Two: If it Turns Boys into Men, What Will it Turn Girls Into?

I am impressed at how arbitrary one lens can seem when social forces have handed you another lens.

Let’s look at soccer. And let’s look at football. (Or "gridiron football". I will often use the word "soccer". I am a US-American and this is the name of the sport on the internet.)

In most of the world soccer is not only a spectacle but it is also meant to display masculinity. Where the game is widely played, it is also very often seen as a school for turning boys into men. Thus soccer plays the role in most of the world that we often attribute to gridiron football. 

In the US the idea of women playing gridiron football is unthinkable except perhaps as satire. 

In seventh grade I remember a football coach, teaching our health class, asserting the importance of competition and winning. (“Teamwork,” “Leadership,” etc. We were off-topic.) I raised my hand and, with a little sheepishness, mentioned the fact that, if we wanted our junior high football team to win, we should have girls on team because many of them are bigger and stronger than many of us. The class howled and the coach was stunned. It could have gotten worse. This coach simply chastised me for messing with a serious conversation (however familiar it was). 

I meant it. I had one particular girl in mind but knew not to name her. I tried to tread carefully but I did know that this was a transgressive thing to say. Another coach would have been harsher, I think. He called players “pussies” over and over and mocked students who weren’t on the team and who he judged odd by name. 

It’s not only about winning. It’s about expressing virtues and those virtues are understood in a highly gendered way. 

Norms have be negotiated. Sometimes the incentive to win trumps norms. In the US military, the sheer need for more skilled people finally trumped most of the formal obstacles to women in uniform. (The military still is a nightmare but that is a whole other blog.) 

Negotiation can be tricky. I had a list of girls who would obviously improve the team but I knew that naming them would be passed on as an insult and I would be treated as insulting. 

These coaches, and most people, see the game of football through a lens that makes women as football players seem impossible. All of our interpretation takes place before a background of beliefs. ideas, and habits. If I use the words “women” and “football” I know that the listeners are now picturing: 

(1) A failure to play. One of the colleges I worked in had a fundraiser whereby sorority sisters were asked to play football, often for the first time. This was “just fun” and was taken as evidence that the game is for men only. Asking a group of men to play in public with minimal preparation would have been too cruel. 

(2) Women getting hurt. 

(3) Something like the Lingerie Bowl.

Sometimes we are held hostage to an image as much as we might be to a belief or an idea. 

(By the way, I do not particularly want to follow the tribulations of women's gridiron football organizations. There have been a few. The game has proven to be a poor device. Playing the game has proven to damage the players skulls and spines. I can't watch it anymore. It's even worse now that players are bigger and faster. Barring some very serious rule changes, gridiron football needs to just fade away.) 

Americans know that soccer is a bigger sport in most other countries but they often have to be told how poorly women players are treated. They are treated as transgressing a gender norm. Most organizers of soccer in national Football Association and at FIFA think women should not be seen playing. 

In England, West Germany, Brazil, and France, the Football Associations did not allow “clubs” to permit women to play on their grounds for decades. England’s ban was not lifted until 1971 and Brazil’s not until 1979. Brazil’s highly competitive women’s team gets no support. This is less the case in Germany in part because of East German development of women’s clubs but the West also had a ban until 1970. 

This ban took work. There were many women's teams in the teens and twenties and they were drawing large crowds. 

Dick Kerr's Ladies were composed of employees at Dick Kerr's munition factories. They conducted international tours and drew crowds around 50,000 at times. 

Dick Kerr's Ladies 1921 

Charlotte Specht founded a women's club, DFC Frankfurt, in 1930. She quit after a year in which her father's business (a butcher shop) was harassed. 

These bans were not only motivated by sexist norms. These clubs were raising money for charity and competing with men's clubs. 

There have been very large crowds gathered to see women play soccer in recent history but also a little further back. Many Americans believe that the 1999 final between USA and China was the largest turnout to a Women's match but 100,000 came to see the 1971 Women’s World Cup at Azteca Stadium in Mexico City. (Sweden beat Mexico.) But we always hear that the game just started to develop. This gives the sense that football associations have not missed opportunities and are doing as much as they can. 

Ticket to a Semi-Final in the 1971 World Cup

Figurine in Mexican uniform dating from 1971 World Cup

In Germany, 2001, I remember a group of male and female philosophers telling me they could not imagine women playing Fussball. This was before the German women's team had won two consecutive World Cups. (It also was a fan-skeptical table, it should be said.) For me as an American, this inability to put the image together seemed so odd. I later found out that there had been large turn-outs to see women play in West Germany but there was very little uptake in press. 

Another Sample 

Let’s run an experiment. I will go over the the Guardian, a literate liberal-or-left British newspaper that is famous for its good writing on soccer. I will go over and look up a women’s football article and then look at the comments.

