FALW Women's World Ranking

FIFA's latest ranking of women's national teams has just been released. As I can't figure out how the hell FIFA ranks the US Women's National Team #1 and places Nigeria below, say, Scotland, I figured I should post my own purely intuitive ranking.

My top 15:

     1           Germany

     2           Canada

     3           Brazil

     4           USA

     5           Nigeria

     6           Japan

     7           South Korea

     8           England

     9           Sweden

     10         Mexico

     11         Australia

     12         France

     13         Colombia

     14         Norway

     15        North Korea

Mind you, this is pure polemics. But I do actually think Canada looks stronger than the US. Mexico surely looks stronger than Iceland. To my fellow bloggers: I await your rankings - they will surely be more informative than the crap statistics that FIFA puts out.

In the Game: Documentary on impact of Title IX needs our support!

I'm really excited by In the Game. This film by the producers of Hoop Dreams looks the realities of the highest levels of professional women's sports and the daily grind of girls fighting for access to training and facilities at especially urban high schools.  From a leader in the WNBA, "Our biggest challenge is media coverage." Good segment at about 9 minutes in this clip on unbelievably sexist attitudes which define sports media. But this story is centered not on that shitty fact, but on the people who play, coach and manage women's sports. Watch this!

Ball & Chain: Notes on Anne Hathaway, James Franco & the Oscars

This has nothing to do with soccer. I wrote this rant last weekend and posted on my facebook page.  Some readers asked that I post it here. I'll be back to soccer stories as soon as I put the manuscript I'm finishing in the mail!

Anne Hathaway's performance as an Oscars co-host was heroic. When one focuses on her performance, the whole ceremony takes on a surreal aspect. Take the ULTRA real dynamic of soporific Franco and hysterical Hathaway: This was a rather extraordinary performance of a high-energy female/femme dragging the sad-dog-weight of her man behind her. It is the flipside of sexist narratives about the “ball-and-chain” in which women hold men back, rather than prop them up (as is, well, more usually the case).

My favorite study on sexism and the academy: according to an analysis of gender and faculty promotion at the University of California, the people most likely to advance are men with wives. Then men without wives, then women without husbands, then women with husbands. I could not see from this study if they accounted for same sex couples, or the ways in which being gay/lesbian might impede one’s progress in such a hetero-dynamic system. In any case, I think we can all agree that, according to such studies, one is “better off” having and not being the wife.

Anne Hathaway showed us how true this is - the mere presence of that man standing next to her impedes our ability to value her work. And it was pretty clear to me, at least, that her performance itself was commenting on this.

On Her Own

For example: In a deeply ironic moment she took the stage in a tux to sing “On My Own.” The song choice, she explained, was a reference to her all-too brief appearance on stage with Hugh Jackman in another Oscar ceremony – she had been plucked from the audience to sing a duet, in which they adopted the identities of Frost and Nixon. There was a hell of a queer subtext to that performance, given the take on Jackman and his having just belted out some fabulous gay-positive, out-loud-and-proud lyrics about Milk. Hathaway said she’d hoped the actor would perform with her this year, but he’d bailed at the last minute. She might well have been talking about Franco: Franco's non-performance was by this point in the broadcast clear to everyone in the audience.

Franco gave us plenty of warnings, including his recent discussion of "bad acting" and performance - a line of thought/fascination I pursued in my work own on Andy Warhol, esp in the introduction to Pop Out (co-authored with José Muñoz and Jonathan Flatley). As we worked on that project we talked explicitly about Keanu Reeves, River Phoenix et al in relation to the performances in Warhol's films.

Eventually, I felt that in my own work I could not talk about the performances of Joe Dallesandro etc without acknowledging the hyper-active energy that is produced by the women around those underperforming men. At times last night I felt like I was watching "Bike Boy" - in one infamous scene Warhol instructed Joe Spencer (Bike Boy) to ignore Ingrid Superstar, she tries for a minute to get his attention and then just fills the rest of the time with nearly diassociated babble while he stares off into space and strokes his manly arms every now and again. It took me a while to understand that the film is not about Bike Boy at all, but about the gay men and women around Bike Boy. Bike Boy is a void. Reeves and Phoenix in their own way played with that dynamic in their films - and in a queer setting one can. But in the straight-jacketed public sphere, it just reads as so much more heterosexuality. As women basically doing all the work, and getting none of the recognition.

