All in One Rhythm: Brazil Rejects the Pure Spectacle

The people taking to the streets in Brazil are demonstrating the only right and true response to the militarized boondoggle of international sports festivals like FIFA's World Cup and the Olympics. These are serial spectacles - a rotating cast and set acting out the same story over and over again - a massive fiction about fairness and a "level playing field." It is fiction in the sense of the lie, the scam. The complicity of any government with the production of these spectacles is a scandal.

from Christopher Gaffney's Geostadia

The level field of the pure spectacle is flattened by bulldozers, helicopters and police. The formal image of the World Cup: a green rectangle of the best grass for the best game - a painted-on Imperial green that registers nicely in HD and bears no resemblance whatsoever to the fields that the world's people actually play on. Our own lived experience of the game is mediated through it. The beautiful game is turned into a game of deficits - the distance between that artificial image of the perfect conditions and the actual conditions in which we live, work, play - that distance itself is captured, packaged and sold to us as a form of global longing - a shared spectator experience that we indulge every four years and from which we turn away, like uncertain addicts - disgusted with ourselves and with the things we want. (This is why I am not going to the World Cup.)

It may seem a strange moment for me to remind you of Brazil's women's team. The CBF has never done right by the women's team. They are still here nevertheless as embodiments of everything FIFA resents. The impure spectacle, the spectacle of intense skill and joy that takes us all by surprise every time we see it because we consume it through a system determined to forget every sick pass, every goal or supernatural save. A system that can't hold onto her joy - for that kid of joy is a poison to its system. So a women's club will win its national title before an all but empty stadium. A player might grow her hair long and indulge a manager's impulse to put her in a uniform so tight it doesn't allow her to move her arms. But she knows it won't work. She remains an irritant to the apparatus. A grain of sand, a splinter.

Perhaps this is why FIFA wants women to play their World Cup on plastic. Or why we forget that people have organized international tournaments for women (e.g Mexico, 1970) - at a time when supposedly nobody cared - and these games drew massive audiences (e.g. Estadio Azteca, 110,000). I can hardly get myself wound up about the "failure" of women's soccer. I like to think of the dogged failure of the women's game to attract as a sign. It is an unspectacular spectacle, an impure spectacle of the lowest order.

From a PRI story, "The Struggle for Equality in Brazil" 

Given that the men's world cup is in essence Moloch's game, I find it hard to root for "equity" for the women's. Instead, I like to remember the activist and egalitarian spirit of the women's game as a counterpoint. FIFA hates women, FIFA hates feminists - and in this simple fact we see that it actually hates the grassroots it purports to nurture - the same grassroots spirit it appropriates as a marketing strategy - the favela fantasy, the favela as the soul of the game - the "slum," the "street" rendered in one commercial after another (teeming with life and with talent) from an actual community into the commodity's patina.

Demonstrators in Brazil are telling us what we already know: we need to hate these systems back - properly, and in numbers. It is not enough to want a "better" World Cup, just as it not enough to want the state to be more efficient in the ways that it strips our educational, health care and transportation systems for parts, to build higher fences and thicker walls. 

There is a lot of good writing about what is happening in Brazil right now. I recommend Christopher Gaffney's blog Geostadia, from which I pulled the photo at the top of this post. It's a smart starting place for the English-language reader. Check out this post on Social Text too. 

Jason Collins Comes Out (and Leans In)

NBA center Jason Collins came out in this week's issue of Sports Illustrated. People are celebrating him as the first man in a "major sport" to come out as gay. That is true only if we limit our examples to the US.

Justin Fashanu was the first athlete to come out as gay while still playing as a pro. The first black footballer to earn a million-pound contract came out to a UK tabloid (The Sun) in 1990. The scholar David DiBossa uses the word "apprehension" to describe the terrible and confusing legacy of Fashanu's story - its been relegated to the shadows for good reason. He was an exceptional player; his relationship to the tabloids was exploitative and toxic; his performance as an athlete was alternately promising and depressing; he found God; he was discriminated against; he was exiled from the game (by mutual spirals of injury and scandal); he lingered in the sport's seedy margins. He was accused of raping a minor (a 17-year old boy). He killed himself and was tried in the headlines.

There is no aspect of Fashanu's story that can be recovered as a positive example. His story is so difficult that few have dared to "go there" and really consider it, even as his name is routinely invoked in anti-homophobia campaigns. Thus DiBossa uses the word "apprehension" to name the chest-tightening anxiety one feels in the neighborhood of Fashanu's story. (To learn more about Fashanu see Jim Read's review of a recent biography in WSC, and Julie Jacques's essay for The New Statesman.)

Jason Collins's coming out story is a positive counter-narrative. It is not only important because it is a first for an American athlete (male, pro). It is also important as a counter-example to Fashanu's story.  Collins is the first athlete to come out and tackle its long shadow.

Collins's narrative could not be more different than Fashanu's - Collins's family is supportive and loving, his upbringing stable, his history proud. He has a gay uncle in a loving relationship - he grew up with gay role models and mentors. Furthermore, the story published in Sports Illustrated is his story. This is a first-person narrative. It opens:

I'm a 34-year-old NBA center. I'm black. And I'm gay. 

I didn't set out to be the first openly gay athlete playing in a major American team sport. But since I am, I'm happy to start the conversation. (SI: The Gay Athlete)

The story he tells is empowering, and the fact that he is telling the story - that he is controlling the narrative, that he is its author - is important. The relationship between any pro athlete and the media is vexed. SI is willing to be the platform for Collins's coming out; it is also part of a media culture that surveils him and every other pro athlete in its view; it is part of a public culture that surveils black men with particular violence. Collins signals this as a worry carried by the people around him.

My maternal grandmother was apprehensive about my plans to come out. She grew up in rural Louisiana and witnessed the horrors of segregation. During the civil rights movement she saw great bravery play out amid the ugliest aspects of humanity. She worries that I am opening myself up to prejudice and hatred. I explained to her that in a way, my coming out is preemptive. I shouldn't have to live under the threat of being outed. The announcement should be mine to make, not TMZ's. (SI: The Gay Athlete)

If his grandmother is apprehensive, it is because she is knowing. Collins explains that he has decided to lean into the problem - later in the interview, he suggests that this is in harmony with his style as a player. He's a "pro's pro" willing to charge, to foul - to play hard. That might reflect a fear of being read as "soft," he writes, and it might also reflect a desire to make room for the impossible.

