-N-G-O. The last paragraph of her post covers some of the ideas I was trying to get to.
But I notice these arguments aren’t used so much for men in other settings. We don’t, for instance, see high-risk-taking rock climbers, parachutists, ocean yachtsmen and sea kayakers regularly fronting up to the cameras pretending to apologise for their latest “gang bang” or euphemism du jour.
Go and read the whole post.