Which brings me back to Hathaway. Taking the stage as if one's been left at the altar is an old gag: The performer sets herself up as abandoned, standing before her audience if she’d been left there alone and unloved. She proceeds to seduce an entire theater. This kind of performance toggles back and forth between “nobody loves me” and “love me or else." The genre has been remastered by diverse figures - Judy Garland and daughter Liza, but also Sandra Bernhard (e.g. “Without You I’m Nothing”). That dynamic shapes some of the most compelling queer performance, in which the artist emerges as both intensely vulnerable and invincible. (eg Franko B's "I Miss You!" or just about everything from Dynasty Handbag.)

THIS, I think, is why when Franco walked out in drag, it seemed like such a failure: not just because he was styled in a jokey sort of drag more apropos of a Judd Apatow movie than a drag club, but because "showy" Hathaway was always already working drag territory.

It would have been amazing if they’d found a way to give Franco the same kind of elegance that Hathaway has in a lady-tux – but that would have perhaps been too risky for the Oscars, as it’d have required making him look both gay and hot. Given who we are talking about here, that should have been easy. Instead, he looked like the next chapter of Hollywood's drag devolution (Jack Lemmon to Robin Williams to James Franco, each one being a worse version of his drag-as-gag predecessor). A more visionary look would surely have brought Franco's appearance in drag closer to Kalup Linzy's zone, and it might have allowed us to see Franco's look in relation to Hathaway's. For Linzy’s "bad drag" looks nothing like what Franco did last night. Linzy's version of drag is queer assemblage of signs. He doesn’t look any more “natural” or “realistic” in drag than did Franco – but he inhabits drag, fully, in a dialogue that makes sex and gender and race come alive, and feel both real and unsettled. That is no easy thing to do. And it is way more than a matter of his outfit.

The fact of the matter is that in last night’s performance the person on stage closest to Kalup Linzy’s universe was Anne Hathaway – producing a theatrical, desperate and frankly scary version of feminine performance, not just alone, but in compensation for someone else's failure - as if, if she worked hard enough, nobody would feel Franco's absence. As if, if she worked hard enough, it would feel like her presence mattered. As if, to matter, her performance must anchor his.

She was not being the person who could care less, but the person who cares too much. The less Franco put out, the more she had to make up for it. The worse his performance became, the more it obliterated hers. Because when we wake up in the morning, who is the press talking about? Not the show's "wife", but the show's drag - the sad-dog manchild bringing everybody down. Fine, that's what the media does.

The whole point of performance studies for me is not that it enables actors to expand their practice into the artworld. Although that’s an interesting effect, actors never needed the discipline of performance studies to do that (a few names at random: Andy Kauffman, Sandra Bernhard, Ann Magnuson). Performance studies, however, does give us a few tools for considering the political dimensions of moments like these, and resisting mass media's flow.

Female actors with comic sensibilities and wit are particularly hard for Hollywood to accommodate these days. Things on this point have not gotten better but worse. At least we have Tina Fey, and why isn't she hosting or better, writing - the show?

Hathaway’s performances (as, for example, The Brown Duck) were eye-opening. They gestured to a Hollywood legacy otherwise completely ignored by last night’s nostalgic gestures to its own past. Comic geniuses like Lucile Ball and Carol Burnett never hosted the Oscars alone (Ball never hosted at all). Many women have taken the stage as hosts, but nearly all were required to share it.*

Few have been allowed to be on her own. Perhaps in singing that song, Hathaway was trying to tell us something.

There are plenty of goofy, smart, chatty showboats out there in ballgowns. Not only does Anne Hathaway not need a straight man to make her audience laugh, that straight man is the very thing that’s holding her back.

*Note: For the record, many women have worked as co-hosts: Thelma Ritter in 1954; Claudette Colbert in 1955; Celeste Holme in 1957; Helen Hayesin 1972; Carol Burnett in 1973; Diana Ross in 1973; Shirley MacLain in 1974; Goldie Hawn in 1975; Ellen Burstyn and Jane Fonda in 1976; Lina Minelli in 1982; Jane Fonda in 1985; Goldie Hawn in 1986. (Thanks Wikipedia.) To date, Ellen DeGeneres and Whoopie Goldberg are the only women to have hosted alone, in the show's entire history. Goldberg hosted the show a rather miraculous four times.

Barely related to sport: Queer Fantasy Football Meeting

Here's one for the art + music + football archives. Johan Renck's video for The Knife's "Pass This On" (2003). Concept: Annual meeting for the local football club has the best entertainment ever. The guy flirting with the singer and the woman sitting at the table are the electronic duo's brother and sister Olof Dreijer and Karin Dreijer Andersson.

A little information about Ultras fan clubs in Egypt

Egypt's football fan clubs are figuring prominently in stories about the current uprising. For readers wanting to learn more about the Ultras in Egypt and their role in the uprising, here are a few links:

James M. Dorsey, "Soccer Fans Play Key Role in Egyptian Protests" (readers of this blog will not be surprised, as this is a fairly consistent topic in writing about the sport and politics).