It is worth remembering that Justin Fashanu came out in the midst of the AIDS crisis. In 1990, public discourse on homosexuality was defined by panic, phobia, fear and fascination - it was a generally awful moment even as it also gave us the activist organizations that helped redefine public culture in the US. Think back to 1991 and recall the confusion that shaped the response to Magic Johnson's coming out as HIV positive. How could Magic be HIV positive? Was he gay? What was going to happen to him? The assumption was that he'd retire - not only because (it was assumed) he was sick, but because people were afraid he'd infect others. It's hard to imagine the difficulty of integrating an HIV positive player into the televised sport spectacle in the early 1990s. And then there was the fear was that he'd die, because so many did. (See this GQ oral history of the moment.) A phobic language of infection and disease had been built into public discourse on homosexuality long before the AIDS crisis. That fact is one of the things that made the AIDS crisis so terrible: priests and presidents treated the virus as a judgement from the heavens. And that fact has everything to do with the complacency that some people have towards their own homophobia.

These are different times. Today, kids have in Magic Johnson an example we could never have imagined possible. He's alive, first of all. (When he got the diagnosis, he was imagined he probably had "a couple of years.") He's a popular public figure and a proud parent to a (particularly fabulous) gay son. (See this recent interview with Johnson on TMZ.)

23 years after Fashanu became a tabloid headline, 22 years after Magic Johnson blew the sports world's collective mind, Jason Collins writes that he wants to participate in a gay pride march as an out and proud black gay man. He can write, in Sports Illustrated no less, that he wants to get married and have kids - and people understand what he means. He doesn't sound like a martian. The desires he expresses are recognizable to a lot of people as normal. Opponents of gay marriage belong to a shrinking - and shrieking - minority. Gay marriage has become so visible a part of the normalization of homosexuality in the US that it's hard to remember how alien the idea has been.  And how long it's been that way.

In 1968, Yayoi Kusama staged a gay wedding in New York as a "Happening." The idea of two men getting hitched was magical and weird, and seemed a direct challenge to dominant ideology regarding the family. She officiated the ceremony as the "High Priestess of Polka Dots." She designed a dress that two men could wear at the same time. They swore their love not on a bible, but on a New York City telephone book. In 1968, gay men in a wedding dress expressed utopian impulses. They were unicorns with the power to change everything. They were the future.

For a long time, the gay male pro athlete has held a similar magical power over our imaginary. A black gay NBA player? What couldn't this man accomplish for a whole world? What can't he do? The answer to that question is everything.

Big Money Sports Provides Training in Bullying and Harassment!: Notes on Rutgers Basketball

Rutgers's biggest problem is not Mike Rice. It's politicians digging into the university's infrastructure - taking the ongoing dismantling of affordable public education to the next level (first attack affordability, then attack the scene of education by taking away its working infrastructure, access to institutional memory, sense of community). As that complex, difficult story unfolds, Rutgers joins the Big 10 - this entry into big money sports is presented to the public as a fix. Because a winning, televised sports program makes a campus rich, right? One story is a cover for the other. 

Over the past four or five decades we've witnessed the emergence of a public culture in which one wants the best of everything - for oneself. That culture is centered in the delusion that all you need (to succeed) is to participate in a great competition - like March Madness or American Idol. All you need is a chance to be a winner! On television! But of course you are just fodder for the production of the image of victory. Even the winner is raw material for the actual product: the televised sport spectacle.  

Of course Mike Rice hurls insults, kicks and throws basketballs at his players. He's an overseer in a system that places the burden of supporting a state's public education on the backs of young, profoundly disenfranchised men. 

Was Mike Rice's behavior abusive? Yes. The whole story is a disaster. Everyone knew. Everyone worried about being sued. And now Eric Murdock (the whistle blower) is under investigation for extortion. How can you hold anything you hear against Murdock? If he had problems with Rice's behavior, real problems, as an assistant to Rice he was in an impossible position. Coming forward with those complaints is a career-killer. A permanent career killer. That is even more true for players. More than a few commentators have remarked on how easily the athletes seemed to take Rice's abuse.

Nothing about football and basketball culture as practiced in the NCAA lines up with the way we understand the right to be free from harassment and abuse. If we understood athletes as having protections similar to, say, employees, then NCAA athletes would be allowed to unionize. They are not. The NCAA works very hard, very hard, to render its athletes into children, students, apprentices, "amateurs" - anything but "professionals" (employees).

What these athletes need - more than this season of head rolling - is the right to organize to stand up for themselves, to improve their working conditions and support their education. They need a much better system, as athletes and as students. They - we - need a better university. 

HEADLINE: Big Time Sports Provides Training in Bullying and Harassment. Players Take It or Walk Away from Career. 

It is news. And, of course, it is not news. Buried underneath these headlines is a darker, more depressing story about the conversion of a great public education system into a giant system of indentured servitude - and here I don't mean the NCAA's exploitation of student athletes, I mean the generations of people that will spend their entire lives servicing unsecured student loan debt. 

Oh the Irony!: Nike's Gold Diggers

 
Can Nike come up with an Olympic motto worse than "Greatness has been found?" YES!

Of course, this shirt is only sold in women's sizes. Nike explains itself:

“Nike has consistently supported female athletes and the position they enjoy as positive role models. The t-shirt uses a phrase in an ironic way that is relevant given it was released just as the world focused on the success of female athletes.”

Tell me how this is ironic again? Seriously. Oh wait! The joke is on the people who buy it. Nike is lining its coffers at the expense of the women it purports to support. Ha ha! OMG that's so funny. I get it!  Ironic gold digging indeed.

Greatness Has Been Found: A Close Reading

Doing it themselves. USWNT fans at the 2011 World Cup semi-final.

At the end of yesterday's match, most of the USWNT pulled Nike t-shirts over their uniforms. The kit sponsor must move its merchandise. As long as the swoosh is on the team jersey it doesn't much matter than they throw another Nike product on at the designated moment. Except that this shirt is just so awful. Let me count the ways.

Greatness had been found.

The suggestion is that in the win, the US 'found' a greatness that was absent from not only the team, but from the tournament. This is embarrassing. I love swagger, I really do. But this isn't swagger.

Greatness has been found. In small letters, under the emblem, "United We Stand."

The USWNT has been ranked either number 1 or 2 in the women's game for eons. Even if they don't make the road to victory easy on themselves, they are, in fact, not the underdog. They are the team that everyone wants to beat. Their opponents bring full-on heavy metal GAME. Everyone loves to take them down.

To suggest that this team has had anything but a very long history of "greatness," that this "greatness" (what a shitty word) is anything but their freaking baseline is just ridiculous. Not one fan buys that narrative.