First off, on this day (April 30th 2014), there is no article about women on the first page of the “Football” section. (This is usually the case, including the day I finally posted this on June 4th, 2014.) There are 60 articles on many levels of the men’s game, which is called “Football” and not “Men’s Football”. I will go to the search bar and type in “Women’s Football”:

I clicked the top article, a match report on “Liverpool Ladies versus Manchester City Women”. This article dates almost two weeks before the date I found it. 

The match report is standard, the only exception being that no author’s name is given. The comments included this one which makes a very frequent point:

I might have to choose my words carefully here, but is this new level of press coverage for the womens' game really warranted? It doesn't appear to be of a high enough standard to draw significant crowds, so the suspicion is that the media attention is there just because they're women. There has been some criticism in the past that the womens' game has been ignored, but why should they get coverage just because they're female. I don't see it as an equality issue to be honest. Maybe I'm just a dinosaur, but I think most football fans ignore it because it's an inferior product. (Anonymous posting.) .

The argument here is typical. This comment is actually made with a much more civil tone than many I’ve seen before. People often take the time to type “Who cares?” Women writers on football frequently get rape threats. On the Guardian, you "might have to choose your words carefully." I am often surprised at how bad comments can get on sites run by papers like the Guardian or the New York Times. But they are worse over at the Daily Mirror and on message boards. 

As an ethicist, it is easy to argue that mockery and assault threats are morally impermissible. Figuring out the sources of violent acts and violent speech acts is a bigger project. The reasons for the extent of shaming and threatening is an important empirical project. Political action against this will keep growing and will interact with research until we move on to other problems. (I am confident this sort of thing will get better. I am mortified by the pace of change.) 

Right here, I am going to deal with the argument cited above. It is clearly important. It just keeps coming up. I want to analyze it a bit and I hope I will show you why it hangs on some very poor images of women. 

First off, this “new level of press coverage” is hardly overwhelming. Not one of the sixty articles headlined on the first page of the “Football” section covered Women's Football. And this is the good old liberal left Guardian. The commentator is objecting to what could only be a tiny increase. (Actually, there has always been a tiny amount of coverage. Having a tiny bit lately is not a sign of development at all.) 

Another commentator mentions 1,600 people were there. Soccer writers often cover men's matches with smaller crowds for lower English and in Scotland’s top division. Such clubs with crowds this size are praised as plucky and they are often described as working on a reasonable scale. And yet, the mammoth crowds that the top men’s club see are cited as evidence that women’s inability to play repulses crowds and television programmers. 1,600 people are significant. As we've said, there have been large-scale turn outs so the game should not be treated as something new. 

The main idea at play here is that women play so poorly that no one would ever want to see it-- "so the suspicion is that the media attention is there just because they're women." This argument keeps coming up over and over. This commentator is not particularly vicious. However, this argument is sedimented in the lifeworld of soccer. What coverage that is there is only there because of political commitments that have no place in the game. 

I may have given the impression that this sort of thing is an English or European thing and doesn't happen in the USA but this same argument was made at an academic conference I attended just last month at Hofstra. 

This website is highly recommended.  http://scholars.footy-forum.net/

During an excellent panel organized by the Football Scholars' Forum, this "can't watch" argument was shouted by someone who had raised his hand as if to ask a question. It was re-asserted by a Long Island sports journalist, Kevin McCrudden who called an entire panel "twisted" in a tweet. Before he spoke, he asked if anyone in the room had played professionally. Three women in front of him raised their hands. He literally waved them off and began mansplaining. Apparently, the panel was twisted because they did not understand that it is women's inability to jump as high and run as fast, etc. 

Here is a link to an account of that moment. One of the organizer's of the conference, historian Brenda Elsey, said "If you care about women, you will care about women footballers." 

This conference was ground-breaking in that it was the largest yet in the USA and because it did have sessions that dealt with gender and sex. That said there were whole sessions that did not mention women once. I still think the conference was outstanding and the organizers brought in some of the most insightful and creative interpreters of the game--many of whom just do forget that women play. 

Final Notes 

I have just given a few examples but you can bring your own to bear. There is an idea that women in some sports is transgressive. We cannot wait for large-scale media organizations to resist this notion. Working peer-to-peer, we can shine a light on these habits and show that they are built on sand. 

A newspaper that spends most of its ink on the men's game works in a lifeworld where they do not have to explain that choice. When pressed they may push back, usually with this "can't watch it" argument. Sometimes it's worse. Fans of a men's team who lack any sense of irony often overreact to the charges of sexism in the sport. I plan to write later on how important a sense of irony is but I have a quick note here. 

Saying "Yeah, I latched on to this team..." casts a note of irony on one's choice. I've met Stoke fans who, with irony, acknowledge their team turns all matches into graceless slogs. I have met fans who hate their club's player, the league, and all the other players. Irony is a healthy part of any relationship, especially one like fandom. 