The Football Scholars Forum posted a link to that story and to this BBC interview with David Goldblatt (of The Ball is Round): The Secret Policeman's Football.

In 2007, Tom Dunmore posted a series of articles on Pitch Invasion about "Ultras" - a genre of football fan club, characterized by intense organization, often somewhat militaristic structures and overtly political ideologies. The series includes this photo essay from one of the founders of Egypt's first Ultras group - Ultras Ahlawy. 

An interesting 2009 Al Jazeera article about football and nationalism, The Politics of Sporting Rivalry, written by the author of The Angry Arab News Service.

I will post more articles when I find them.

There are lots of videos of the Ultras Ahlawy on youtube, highlighting their actions at matches. I've included a few turned up by a simple search.

The USSF announced its cancellation of the men's friendly match in Egypt (scheduled for Feb 9) in a very neutral press release. 

Do You Get Rape-y Comments Too?: On Sexism & Sports Media

So the "story" of sexism in football culture finally "broke." We have ample footage of Sky Sports commentators Richard Keys and Andy Gray indulging in sexist "banter." From their recent remarks about Sian Massey, to jokes about "smashing it", and a video of the two of them breaking out into giggles (on camera) while reporting on the 1998 women's FA Cup final, we have a veritable archive of evidence demonstrating that sexism animates the way they think, talk and behave.

Anyone who has spent time with football knows full well how sexism and homophobia are seamlessly integrated into sports culture. The banter in which Grey and Keys engaged, a lighthearted exchange of insults to women (or gay men), helps them cement their relationship to each other. It's the sexist handshake - one of the most banal rituals through which members of the boys club identify themselves to each other. (Hi, are you a sexist? Yes! Great! Let's get to work!) This sort of thing forces everyone around them to adopt one of three positions: be complicit and go along with it, leave the room (a passive form of complicity), or protest at the risk of losing one's job and becoming the punch-line of another joke.

As a fan, a player, as a ref or an administrator we are bombarded with statements that are so outrageously sexist they wouldn't be tolerated in any other sphere. How many times have we heard "nobody really likes women's football" or "women can't play in goal"? These are "polite" versions of the Grey and Keys routine leaked by Sky Sports staff. People take the abjection of women's sports as such a given that the declaration that "women's football is boring" is totally uncontroversial - though when you stop and think about it, that statement actually does as much to replicate sexist structures of thought and power as the remarks about "smashing it."

If people think women's football is boring, it's because it's played by amateur athletes who do not have the benefit of the training offered men. It's because when people watch the rare match broadcast on television, there is hardly anyone in the stands - why go, if you've already decided you'll be bored? In the U.S. most local papers do not publish match times or match results for women's games (even those played at the highest level). Traditional sports media is so hostile to the women's game that the US pro league and its fans rely ENTIRELY on new media forms of micro-broadcasting (e.g. Twitter) for information about the season. These are our most reliable sources of information about our teams.

We would be burying our heads in the sand if we didn't see these egregiously sexist remarks as on a continuum with the sports media's black-out on covering women's sports - both are structured by sexist "common sense."

As has been reported by The Guardian, the Sky incidents were not exceptional, but typical of the work environment at the network. And that working environment is not an exception, but rather a mirror of media representations of sports culture as an all-male universe - played by men, watched by men, managed by men.

Strangely enough, when that story broke I was working on a blog post about the sexist insults I've received since I started writing about this sport. The whole topic got me so down, I put the article aside. This Sky Sports debacle pushed me to return to it:

"Do you get rape-y comments too?"

I often ask this question of fellow female sports bloggers. We then swap stories - our experiences with sexist and homophobic vitriol is connected to our commitments to our blogs as spaces to which sports fans can turn when they want or need something less violently sexist than mainstream spaces. We seem more likely to receive comments laced with a rhetoric of sexual violence when readers experience our writing as feminist - and it doesn't take that much for some to reach that trigger point. Sometimes, just knowing our gender is enough.

When I first started this blog in 2007, I cross-posted a few articles with Soccer Lens. (Warning: I can't write this without recycling obscene and offensive language.) I admit my first post was a full-on feminist polemic, in which I questioned media dismay at the baldy sexist and abusive behavior of Man U players at what became known as the team's "Christmas Rape Party" (thank you British Tabloid culture).  It's a patriarchal organization, I wrote - just look at how they treated their women's team (abysmally) - and I went on to suggest that the "rape party" incident was just the worst example of a much bigger, and deeper problem in British football culture. (Is that point really controversial?)