The closest this team came to being an underdog of any kind was last summer and frankly it was only those of us who actually follow the team who were even aware of this. In fact, most of the mainstream US sports media ignored the team during its struggles. Most of us fans could not watch any form of broadcast of the play-off matches with Italy which would determine IF they were going to the World Cup at all.

Greatness has been lost? If only the channel was found upon which we could watch it!

You'll never walk alone? You will in the world of American women's football if you are anything less than freaking invincible.

The Americans feel like they have to win every tournament just to stay in the headlines. Last year was scary. Placing second in the World Cup in the same year that the home league was floundering must have been absolutely harrowing for everyone on the team. This hit home for me as players talked about how hard that loss was. That wasn't just about being bested by Japan. That was about what not being the best might mean.

So it's a bullshit slogan because it implies that people have stood by the sport in its darkest hours and now they have been rewarded by the team suddenly happening upon their own greatness. The US women's soccer program is, instead, a fascinating story of a super-dominant team that has to fight for every single scrap of media real estate. They been doing this for, uhm, twenty years.

Greatness has been found.

The best you can say is that the team was flirting with slight underdog status for a few months last year. There was a chance they might not make it to the finals. A chance. That, my dears, is not an underdog team.  Imagine representing Manchester United or Real Madrid or Spain this way. For, really, that's the level of "greatness" we are talking about, isn't it?

Now, this slogan has a context. Nike has been working this "greatness" theme in an Olympic campaign celebrating the greatness in the ordinary athlete. But the unveiling of this shirt at the moment the US defeated the World Cup champs reveals the grotesque ideology at work in the multi-national apparel corporation's advertising. These ads are deeply manipulative - they show little kids inhabiting the space of big-time sports competition. Adult voices narrate their story as that of the underdog. It's a recitation of all the times girls and boys are told, "no, you can't just do it." And they do it anyway.

If you want a glimpse of how much media manipulation goes into such things, just look at the media's love affair with Lolo Jones and its complete disinterest in the three women who actually won the 100m hurdles. I admire Jones - but USA athletes Dawn Harper and Kellie Wells were favored over Jones and took silver and bronze. New Zealand's Sally Pearson took gold and set an Olympic record. The three of them ran a close race. Photo finish. But at the race's end, the media flocked around Jones.

Meanwhile, Mexican American Leo Manzano stormed through the pack to take a silver medal in the 1500. That's a huge story for all sorts of reasons, too. But it hasn't gotten the same coverage that as Jones's tears.

Greatness has been found.

The media liked the idea of a very beautiful woman who disavows her power. I've always read the media fascination with Jones's virginity as a preference for the self-castrating woman. The pretty, non-threatening underdog. Meaning, if you are woman athlete, please pretend that you don't know the full measure of your power. Please, just be great. But not too great. Not too obvious. Tuck that greatness into the closet. Let someone find it for you. Oh, and please be pretty.

Oh, what a story it would make for that woman to win! This is the media's work not Jones's - she is right to complain that the excoriating she's received is unfair, and it actually makes the whole situation worse.

She lost. Sports media (or, I should just say NBC) was left the fact that it picked an underdog who didn't even medal. AWKWARD. Because then the media was left with the looming question as to why it continued to ignore the two American athletes who did. Even a next-day interview turned focus back to Jones as the interviewer (Michelle Beadle) baited Harper and Wells to trash talk. This they did somewhat gleefully.

Neither Wells nor Harper are self-effacing. They are not prone to apologize for being great. But neither is Usain Bolt. Bolt can boast about being a living legend. He is one. That shirt would make no sense on him. And it makes no sense as a USWNT shirt.

Bolt is with Puma, as it happens. Puma likes Bolt. Puma also understands how to use real-life grammar.

Greatness has been found.

This is not the language of swagger. It is the language of a militarized bureaucracy.

Where was this greatness? Under the couch? In the back of the closet? Did someone leave it on the bus? Someone actually wrote a slogan in passive voice - and then vaporized whatever trace of the subject might have been implied from both the noun and the verb.

How was this greatness found? Did it just roll out from under a seat and then it was noticed, generally - by no one in particular?

Greatness has been found.

American mythology flips its obsession with winners into the delusion that everyone can be a winner.  A winner and an underdog. Everyone always already has won. If this sentence doesn't express the affective miasma of entitlement I don't know what does.

Greatness has been found.

You know, one might want a shirt that said something like "2012 Olympic Champions." OH, wait. Adidas is the official apparel company for the Olympics. Nike can't make a reference to the event on the shirt. (How about "The USWNT went to London in 2012 and won this t-shirt"?)

Finally: The shirt is boring. There is nothing visually interesting about it at all. Not one design element resonates with the game. It could be about anything. Or nothing.

Far, far better are is the "greatness" found by a bunch of teenage girls armed with a pair of scissors and some face paint. They express a guileless enthusiasm for the game that just can't be bottled, and you know it's the only kind of shirt that does real justice to the players.

All In, All Out: a note on the amazing Megan Rapinoe

In two interviews, four years apart, two different USWNT players casually identified themselves as gay to reporters. Neither did so with the solemn declaration, "I'm a lesbian." Both players answered a reporter's question in a way that snuffed out the presumption of heterosexuality maintained by mass sports media on those rare occasions when it addresses women athletes, a presumption it maintains in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

In 2008, Natasha Kai (remember her?) responded to an NBC interviewer's question about her rocky start on the national team squad:

"It was a hard time," remembered Kai, who saw limited action under former coach Greg Ryan as one of the last three players added to the 2007 World Cup roster. "I had missed the first camp [under Sundhage] in early-January because I had bronchitis, and I was going through a nasty break-up with my girlfriend. Then [Coach Sundhage] told me my job was on the line."

The fact that she's gay was not only subordinate to a story about her fitness; it was subordinate to the story of relationship trouble. The "problem" was not that she had a girlfriend, it was that she and her girlfriend broke up. It was gay drama, but it wasn't drama because it was gay. It isn't at all clear from that interview that Kai was coming out to anyone but the reporter, or to the reader who assumed she was straight. Her answer is structured by the assumption that this is just her life, and anyone who knows her would know this.  Which is a coming out - and it's the kind of coming out that has to be staged over and over again within a discursive context that prefers not to notice that there are a lot of gay people in the sports world. Scarcely any of the media discourse asking "when will it be OK for a soccer player to come out" qualifies the question by pointing out that in fact prominent women athletes have come out, and are a part of our sport. And that this hasn't magically banished homophobia from it.*

Megan Rapinoe's coming out was even less direct than Kai's. In May, Jimmy Conrad (former US national team player) interviewed Rapinoe for KickTV. At the end of their conversation (at about 5:20), he observed that she's been supportive of the gay and lesbian community. By even pointing this out, Conrad identified himself with that community as at least an ally. When does Bob Costas take notice of something like that?