I have never seen anyone treat a choice of club like a proponent of inclusion of the women's game is often treated. As long as it is assumed that the conversation is about an all-male thing, irony is often recognized with a smile. When they see there is no good reason to treat the men's game graciously and the women's game as warped, they either just withdraw to man-only space, or they try to be cute, or they get angry. 

"Yeah, I'm a fan of Tottenham so I end up following the EPL and, well, the Europa League, so it is hard to add another league for me." That is so different from asserting that women in the game are hard to watch. To say that is to say that there is something at stake here. 

In the world, about 80% of soccer players are men. To treat this as emerging from nature itself is to rest on ugly premises and to foster ugly conclusions. 

Calling people out on exclusion is a political act. When you do political work, you can expect to have to make the same points over and over and hear the same retorts over and over. It's exhausting but we should not forget to celebrate such exchanges when they constitute an improvement over previous discourse. 

How ugly or transgressive or absurd must the women's game be for these sorts of explanations to be sound? People endorse watching the game at all sorts of levels. We have strong reason to believe that the great teams of the past would lose to mid-table teams now. That doesn't diminish their glory. 

The Olympics and tennis and ice skating and women's soccer now prove that people want to see women compete. Fans, leagues, and tournaments generate the buzz. Media (social or instituional) will only make it buzzier. It is the investment on the part of the athletes and fans that does the work. The jumping and running all takes part in a lifeworld that we build and that we can develop. 

There have been troubles with getting a high-level women's league started in the US but there have been similar troubles with men's leagues. (I will later argue that one reason for this is because the leagues in the US are not fan-based.) The other reason is that many leaders in organizing soccer hate the idea of women playing. The executive director of England's Football Association seems to have a very big problem with them.  

This sort of argument makes no sense in light of any approach to fan allegiance and behavior. We give credit to the fans of a small local club. Very few fans believe their team is the best in the world and most sport is played and watched at a "lower" level. These fans don't need to be schooled. 

Because audiences for women's games are usually smaller right now, a women’s match now is often much more like the old-fashioned game we hear people get nostalgic about. The players don’t live on another planet than do the fans. The beauty of the play is obvious to press photographers.

I want to get back to the background issue. You can now see that there is something important to be learned from changing the background you use to describe the world. When American students find out how the women’s game was suppressed early on they express bewilderment. The whole thing looks silly given how many women play soccer in the US. 

Looking there changes the way we look at FIFA's comparable lack of concern for the women's game. FIFA requires women's league be controlled by male-controlled Football Associations. That seems normal to FIFA and you can ask students why. 

Then we turn it around and look at US gender codes that used to seem “natural” “obvious” or “eternal.” They now seem less so to many people while others are in despair to see them slip. Ask the class to look at gridiron football and watch a couple of students push back like nothing said earlier was said at all. Most students will wonder why baseball and gridiron football are men-only. Some will retreat, or be cute, or get angry. 

Part of what drives me to think through some of this is the fact that I turned to soccer in part to get away from US sports culture. I was very tired of hearing Lee Greenwood. I was also tired of seeing games delayed for commercial breaks. I am free of these things when I watch English or German soccer but I am not free from this unnecessary and harmful enforcement of gender ideology. It's getting in the way just like concussions and television time outs get in the way of gridiron matches. 

Once we shine a light on the background upon which sport is played and viewed, we will be able to learn more about the norms we are carrying elsewhere. Many of these habits and beliefs shape gender and sex expectations we find outside of sport. 

We can also learn what is at stake when we gather to play and to watch people play. Creative fans will be able to spot opportunities to celebrate healthier understandings of gender, style, beauty, drama and health. We will be poised to celebrate when repressive norms are challenged. 

Within sports, we value the players that prove possibilities within the game. Pele showed what ball control could do during the run of play. Maradona combined this with physical strength. Pre-meth-in-North-Korea Dennis Rodman, Brittney Griner, Robbie Rogers, Jason Collins, and Michael Sam also issue proofs by their existence. 

And in 1895, a team in London, captained by a women who called herself "Nettie Honeyball" forced those who saw her British Ladies Football Club, or even just heard about them, to form new images and develop ideas a little differently than before. 

Honeyball is second from the left, top row

We add her to the list of welcome transgressive athletes. Honeyball understood all of this. She said in an interview: 

"I founded the association late last year, with the fixed resolve of proving to the world that women are not the ‘ornamental and useless’ creatures men have pictured. I must confess, my convictions on all matters where the sexes are so widely divided are all on the side of emancipation, and I look forward to the time when ladies may sit in Parliament and have a voice in the direction of affairs, especially those which concern them most."

When the pitch is used to frame a player, speech acts are generated. Claims are made and images that were once invisible are now made visible.