It was one of the most "aggressive" things I've written.  The comments posted to Soccer Lens nevertheless rattled me. I expected insults and criticism. But more than one comment was sexually violent in its language - I recall one that mapped out a rape fantasy (involving a female soccer player).  Anal rape seemed to be a preoccupation with posters.

More upsetting than these comments was the fact that I had to point out that these comments were offensive - the blog was moderated, and someone at Soccer Lens had approved them for publication. The site's editor was sincerely apologetic.

But the fact that I had to explain that those comments were offensive was so demoralizing I made a decision to stay away from mosh pits like Soccer Lens and Big Soccer. Life is too short, and there is a bigger need, in my view, for abuse-free zones like this blog. I now sometimes cross post with Pitch Invasion, and I share my articles with Women Talk Sports.

Last year, a Pitch Invasion reader posted a zinger in response to my article there on The Damned United (the site's editor deleted the remark):

"Just a silly stupid little split arse tart spouting about something it knows nothing about. Go back to playing with your Barbie dolls dumb arse fucker"

There is nothing about Pitch Invasion that would have encouraged this reader to think such a remark was acceptable. What really shocked me was his use of "it" instead of "she" - I'd never heard this, except as spoken by the psycho in Silence of the Lambs ("it puts the lotion on its skin"), and then recently as spoken by Richard Keys.

Fortunately, From a Left Wing readers really don't write stuff like that. I do get surprising comments from wayward readers intent on demonstrating to me that men are "better" than women (faster, stronger, more interesting). I delete a fair amount of those. Nothing makes me happier than knowing I am doing my small part to confine such thoughts to oblivion.

Jeff Pearlman, a columnist for Sports Illustrated has written an article for CNN about the internet "trolls" - the people who jump into public forums and call people "fucking retards" and worse. He tracked down a couple recent offenders, and was surprised to discover they were decent guys - sports fans who turn up the volume on their comments because they don't feel like anyone is really listening anyway (or that this is the only way to be "heard" - by which I assume they mean "noticed").

I couldn't really relate to his article. Because the guy who called me a "split arse tart" is probably a "nice guy". That's the thing about sexism, homophobia and racism. It's not the exclusive property of assholes. Most of the people who engage in these cultures of hate and discrimination are not obvious monsters. They are normal people.

The worst offenders are probably "great guys" AND sexist pigs. Richard and Andy meant no harm with their sexist banter, and Sky didn't take the culture of its workplace seriously because it's just boys being boys. And maybe the fact that these boys are doing it with a smile and no deliberate malice makes it worse.

The racist equivalent of this stuff is generally seen as "worse" in sports culture. And I guess that makes sense. Where most sports cultures have had to take on their racist administrators, fans, and athletes they have yet to confront their sexism. Men of color are at least seen as athletes. Of course in a broader racist culture determined to lock men into their bodies this becomes another turn in racist discourse. But in sports culture, women are not only not seen as athletes - they are not even really seen as people.  As my previous post points out, women are quite literally treated as a different species in sports culture. In this sense, sexism is the new racism.

Sexism and homophobia are both openly expressed within the most professional halls of sports culture - by Sepp Blatter on down. Blatter asserts that gay people planning to attend the World Cup in Qatar just shouldn't have sex, and he giggles on saying this. And then reporters giggle. Because, you, know, there's so much to find funny in Blatter's homophobia and in the deep history of homophobia in football culture (as a few have pointed out, the last time the World Cup was in England, homosexuality was criminalized in that country).

In the US Brett Favre is in a shitstorm of trouble (finally) over his harassment of any woman, it seems, who dared to cross his path in a professional capacity. That situation was created by the Jets and by the NFL - however - as neither organization seems to have respected the most basic EEOC guidelines regarding discrimination and harassment in the workplace. Ines Sainz gracefully put up with the offensive behavior of Jets players, because you have to if you are going to work in sports media, and you have the misfortune of having tits. Female sports reporters "lucky" enough to get a job have to wait for the lack of professionalism with which they are treated to get caught on camera - and for someone else to leak that "story" - before anyone steps in to moderate the bastards.

The only thing that bothers me more than the story of Andy Grey, Richard Keys and the sexist handshake is the hypocrisy of the media that acts as if has nothing to do with creating the world within which such behavior is not only tolerated, but imagined as defining sports culture itself.

It is not incidental that this was provoked by the spectacle of a woman working in football. For, really, this - the image of a woman participating in the sport is the real problem. We see all too few of those images - because a sexist common sense makes such images seem ridiculous too all too many people.