 

KickTV isn't like mainstream sports media. The Youtube channel is closer to a fan forum. Conrad is very relaxed and familiar with his interview subjects, and his interviews are conducted with a sense of humor. The whole affect of the video is closer to what soccer culture actually feels like (alternately technical, serious, self-deprecating, goofy, bashful). It is much more familiar to me than is anything I've seen from NBC this summer.

Conrad's question seemed pulled from conversations about the men's game. Things are pretty stark in that world. It is indeed hard to imagine a current EPL player coming out to the media. The question seemed like it was pointing in the direction of the men's game, but this wasn't at all clear.

In the women's game, things aren't so black and white. There are, in fact, quite a few high profile figures in women's soccer who have spoken publicly as lesbian athletes, usually without making the fact that they are doing so into a headline. Pia Sundhage, Nadine Angerer, Hope Powell - in most of these cases, the fact that these women have placed themselves within the lesbian and gay community isn't news, except to LGBT media. (Outsports.com keeps a constant eye out for players who take this step, as does After Ellen.) Mainstream sports media avoids acknowledging the sexuality of out lesbian players, even as it apparently can't stop itself from addressing the romantic lives of straight players. (Thank god for Hope Solo, who forces heterosexist media to wrangle with a loud-mouthed shameless man-eater. HA.)

In any case, when it comes to naming a player as not only lesbian, but "out," in the women's game we are often discerning between shades of gray. In an interview for a program called Abbey Road, for example, Marta was asked about the impact of her international travel on her relationship with her girlfriend (also a soccer player). She said that of her two loves, soccer comes first. Is that a coming out? Can a player be out in Sweden but not in the US? Seems so. So why, in the US, does the air get sucked out of the room when the word lesbian is put in the same sentence as "Marta"? Perhaps while she was under contract with the WPS, the desire was that everyone practice a "don't ask, don't tell" policy? What was the fear,exactly? That lesbians might suddenly start attending soccer matches?

In Strong Women, Deep Closets (1998), Pat Griffin offers a table of escalating categories of "outness" to describe how people manage their identity in sports.

1. Completely Closeted             Concealing lesbian identity from all in athletic context
2. Passing as heterosexual         Intentionally leading selected others in athletic context to see self as heterosexual
3. Covering lesbian identity      Concealing lesbian identity from selected others in athletic context
4. Implicitly out                        Allowing selected others in ahtletic conext to see self as lesbian without naming self
5. Explicitly out                        Intentionally revealing lesbian identity to selected others in athletic context
6. Publicly out                           Revelaing lesbian identity to everyone in athletic context.

It's a helpful scale for at least presenting something other than the "closeted" or "out" binary that usually shapes this conversation. A lot of public figures in sports seem to fall somewhere between 4/implicit and 6/public, but of course these would be the athletes that we are mostly likely to notice. 

Even within the top of that range there seems to be room for nuance and gradations, given the complexity of the media sphere. Today, it isn't like you are coming out to one of three networks. Instead, you talk about your girlfriend within a very specific media context that cares and respects you for the player you are. It's not the same interview you'd give to ESPN - it is unlikely that ESPN would solicit that kind of interview from you. They aren't going to ask you what it's like to have a girlfriend who also plays your sport at the international level. Or if coming out shifted your play at all. Or if there are lesbian athletes who inspired you. (espnW might, someday.) The remarks you do make on these subjects within the micro-media of (e.g.) women's sports blogs may or may not be picked up by larger media networks. Given the paucity of attention given to the women's game in general it isn't likely to be as big a story as, say, a ponytail pull. 

Anyway, Pia Sundhage has said that for her being a lesbian "is no problem," and that she and her partner were welcomed when they came to the US. (See Patricia Nell Warren's recent article on Sundhage.)

But it is a problem for plenty of people. As readers of this blog will know, there's a broad and deep culture of homophobia in and around women's sports. And if players are pressured to be very, very discrete about their homosexuality, you can assume that this pushes a lot of women out of the sport entirely. Gender policing and homophobia push a lot of people out of sports. No news there.

Athletes decide to be discrete about their sexuality for lots of reasons - and I'm not in any place to speak to their experiences. Coming out to the media is a political act and what that means to the person who does it is something only they can tell us. But the ramifications of coming out seem to be more complicated than we want to believe - for women have come out, and that doesn't seem to change how women are represented. If anything it just seems to make the commercial organizations that manage sports anxious.

Conrad's question to Rapinoe:

You've vocally supported the lesbian and gay community. What do you think about the absence of out athletes in sports? Do you think we'll see a high profile soccer player come out soon?

This question replicates a lot of assumptions - assumptions built on years of not remembering or noticing the women athletes who are out. I mean, her coach is out. And she's one of the most famous people in the sport. How can you ask a woman on the USWNT soccer team that question without erasing the lesbians who are a part of it?

There was no way for Rapinoe to address that question with a "Yes/No/Maybe" without replicating its assumptions. And there was no way to respond honestly without "outing" herself. Without promoting herself from perhaps level 5 to level 6. So Rapinoe answered:

Hopefully. I think that obviously we're out there. It's weird. I guess on the female side, not on the men's side. But it's accepted within the teams and within the sport. But it seems sports is that last...institutional homophobia.

Welcome to level 6. I love how in getting stuck with explaining a pretty complicated subject she just sends a cross to "institutional homophobia." For that's the right move: if you haven't noticed that quite a few of the most famous women in the sport are out to the media, then that's a symptom of a big problem.

Rapinoe refused to allow herself to be interpellated as closeted, and she also refused to allow the question to situate her as somehow in the dark about the fact that there are, in fact, quite a few out lesbians in the sports world. Obviously. That is as important as the word "we." Obviously we are out there.

All of this is to say that there are out women in sports. Pia Sundhage, Hope Powell, Nadine Angerer - that's just a few. None of them are shrinking violets, none of them are in hiding. But there are days when it seems like the media is hiding from them.

As we all know, Megan Rapinoe has gone on to have a fantastic tournament. Obviously, there's no hiding from that.

*For bloggers trying to find their way through this thicket, GLAAD offers a media guide for addressing sports and homophobia. You can download it here.

