Tommy Martin: Sport must be part of a conversation on reforming harmful male attitudes
I learned about the facts of life on bus trips to teenage football matches. The teachers were not much older than myself and just as ignorant, writes Tommy Martin
I learned about the facts of life on bus trips to teenage football matches.
The teachers were not much older than myself and just as ignorant. The classroom was at the back of the bus, where alpha males of school and club teams held court to while away long trips to far-flung parts of the county.
There, they would tell tales of sexual exploits that would make a sailor blush. Barely into puberty and it seemed that they had commandeered a back catalogue of partners and positions of which Warren Beatty would be proud.
Who knew, those of us jaws agape further up the bus wondered, that the local underage ranks were so full of budding Don Juans? What was in the water to have produced in these spotty youths such devastating charm as to have the entire female population of the area swooning at their feet? We may not win too many county championships, it seemed safe to say, but the birthrate would surely soar.
If the tall tales were to be believed, these were conquistadors of the horny teenage world, boldly planting their flag wherever they saw fit. Women were conquests, to be used for gratification, dispensed with and then ridiculed. Their virtues as human beings were irrelevant. They were game to be hunted, their body parts trinkets to be collected, subjects for bawdy songs and filthy jokes.
That most, if not all, of what we heard was entirely made up by these bedroom Walter Mittys was beside the point. This was how young men ‘learned’ about sex, how the culture of objectification was disseminated.
And if you are a male who sat on bus trips to football matches, or rugby dressing rooms, or any teenage environment where the smell of sweat, Lynx and Deep Heat hung heavy, you probably heard the same things.
Thankfully, most of the information picked up in these horny hedge schools didn’t stand up to contact with real women in the real world. Most men, one hopes, are not assholes. They are able to see the hormonal hogwash of their youth as the awkward, territory-marking posturing that it was.
Put a team full of dumb, priapic kids in a bus and what do you expect them to talk about? Tactics? Homework? Their mummies?
But the outpouring of personal testament about male violence and aggression against women since the disappearance and murder of Sarah Everard in London two weeks ago has forced any half-decent man to have a think.
In fact, the first thing it required men to do was to shut the hell up and listen (not that all have taken up the opportunity to do so). It should shock men deeply to hear that so many women have a story about harassment, physical threat, or violence and that every woman lives in fear when alone in certain situations.
It should force them into questioning their own attitudes and where they come from. Harmless teenage banter? Or the reinforcement of oppression thousands of years in the making?
It is worth pointing out that experts on sexual violence treat acts like rape and murder not as outlier freak events perpetrated by psychos and crackpots, but as part of a continuum that winds all the way back through stalking, harassment, exposure, wolf-whistles, right down to supposedly harmless dirty jokes.
Which sort of brings us back to where we started.
Sport needs to be a part of this conversation, not just because of all those busloads full of pubescent fake news, but because it is a place where so much many harmful male attitudes can be reinforced.
This is uncomfortable for many, who see in sport only the spreading of positive values and the building of character. The ‘not all men’ narrative suggests that because I am not actively attacking women in the street, then I am not part of the problem. Similarly, if sport is fundamentally a force for good, how could it be contributing to something so bad?
But for all its virtues, sport is also where male strength is celebrated. Where really ancient ideas of dominance and physical courage and hierarchy are fundamental. Where the final score correlated with the measure of what it was to be a man. Roman stuff, and they weren’t famous for their equality agenda.
There is a separateness between the genders baked in with sport too, necessitated by the physical differences but exacerbated by misogyny. Sport was a man’s place: the terraces, the golf club, the dressing room and the post-match pub were all traditionally for the lads, all products of male control and sense of superiority.
We are not long removed from the very public acting out of these issues, as seen in the Belfast rape trial.
The contents of the WhatsApp messages between some of the accused around the events in question were not far removed from what was being discussed on my teenage bus trips.
The difference was this banter had real-life consequences, for all parties.
Witness the border tensions between the sexes as the territory of sporting misogyny is slowly pushed back. See the response a female pundit gets when raising a controversial viewpoint. Read the abuse directed at BBC rugby reporter Sonja McLaughlan for having the temerity to stand in a male space and ask tough questions.
Note the painstaking and tortuous road women’s sport has to trudge for access to facilities and compensation men have enjoyed since the days of Woodbines and Brylcreem.
Happily, like right-thinking blokes in the bigger debate about women’s safety, sport is also a part of the solution. The moves to integrate the governing bodies of Gaelic games in this country are a case study here.
The very existence of separate associations for women’s football and camogie is a monument to the old ways. Many clubs are already moving in the direction that their facilities are a shared space between genders — making this stance official would resonate far beyond the pitches and into the minds of young people of both sexes.
The same principle applies elsewhere. The temptation by some men to dismiss strides in coverage and promotion of women’s sport in recent years as ‘virtue-signalling’ grossly underestimates the potential this movement has to change attitudes hard-wired by millennia of the strutting, conquering male, that oh-so dangerous ideal.
Sport, itself, is undergoing a notable process of demachofication: wanton violence is less tolerated, mental health struggles openly discussed and sexism, racism and homophobia are at least on the table.
All these decades later, I’d like to think that buses full of teenage boys heading to matches are more enlightened places, but I’m not so sure. The easy availability of porn for today’s hormone-addled striplings would make you fear the worst. Following the Belfast trial there was a lot of talk about putting in place proper education about sexual health and consent for young people.
This seems like an urgent necessity, because in my experience, the current course material leaves a lot to be desired.