When I see The Guardian, Sky Sports and the BBC reporting on the hard stories in women's sports (such as the mismanagement and corruption that limits international development of the women's game, or the struggles attending to the professionalization of women's soccer, or the impact of the sexist attitudes on the management and development of the women's game, or the accusations of harassment directed at national team managers in a range of sports) I'll believe that there actually has been a crisis of conscience in sports media, and that the times are actually changing.

Note to espnW: a woman is not a horse

Zenyatta: "Am I not a woman and a horse?"

ESPN recently launched a website for women sports fans, espnW. Today the site listed its top ten stories in women's sports. In cooking up this list, ESPN adopted a flexible definition of the category "woman" by including Zenyatta, the horse, as #4.

Setting aside the rather large problem regarding the network's confusion regarding the category "woman," the list is a rather bland summary of accomplishments. The biggest stories are not always the ones we want to hear - a real list of the biggest stories for women in sports would include a mix of the good and the bad. I've approached this from a journalism standpoint, and have forwarded a few of the stories that I think are most important.  This is quite different from listing accomplishments of female athletes.

• Mary Kom wins 5^th women’s world boxing championship. Indian women dominate the sport and are poised to bring the first Olympic gold medal to the country in the London Olympics.
• Two South African players charge national women's team coach with sexual harassment – accuse coach of prowling dormitory at night and dropping players from the squad who reject his advances.
• U Conn claims record for longest winning streak in basketball – Stanford claims honor of breaking 90 game run. Meanwhile the accomplishments of the individual athletes (most notably Maya Moore) are ignored in end-of-the-year awards for athletes.
• FC Gold Pride - possibly the best women's club team ever assembled - wins season, and folds: WPS is the most competitive professional women’s soccer league in the world, but struggles to win sponsors and is overwhelmed by media blackout.
• Nigerian women’s soccer team become first African [women's] team of either gender to play in a World Cup Final – as the national association is swamped in scandal, their remarkable achievement goes unnoticed.
• Mexico beats the US women's national soccer team in a crucial World Cup qualifying match. Sends the latter to a desperate play-off with Italy, and initiates what fans hope will be an extension of the infamous border rivalry in the men's game to the women's game. 
• Ines Sainz harrassed by New York Jets, international coverage of story revives sexist attitudes about women journalists and sports coverage. Brett Favre sends explicit pictures and texts to hostess working for Jets, given a slap on the wrist fine by the NFL.
• Serena Williams wins 4th Wimbleton singles trophy, breaks tournament record with 89 aces across her career. 13th title puts her 6th in list of grand slam champions.
• ESPN names horse as a top story in women's sports.  We LIKE horses. That doesn't MAKE us horses. 

[Since publishing this, I wrote a mildly satirical post for The Guardian's "Comment is Free" page: ESPN makes mare's nest of women in sport. I think I do my best work in the comments section.]

 

BBC story on Mary Kom, 5 time Women's World Boxing Championship, from Manipur, India

Dancing with India's Football Star

In the interest of keeping things light, here are some highlights from the 2009 season of India's Dancing with the Stars. The winner that year was Baichung Bhutia, the country's most accomplished footballer. Bhutia is responsible for forming a player's union in India and is a public figure in the best sense - using his celebrity to raise money for good causes, taking stands on issues that matter to him (like Tibetan independence), and devoting much time and energy to the development of resources for Indian soccer players. Bhutia was just named captain for his team's Asia Cup campaign.

The challenges of Jhalak Dikhhla Jaa are really fun to watch. Celebrities are paired with renown Bollywood choreographers who are stars in their own right. The judges are hilarious and make me wish I understood Hindi. The 2009 season was also notable for featuring Hard Kaur, India's first female hip hop star.

Bhutia appears at about 3:30 min.

Bhutia appears at about 3:50, and is totally charming as he takes ribbing for his lack of facial expressions.

Holiday Cheer: a football music mix

In the interest of spreading holiday cheer, a mix of the amusing, the interesting & the sublime:

New Order, The World In Motion. Produced for England's 1990 World Cup campaign, it features John Barnes singing along and rapping at about 2:30. (He's not bad!) Is it my imagination, or were footballers goofier circa 1990?

Richy Pitch f. M.anifest, Blackstar. I've posted references to Football Jama before - one of my absolute favorite football-inspired songs. This track is only tangentially related to football. Pitch spent two years in Ghana, absorbing the scene into his music practice. It's a sweet video, and a great song. Ghana, I think, has produced more songs inspired by its national team than any other country - aside from Brazil, that is.