In which the IOC suppresses access to the women's game

International tournaments give fans a chance to see women players from around the world in action. People who only watch the men's game have little idea what this means for us. In the men's game, you can see the best players whenever you want. They are on TV 24/7. They are in advertisements, they get whole sections of some newspapers even when they aren't doing a thing. These men play in leagues that pump their product non-stop. There are also more fan-authored montages using footage of the men's game than any of us can fathom.

Not so for women. We get these tournaments. Or minimal, hard to find broadcasts distinguished by few cameras and little editing. Sometimes these are broadcast on "floating" channels that don't appear in your tv guide. Seriously.

Youtube deactivated the one video I found the other day showing the very cool goal that Portia Modise scored in South Africa's first appearance at the Olympics.

The last time I blogged women's Olympic matches, every single video I initially used was deactivated for infringement. All of those videos were posted to other sites by devoted fans - all did nothing but celebrate the best moment from the day's matches. After the tournament, for most of us this kind of video will be our sole access to especially those sides that are not our home team.

If FIFA and the IOC cared at all about the women's game, they would encourage the circulation of fan-authored video celebrating players. It's free publicity for a sport that badly needs it. Instead, for no reason that I can see, they quash circulation of information about the game - except when that information is blatantly sexist. Google "female goalkeeper" and you'll see what I mean. One of the shittiest anti-women's-soccer videos I know has been on Youtube since 2007 and features nothing but pirated footage from the 2007 World Cup.

Weirdly, the policing of copyright infringement targets footage used by supporters of the game rather than its detractors. The rare exceptions are those stories in women's sports that go viral - for good or bad.

Marta's crazy 2007 World Cup goal against the US, highlights from the USWNT's 2012 defeat of Brazil, the ponytail incident. In those cases, footage circulates so widely it enters the cultural commons - it becomes impossible to control. But in the vast majority of cases, the circulation of footage of women's matches is so limited, it is easy to kill. And so that's what the trolls do. They shut it down. Because whoever these gremlins are, they have their heads so far up their asses they think that an image loses its value if it circulates too freely - when in fact it is absolutely the other way around. The more freely an image circulates, the more valuable it becomes.

Anyway, you can see Modise's golaso here:

No Justice, No Peace in College Sports: More on Penn State

I'm jumping into the Penn State mosh pit! In this week's column (Why the NCAA Sanctions Are Just Dead Wrong), Dave Zirin takes the NCAA to task for the $60 million dollar fine and post-season ban that it leveled against Penn State. Zirin isn't arguing that the program shouldn't be punished: quite the opposite. His argument is with the role that these sanctions play in the political theater of college sports, supporting the NCAA's self-assigned role as divine authority over the kingdom of amateur athletics.

I can see the point. As a culture, we have a tendency to turn to colleges and universities as if they were Meta-Parents. We wait for the NCAA to step in and punish its children. But the assignation of that kind of authority to almost completely unsupervised structure goes hand-in-hand with the abuse of that power. (Think: FIFA)

The problem is that the NCAA is a meta-version of the Penn State program itself. That organization has had full contact with so many forms of abuse of power and authority in college football especially that its attempt to claim some kind of moral high ground here is nauseating. 

That I would feel queasy about it is something. Penn State football is the Scientology of college sports. Let'em go down. But I have a couple things to add to Zirin's critical look at the NCAA's actions. 

Zirin expresses concern for Penn State as a public institution. He writes, "The punishment levied by Emmert was nothing less than an extra-legal, extra-judicial imposition into the affairs of a publicly funded campus." At least some of Zirin's criticism is directed at this - the idea that Penn State is a public institution, and that the NCAA is here interfering with publicly governed resources. I absolutely agree - but the problem is big, deep and complicated.

Not all public universities are the same. Penn State is so beholden to the financial teats of alumni wealth and the commercial payoff of big time sports that it turned a blind eye to years of sexual abuse. And as the Freeh report makes clear, the whole of the university leadership conspired to keep the story under wraps. Worse, they actually helped Sandusky into his position at a youth outreach program whose relationship with the university would provide the architecture for his access to victims.

Worse, Penn State's cover-up of child abuse was staged while the university was also suppressing complaints about the homophobia of one of its other coaches (Rene Portland, a Paterno protégé). For about two decades athletes were kicked off the team, and staff were silenced. The administration ignored protests of faculty, staff and students. But then an exiled player filed a Title IX complaint: and the campus faced a losing fight against the feds. The settlement produced by that complaint required all supervisors, coaches, staff, administrators to attend educational meetings about reporting harassment and abuse. The university was getting a big lesson in compliance - which it ignored. I heard from very good sources that Paterno attended at least one of these policy sessions, arriving late and plainly showing his irritation.

But back to the defense of Penn State as a public university. Public education is not what it used to be. In 2012, about 14% of Penn State's budget was supported by public funding - this is a reflection of decreased public support for all of the Commonwealth Campuses (Penn State is the flagship campus of a network that stretches from Erie to Scranton). 

That figure goes hand in hand with increases in tuition. Penn State's State College campus has the highest in-state tuition of any public university in the United States ($15,250/year in 2011) and it has held that distinction for quite a few years. (See, for example: "Should Public Universities Behave Like Private Colleges," in Business Week Nov 14 2004 and Penn State's 2011/2012 "budget breakdown.") The fact that Penn State is a public university doesn't mean that it serves the mission we associate with that term "public education."

The NCAA is concerned about the value of the brand and the stability of the organization's power. Penn State officials are worried about the same - they are not thinking about Penn State as a part of the public system. And the state's elected officials aren't thinking about Penn State as a public resource either: they've been working for years to privatize the whole system. 

It has been a long time since the leaders of public universities acted like stewards of the state commons. Just look at what happens when one does: UVA President Teresa Sullivan was ousted by a Board of Trustees for doing just that.

Anyway: I keep returning in my own mind to the public outrage regarding Sandusky. That outrage appears in exact proportion to the fervor of the public's investment in college sports as some sort of Oz where the playing field is leveled by scholarships, where gender inequity was banished by a single legislative act, and where things like rape are aberrations and not in fact part of the same culture that fetishizes paternalistic, macho authority. "Jo-Pa couldn't possibly have known!" becomes "We can't talk about this!" becomes "Nobody needs to know!" We turn to "JoPa," then to the paternalistic structures of the university, then the NCAA - each an exponential replication of the same institutional psychosis in which people imagine that these people actually care about us. 

I take Zirin's anger to be about that - that an independent report and an NCAA sanction might be mistaken by the public as justice, or as change. It is, in fact, neither. Rage on, sister.

The Sex of the MLS

Masculinity is a complicated thing. This is what we learn from listening to "Losing Proposition," the April 30th installment of Extratime, the MLS's podcast. At the program's conclusion, one of its hosts (Simon Borg) launched into a bizarre rant about how serious female fans are a real turn-off. This is quite rightly causing a stir - and not just because it's offensive.

[The MLS has responded to complaints by replacing the podcast file with an edited version, lopping off the offending segment, described below.]

It's newsworthy because the guys who host this program (Jason Saghini, Nick Firchau, Greg Lalas and Borg) work for the MLS and represent the league. Jezebel's story hits the right note, so I'm going to skip the obvious (it's sexist and diminishing) in order to describe the broader context of the conversation which facilitated Borg's comments. Those remarks didn't come out of nowhere - it was actually the second week that the program featured a conversation about soccer and the bedroom.

At the end of  "Losing Proposition," the hosts respond to emails from listeners. These emails take up the previous week's discussion of a question from a fan who confesses to watching soccer in bed using a Kindle Fire that he bought for his wife as a gift. "Am I a bad husband for this? How much time do you spend watching soccer with your wives, partners, etc.?" It's a question and an answer. Clearly, if he wants sex it's probably a good idea to stop watching soccer in bed. But maybe he doesn't want sex, at least not every night. Maybe he's happy watching soccer, and it's nice to have his wife in bed next to him while he does so. Is that OK? Does that make him less of a man? That's at least one way (my way) of reading the question.

Anyway, at that point the hosts invite listeners to email advice about soccer and love, because clearly the two are at war.

The controversial April 30th discussion revolves around this set of emails from fans. The hosts mostly rehash platitudes about sports bachelors and soccer widows. They talk over one email from a fan whose wife found him asleep in bed, clutching his iPhone, on which was playing a Union/Chivas match. As his wife tried to pry the phone from his fingers, he popped awake and said "Hold on, this game is about to get chippy."

They read an email from a fan who observes that a lot of women go to games - that, in fact, you see a fair number of straight couples at MLS matches, on dates. They all seem taken by this "development."

People should not be surprised by the fact that there are women in the stands, and that people go to soccer matches on dates. Romantic comedies, for example, routinely stage date scenes at sport events - not because it's exotic but because it's typically American. That instrument of social coercion known as 'the kissing cam' exists because sports has been fully integrated into the rituals of heterosexual courtship. One viral video, for example, features kissing couples at an LA Kings game.

Anyway - rather than talk about the fact that a lot of women watch soccer, that women are a part of the MLS fan base, that the whole soccer-or-women choice is a ruse - the Extratime conversation turns back to the guy in bed with his iPhone.

Why, Simon Borg wonders, was this man watching the game in bed? He then describes this guy as forced into the bed not by fatigue, but by his wife. "There's a problem with the relationship already, if you feel forced, or compelled to be in bed." Borg doesn't let this idea go - that men are being forced into bed. "The thing about the guys with the thing in bed...How does it work? Are you ordered 'come to bed'? And so are you trying to sneak a Kindle or an iPhone to watch the game?  [Almost screaming now] Why don't you just get up and go to your TV or go sit at the kitchen table?"

At this point one of the guys tries to turn the table on Borg, and suggests that he seems pretty invested in this notion that these listeners don't want to be in bed with their wives. It's intense.

This takes us into the program's finale. They read an email from a passionate, committed female fan ("Elizabeth from Portland") which affirms that yes, soccer can actually be a part of a person's relationship - and that, yes, there are women out there who are superfans who participate in fan culture. The other participants in this discussion narrate how their soccer-watching fits into their personal lives. It all sounds really normal. They discuss how it can be nice to have a relationship with someone who "gets" your sport. Then Borg says the following:

It's fine if you're a female and you want to be a super-fan. Clearly go for it, that's your choice. But there is something to be said for how appealing that might be to the other sex. Having a woman that's such a fan, like painting your face, tuning in to every podcast. I don't know how many males would be into that.

It's cool for women to be into it. It's great that in Kansas City there are a lot of women in the stands, it's great, but for the guy who wants maybe a serious relationship... If you are following just casually, but if you're such a die-hard, I don't know, it comes a point that it is a bit of a turn-off.

To their credit, his interlocutors try to argue with him - one sounds incredulous. Borg pushes his point and tries to make the other guys confess that, yes, secretly they are turned off by passionate women fans.

They settle into a little talk about whether or not they "have a problem with it" (a woman's passion for the game). One of the hosts confesses he's "never dated a sports girl. Ever, ever, ever." (TMI!)

I'd say Borg should be fired, except I think they all bear some responsibility for that conversation - I'm not sure such scapegoating accomplishes much in the long run. Better to have a feminist on the panel, forever - someone sharp enough to call him out properly and shift the discussion. 

Sure, Borg's a problem: but so is the architecture of that whole conversation in which Borg performs the role of saying what none of the other guys have the "guts" to say. That's his job, and pretty much every sports program seems obliged to have one person play that role.

Extratime is featuring female fans of the MLS on next week's show, which is great. But given the  stupidity of that entire discussion of sex and soccer, I wouldn't be surprised if the MLS apology went something like: "No, really - we think you're pretty!"

My take-away from this story: The men who run MLS harbor a wish. They wish that the MLS was like English soccer was in its heyday. Guys like this long for a time when men were men, and the game was (somewhat) more honest and when fans were hard core. But they also know that's silly. They grew up with the culture of the game as it is here - they grew up fending off the bullshit, xenophobic weirdness of mainstream sports hostility to the beautiful game. Official MLS masculinity is embattled, conflicted.

If Borg felt he needed to assert that a man can't love a woman who loves soccer as much as he does, it was perhaps because he doesn't think the American soccer fan is man enough to love her back.

So the insult here is not only to women soccer fans. It actually an insult to the entire soccer-loving community - as if somehow loving the game means that you aren't actually up for loving itself.

Soccer by Searchlight: looking for the future in the past

 

It's a little known fact that the earliest night matches were women's games. Amazing how far we've moved in the wrong direction. In 1920 enough people were excited by the idea of watching women play that they packed the terraces. The media thought the match was important enough to cover it in print and as a cinematic news reel. Even if press from this period approached the women's game as a novelty, it broadcast information about teams and events and made celebrities of its amateur players.

Today, fans of the women's game are so sick and tired of having to cajole, beg, whine, yell and snipe about the lack of coverage - we've become bored with the whole situation. When it comes to the media blackout on coverage of women's sports, most of us have just thrown up our hands with a "whatever."