On the subject of Brazil: Elis Regina, Meio de Campo. This would be what I meant by sublime:

TWO players collaborated on this gem. Basile Boli and Chris Waddle both played at Olympique de Marseille and apparently bonded over a love of pop music. You can see the latter commenting for ESPN.

Neeraj Shrindhar, Ishq Ka Kalma. This is from the 2007 Bollywood film Dhan Dhana Dhan Goal. I do not know where to start. I love everything about it, especially the backup dancers - women in football kits. Not sexed up costumes, but football kits. Minus the shoes - because you really can't dance like that in football boots. Note the number of hits this video has had: 1.1 million at last check. (See this clip, of Billo Rani from the same film - actually, just see the film - you can watch it instantly on Netflix.)

Last and certainly least: Football and Music pointed me to Alleluia, a 1986 Italian Christmas charity record featuring "The Football Stars" - all players active in the Italian league, including Ruud Gullit and Michel Platini. I would describe the recording as plodding, and labored. Seems to have been inspired by "We Are the World" (which was recorded in 1985). Some lovely football nut recorded this off Italian TV, but could only take 4:17 of it -  the video cuts out before the song's no doubt awful conclusion. 

Buon Natale!

Good Intentions: notes on the WPS as cause & business

Stuff you won't see on TV (Brazil v Canada)
Photo by Sereias da Vila

It's been a harrowing month for fans of women's soccer. This year's WPS champions, FC Gold Pride, folded. The team is thought to be one of the best assembled, but the club's backers were not prepared to weather more years of financial loss. The Chicago Red Stars - which has a strong fan base - announced that they were suspending operations for the upcoming season. No one expected to break even in the league's first few years, but few expected to lose the money they are losing - the league has yet to recover from the impact of global economic disaster. I think lots of us can relate to that. Other teams will come into the league but the upcoming season only features six sides, all on the east coast. That said, there may be two teams from California entering the league in two years and there are rumors of Santos supporting a US-based sister team. And much of the news on the international level is good: better competition (e.g. Brazil and Canada's recent performances in São Paolo) will make for an exciting World Cup.

As all this unfolds, sports journalists quite rightly turn their attention to the Women's Professional Soccer league and offer up their diagnoses for its rocky start. There are a lot of good takes on the league's struggles, and the more we have, the better. (All White Kit is my go-to blog for all thing women's soccer.) Of course, I'd trade those grim end-of-the-season stories for regular, consistent coverage of women's soccer throughout the season.

In the reporting on the WPS that we do have, there is one kind of observation I could do without. Noah Davis, in his mostly on-point diagnosis of the state of women's soccer in the US, points to a tweet from a Washington Post journalist:

Steve Goff...noted, "WPS is becoming a cause instead of a business. Can't sustain a pro sports league on good intentions." His thoughts echo those of many who cover the sport.

I've lost track of how many times I've read or heard some version of this statement in discussions of women's soccer, and witnessed these nods of recognition and agreement.

From Puma/WPS 2010 ad campaign

I would like to ask where this sense of "cause" is coming from, and why it feels like such a burden to these folks. The WPS marketing budget is so miniscule that one can hardly assert that any fan of women's soccer has been overwhelmed by its message. That message has, in my experience, tried in fact to stay as far from "cause" as possible. (This ad is my favorite.) But of course, the "cause" is always there in women's sports. Whether it's spoken or not.

Being a fan of women's soccer - hell, nearly any women's sport - means that some part of what you do becomes feminist, whether you identify yourself with that word or not.  I don't have a problem with feeling like the WPS is a cause. Fans actually connect around "cause" more than "business" - the cause is what gets us to the game, the business is what makes us complain about the price of the ticket.

And there is something obnoxious about the statement "Can't sustain a pro sports league on good intentions." It is just a tweet, but it does seem to capture a broader "common sense." Let's look at the NFL as a model for what happens when you throw out "good intentions" and embrace the logic of "business." We could look at Liverpool, or any number of severely leveraged clubs. We could look at stadium development. Or FIFA. Actually - why stick to sports? We could talk global warming and the environment. Or mortgages and the housing market.

I would rather see the WPS fail than become like the NFL. I do not need women's soccer to be like the English Premier League, or like any business that makes a few people wealthy and the rest of the world poor. If we can find a way to build a league that allows women to play soccer, develop their game, and not have to work full-time in order to do that, a lot of us would be happy. Sustainable business is a cause, shaped by "good intentions" and that is nothing to be ashamed of.

If that's a killjoy for people who want to worship at the altar of the absolute corruption and greed of big time sports, well, they have plenty of other leagues that will be all too happy to make it their business to lift the burden of "cause" from their shoulders.

[See also Tanya Keith's "Can Women's Soccer Survive? Is the Wrong Question"  on her blog "Soccer...Family Style."]