Of course we need the media to support nascent leagues. We need media to pay enough attention to league organization and team management so that those running the women's game are celebrated for their successes and held accountable for their failures. We need coverage of actual matches, week in, week out. It's ludicrous that people in the US have only ever heard of Abby Wambach and Hope Solo - and most who know these names haven't actually watched them play and and they certainly don't follow their club careers.

We need a media from another era - a media that takes an interest in new things, in things that aren't guaranteed successes. We need a media interested in a sport that is professional in the ways that working people are professional. Why not take an interest in a sport that is not making a few people rich, but that is just trying to sustain itself?

What happened to make media interest so synonymous with "profitable" that we can't imagine wanting to watch something unless there is an abstract sum of money in play between a handful of people - none of whom are on the field?

We have one clue in the 1920 ban on the women's game - The English Football Association only killed the women's game when its success in modeling a sustainable game played for the benefit of all began to suggest a different future for the game than the one we've been stuck with. Barbara Jacobs writes:

From their formation until the FA announcement [of the ban against the women's game], Dick, Kerr's Ladies [the most celebrated club] had raised over £60,000 for charity, and the same amount had been raised by all the other women's clubs combined. That's, in a total for the years 1918 to 1921, £120,000, or, in today's reckoning, 24 million pounds. And the FA? I think we can safely call the scoreline 24 million to nil. [Jacobs, The Dick, Kerr's Ladies, p. 164]

Jacobs quite reasonably points out that given the identification of women's football with highly successful community support, it was inevitable that working people filling the stands for men's matches would begin to ask where their hard-earned money was going.

The FA's 1920 decision to kill interest in the women's game left us with the "common sense" dished out as an explanation for why the women's game isn't worth watching: "There's no money in it." If working people living in the desolation of post WWI Europe could raise £120,000 from women's matches, then surely the problem has never been money itself, but rather where the money in the women's game went.

People complain all the time that you can't market the women's game as a "charity" - that there is nothing that will kill a sports-buzz quicker than the spirit of "good works." I've felt this myself.

Meanwhile corporate speculation has sucked the soul from the men's game. Who believes that the season championship is something that a team earns? What honor is there in a trophy that's been bought? Or in watching a play-off between two or three teams that have sold their economic souls in order to have the right to be in the running?

Sure, as a spectator I won't turn my back on a big match - but the pleasures of the game feel no more and no less thrilling than the pleasures of a great product, designed for easy consumption. If it feels good, this is because it asks so very little of me.

Most of us actually want more than this. Few of us, however, are old enough to remember what that "more" might actually be. We live with a vague sense that our desire for something different is impractical, unrealizable. "There's no money in that."

And so we turn to history not out of nostalgia but out of curiosity: the past doesn't teach us that "yes, there is money in that." It shows us an entirely different relationship to money. The women's game allowed those with a little to give to those with even less. The team's management and players took only what they needed to keep playing. No one was set to get rich off of it. And this made the fans love the enterprise even more. Imagine!

Footballers on the Dancefloor: from Hollywood to Bollywood, Solo, Savage and God Himself

I'm in denial. Hope Solo was voted off Dancing with the Stars. She and Maksim were ROBBED by the judges. The Argentine Tango is a perfect framework for the two strong and combative personalities. Their performance was interesting, ambitious and fun to watch.  Nevertheless, Solo and Maksim were given quite low scores. (Their Paso Doble was awesome from a head-banger's perspective but perhaps not so ballroom. Their Cha Cha was OK, but in the "relay" format you can really see the qualitative difference between Martinez, Lake and the rest (how Kardashian won that segment is beyond my understanding). Anyway, here's the Tango:

Bravo to Solo for bringing it.

This seems like a good moment to survey performances by a few other footballers. For example, Robbie Savage is on this season's Strictly Come Dancing. 

That performance needs no comment from me. Bless him.

Diligent readers of FaLW will know that I'm a fan of Baichung Bhutia, who won India's Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa in 2009. Bhutia played for Kolkata clubs Mohun Bagan and East Bengal - two of the most stories clubs in Asia. His career has largely been built around long-term ambitions for soccer in India, and he is one of the founders of the country's first player's union. Without a doubt, he participated in India's version of Dancing with the Stars in order to raise awareness of Indian soccer. Nevertheless, Mohun Bagan questioned his commitment to the sport when his succesful run on the dance show caused him to miss a practice and exhibition match. The club took a ridiculous, short-sighted stand and Bhutia left them for East Bengal.

He retired from play this year, but owns United Sikkim and is a key figure for the future of the sport in Asia. Bhutia's the kind of person many of us would love to see head FIFA. The guy has a soul. And that shows in all of his performances. (Jhalak Dikkhla Jaa is fun to watch because the dances are hybrids - part ballroom, part Bollywood. They are very theatrical and often quite athletic.) 

The most fascinating turn in this genre comes from Italy's Ballando con le Stelle. God himself appeared on its dance floor in 2005. He withdrew from the show after four weeks - he'd been flying back and forth between Buenos Aires and Italy, shortly after undergoing surgery to control his weight problems. Around this time, however, Italian tax authorities tried to collect his earnings from the program, in order to cover debt dating back to his days as a player. I'm grateful for the three weeks he gave us - everytime I watch this, my brain goes: "No, is that really...wow." And then it short circuits.

If you need more after that, I recommend Bleacher Report's survey of footballers who should be on DWTS. Given that this Bleacher Report researcher confined herself to the men's game, she missed one, most obvious candidate. For of all the dancing footballers surveyed by Bleacher Report, none actually incorporate dance into their play. For them, it's a post-goal scoring celebration. For Marta Vieira da Silva, the samba is a cruel taunt embedded into play - an announcement of her opponent's imminent humiliation (see, especially the move that starts around min 3:35):

Hope Solo would be the first to observe, however, that had she been in goal in 2007, Marta would have had much less to Samba about.

More Notes on a Scandal: Cultures of Compliance (the Penn State/Berkeley comparison)

The other week, my university's Chancellor sent out a message encouraging people to respect each other's differences - be they cultural, political, religious, academic, etc. 

It's the kind of thing administrators generate to look like they are doing the right thing. It's also the kind of thing that makes 'doing the right thing' look easy. As if difference - being different, feeling differently, living differently - was reducible to a matter of taste. The actual aim of that message was to discourage students from raising their voices. The memo's central purpose, in other words, is to minimize conflict.

That same week, at Berkeley, campus police wedged their batons into student bellies. Some show of respect. 

Dave Zirin said something a lot of us were thinking when he contrasted Penn State students with Berkeley's - one set rioting at the firing of a coach who failed his community by burying accusations of child abuse, the other peacefully asserting their right to demonstrate in support of the #Occupy movement - and beaten by the campus police for doing so. (Penn State students also "rioted" at the announcement of Osama Bin Laden's death - so, this seems to be their default mode.)

Sneering at jarhead Penn State fans is a little too easy. It's close to the flipside of the knee-jerk, smug righteousness of the fans themselves - who decry the defilement of the abused in the same gesture they flip a news van and set it on fire. These things feel related to me - the macho posturing that wraps itself around the idea of protecting innocent children, coming from the last people one would actually trust to know what it means to support a healthy sexual culture.

In any case, both situations express a crisis in the integrity of university culture. And it does feel like this problem goes coast to coast. 

There is a growing gap between what students want from their universities and what those campuses are giving them. They want an education. They are being given lessons in compliance - comply with the corporate culture or get beaten for resisting it.

It's a miracle that California students haven't started burning down their schools. The entire system has been raped and pillaged by the selfish class. It's that simple. Administrations collaborate, making deals with the "1%" by selling bad debt - what is the difference between a shady mortgage on an overpriced home sold at the edge of a bubble, and dramatic rises in tuition that can only be paid with loans that will enslave students with outrageous "unsecured" debt for most of their adult, underemployed lives?

The brutal realities of this are perhaps nowhere more evident that in the Golden State, which once boasted the best public education system in the world, but now can't afford to give its students desks and textbooks. Tuition escalates beyond a working person's reach. Families lose their homes and kids are caught between paying for school, or helping mom and dad with the mortgage. Everybody is losing.

Students should occupy their campuses - they need to unite in their grief and outrage, and they'll find plenty of staff and faculty willing to pitch their tents alongside them. But it's their campus. We work for them.

Turning to Penn State: I can't fathom making a martyr out of Joe Paterno, and there's no crowd that makes me more uncomfortable, feel more "unsafe" than college football fans.

But: I can imagine being very suspicious of Penn State's public sacrifice of its father-figure.

The atmosphere at Penn State has been described to me as "cult-like." That intense attachment to the campus, secured through its football program and its symbolic Father, is what most universities are aiming for: Rather than build the campus up from the ground with good teaching, resources for research, support for student learning - they are trying to create a corporate brand, administrations want students to have not an education but an "experience."

The myth here is that this nostalgia for "the college experience" will fund public education. For a handful of colleges it might, but at what cost to them, and to the rest of the system?

University executives now want former students to look back on their education with uncritical nostalgia, with the same set of feelings they might have for their first pair of Nikes.

If I send a check to Rutgers, it isn't because I think back on my "college experience" and feel wistful. I think about how the education I received - which was pleasurable, challenging and sometimes soul-rattling - changed my life. Enabling that in the classroom is hard work. It isn't pretty. It is a hard sell.

The Penn State students who rioted clearly drank the campus Kool-Aid. But I can imagine being a student there, and seeing the big round of dismissals as a hollow gesture. Given how long this abuse is supposed to have gone on, given how many years people continued to work with and support Sandusky after they learned about the now infamous shower incident, who doesn't bear responsibility to the alleged victims here? Ushering these guys off the stage with the directive "don't talk about anything" doesn't feel satisfactory. But what would? Something is rotten in the system. 

But what system? How is it rotten?

As I wrote in an op-ed piece for The Guardian this week, it's more, and more complicated, than football and big-time sports.

I remember the sex scandal that rocked Princeton in the late 1980s, when a distinguished male professor in the English Department was accused of rape by a male graduate student. (See the NYT Magazine article, "Arms and the Man: A Sex Scandal Rocks Princeton.")

The story was awful - the professor's behavior before and after the incident was disturbing. Those who came forward were treated badly by the university. They were feminist, anti-racist and anti-homophobic scholars tired of the climate cultivated by the Princeton administration's passivity vis a vis discrimination and harassment. Confronted with a university that dealt with a credible rape accusation by offering the accused professor a golden parachute, four left - including Emory Elliott, a distinguished American Literature scholar who was my senior colleague at U.C. Riverside.

At my own campus, three women came forward in the 1990s and filed a complaint about systemic harassment and discrimination in the History Department. The pattern of behavior was jaw-dropping - ranging from overt discrimination against women faculty with children to a rape charge filed by a female student against a male professor. It was bad enough to become a scandal within the academy. (The story was reported in a May 1999 story for The Chronicle of Higher Education: "A History Department Implodes Over Sex-Bias Charges and a Suicide.")

The women who came forward on my campus paid a heavy price for doing the right thing. If that department is now a good place to work, we can thank those scholars. But even now, I see little sympathy from senior colleagues about the crap they went through and how that might have impacted not only their scholarship, but their relationship to the institution.

I recall these stories to point out something easily forgotten: academic administration contains more than a few atavistic holdovers from the days when universities were run by and for white men.

An English Department, a History Department will (hopefully) have been forced to work through this stuff by virtue of the integration of women and feminist scholars into their ranks - the Humanities are ahead of the ball on this point.

Athletic Departments like Penn State's are nursing fantasies of the gold old days when men were men and women knew their place, and nobody rocked to boat or talked about anything.  

The bizarre thing about this is that athletic departments are actually forced to confront the matter of gender equity much more directly than academic departments. It is (apparently) hard to force a Physics department to hire as many women as it does men - but it isn't hard to force a campus to at least try to offer equal opportunity to women athletes.

That should mean that there is a greater awareness in athletic departments about all the issues that come with sex/gender equity - but instead we see a national pattern of football programs especially endorsing rape culture, women's sports programs engaging in shitty forms of gender policing (Penn State was sued by a female basketball player who was harassed by her coach over her 'unfeminine' appearance), a total passivity about homophobic behavior towards male and female athletes, and a resistance to owning up to the responsibilities that campus administrations bear in letting this stuff go on, and on, and on.

As we bear witness to this national wave of sympathy for the victims and at the massive, totally justified outrage at the cover-up, let's entertain the following possibility:

If people felt half this sympathy for the women who've been raped by football players in the past forty years, or half the outrage regarding the systemic cover-up of those assaults - perhaps we wouldn't be in quite this situation. Perhaps the guys at Penn State would have been raised to do the right thing, even if that thing was really hard.

To circle back to my opening paragraph - If I'm uneasy about comparisons of the Penn State student riot with the Berkeley student protest, even as a study of contrasts, it's because campus administrators don't see a difference. They see both as crowds to be controlled, and send them both the same memo.

What we want on our campuses is an environment in which people can speak hard truths - truths with consequences. We want students to be able to express themselves when they are angry and confused. We want an environment in which people will at least be heard. Whether they utter their truth as a shout, or a whisper.