U Conn's Winning Streak: are they freaks, frauds, or the best women's basketball team ever?

Geno Auriemma, U Conn's head coach, dared to say out loud what is a given: sports media is only paying attention to their record because the Huskies are about to break a men's record.  The media barely made note of the moment they surpassed the longest winning streak in women's basketball. He ALSO speculated that some fans of the men's game are "pissed off" to see women break a men's record.  This, he implies, is the reason many feel the need to knock down his team's accomplishments.  

 

ESPN: Jemele Hill and Skip Bayless talk over Auriemma's post-game polemic

The Huskies have a home game against Florida State tomorrow (Tuesday, December 2) at 7:00pm ET (4:00pm Pacific). The game - which is sold out - will be broadcast NATIONALLY, on ESPN2. Imagine that! The BIG game, however, will be at Stanford - one of their stronger rivals.  That show-down is on December 28th, 7:00pm Pacific/10:00pm ET. I can't tell how that game will be broadcast outside of Connecticut (where you can watch it on CPTV).

To the people who piss on their accomplishments: If women's basketball is so lame, how come this team is so awesome? Are they space aliens? Robots? Are all these other women's college basketball programs disasters? There are two labels that get mapped onto female winners - that they are freaks, or that they are frauds. Marta, for example, is a "freak" - a total anomaly - the Huskies are "frauds" - who aren't the best team, but the least worst of teams playing not "real" basketball.  That is not only an insult to the Huskies, but a really profound insult to Baylor, Duke, Xavier, Tennessee, West Virginia, Texas A&M, Stanford, UCLA, UNC, Kentucky, Michigan State, Ohio State... 

Go Huskies - everyone but Florida wants you to take that record and destroy it. And "go!" to every team looking to take them down - because perhaps the only thing as awesome as holding a record like that, is being the team that breaks the streak.

For those of you who want to know more about women's college basketball, I recommend watching This Is a Game, Ladies, about C. Vivian Stringer and the Rutgers University women's basketball team. It's a GREAT documentary and available on netflix!

Disturbing allegations against South African team coach Makalakalane

While pundits whine about having to figure out where Qatar is and worry about overly long flights from one Russian World Cup match to another, players for the South African women's national team have come forward with charges that their coach, Augustine Makalakalane, sexually harassed the women and was openly, aggressively homophobic, declaring (for example) he only wanted "straight ladies on the team." Two former players charge that they were dropped from the team when they refused their coach's advances. They describe abusive behavior and a lack of respect for women and for the women's game.

Makalakalane (pictured here, center) is already in trouble with the South African Football Association, as his team failed to qualify for the 2011 World Cup when they lost to Equatorial Guinea and came in 3rd in the Africa Women's Championship this year. Makalakalane refused to call up any of the South African players living and playing abroad (Equitorian Guinea, on the other hand, is stacked with international players who were rushed through eligibility procedures), thereby cheating the team of the wisdom those more experienced players might have brought to the squad.

Players describe him as having a "stinking attitude" towards women. Banyana player Nthabiseng "Moemish" Matshaba alleges that the coach made direct advances toward her, and dropped her from the team for not sleeping with him - just before the African Women's Championship. According to Sameer Naik's story for IOL Sport, Matshaba

said she had been 'heart-broken' after she was left out of the squad, but will refuse to play under Makalakalane. Naik, "More allegations against Makalakalane," 11/27/2010

No one should have to endure such abusive behavior, and no one should have to feel that playing on a team requires their silence and complicity.

This story reminds me of a hypothesis I've been entertaining for the past year: FIFA's involvement in the women's game is in the best situations a mixed bag, and for a much of the world it has created serious problems - one which stunts, even prevents the development of national teams around the globe.

FIFA only got involved in the women's game in the late 1980s, after a Norwegian official became the first woman to speak at one of its congresses, with the demand that FIFA pay attention to the women's game. FIFA took on the organization of a World Cup in baby steps - at first refusing to associate its "brand" with women by calling its tournament anything but a "FIFA World Cup." But lo and behold, people cared, the games were great and there were real crowds in attendance.

Today, all FIFA associated national programs are supposed to have a women's program.  In order to submit a women's team to World Cup qualifications, that women's program must be run by the existing structures of the countries (men's) football association.

From the late 1980s through the 1990s, in those countries with women's soccer programs, the groups organizing national leagues and teams were forced (I don't think that's too strong a word) under the umbrella structure of the FIFA affiliated men's national association. This means that in a lot of countries, men who had enforced bans against women's soccer as recently as the mid 1980s were now charged with taking over women's soccer.

In South Africa (I am oversimplifying its history here), prior to its absorption by the South African Football Association, the South Africa Women's Football Association managed the national program. SAWFA's history is interesting, as they were originally white and colored, then integrated - there was a Black women's association as well - the South African Women's Soccer Association - which merged with the SAWFA before it was taken over by the SAFA. Also interesting: the period during which FIFA's involvment with the women's game forced the absorption of the women's association into SAFA - late 1980s/early 1990s - coincides with the transition from Apartheid - the first universal election was held in 1994.

By 1994, women's football was administered through the SAFA, and this is where the story starts getting very ugly. According to Cynthia Pelak's 2009 overview of women's soccer in South Africa (from which I take this history), "as more women showed up at their local soccer pitches, highly gendered spaces, more overt power struggles between men and women emerged." Around this time, serious charges against male owners and managers emerged, as they were accused of sexual harassment and financial mismanagement (and corruption). Players asked the SAFA for help and were ignored until a commissioned was formed in 1996. As a result, women's soccer - which had been "affiliated" with the SAFA - was brought fully into its organizational structure, as a subcommittee, allowing the women's programs more access to SAFA resources and adminsitrative support. But this did nothing to change the basic problems regarding the absence of women from leadership roles in the SAFA itself.

Pelak interviewed a SAFA administrator about the situation in Johannesburg in the 1990s:

The sport grew very rapidly and in 1994 we started having a lot of problems with men. They saw women’s sports growing and they wanted to come and start running it. We had huge troubles in those years – 1994, 95, and 96. It was really a tormented time for all of us. A lot of the women were threatened by these men and their kids intimidated. It led to the police being involved and all sorts of mess. And, unfortunately the men who were trying to take over the running of women’s football had connections with the federation [SAFA] and the federation supported them instead of the women. The people in charge did not take us seriously. We had to go to the Minister of Sports. And there was a huge commission for men and women in soccer [along with other concerns] and it took about three years to complete. It resulted in women being rendered powerless. It resulted in the federation disbanding women’s soccer as a separate entity and incorporating it into the men’s structure.   - SAFA adinsitrator interviewed by Cynthia Pelak, "Women and gender in South African Soccer: a brief history" in Soccer and Society (December, 2009)

To return to the emerging story regarding Makalakalane: For the sake of argument, let's assume these allegations are true. Let's assume that things would have to have gotten really bad for these stories to come out - for no female player who makes such a charge will do so with an expectation that she will go on to have a career playing for her national team, especially given the ongoing betrayal of women's trust in administrative structures like the SAFA.

Furthermore, given the grisly statistics regarding the numbers of South African women who experience sexual violence, and the frequency with which women footballers are subjected to extra-harassment for participating in a sport coded as masculine, it's very likely that players on this team are all too familiar with the dynamics of sexual abuse. And all too familiar with the systemic indifference to the problem in judicial and employment spheres.

Players come forward with these charges with the hope of making the national team better but they do so with few illusions about the struggle required to make such changes.

The team's manager, Fran Hilton-Smith, is a highly visible advocate within the SAFA. Patrick Baloyi reports that while players said they told Hilton-Smith about the situation, she was not given anything specific enough to respond to, until now. "Maybe the players were scared to talk," she posited, "because they wanted to play." In its investigation, apparently the SAFA brought a host of former players in for a confidential discussion of the crisis. This - bringing in senior and retired players - seems like a step in the right direction - and let's hope it is part of a broader effort to include such women in the administrative structures of the game.

A stronger female presence in the organization of football associations won't fix everything by a long stretch, but it has got to force some positive changes by at the very least raising awareness about what sexual harassment is, and how toxic it can be to any collective - I can't imagine anything destroying one's relationship to a team and the sport more than the systemic harassment these players are describing.

In any case, this is a reminder that the FIFA World Cup is a pop-up nation unto itself - hosting a World Cup is no magic elixir, and FIFA is not a human rights organization.  It's controlling presence in the sport works not in the service of the greater good, but in the service of globalization and to the benefit of the politico-economic forces invested not in making a better world, but in selling you an image of a better world, so that you can forget about the shitty one you actually live in.

Sorry for sour tone, but it's hard to put a positive spin on this story.



A few of the articles on the charges against Makalakalane:

"Good as Gone - 'If Fired, Life Goes on'" Sunday World (November 21, 2010)
Patrick Baloyi, "'Rude predator' 'randy coach' too hands-on" Sunday World (November 21, 2010)
Sameer Naik, "More allegations against Makalakalane" Sunday Independent (November 29, 2010)

And: I come across this story initially via the Justin Campaign's website. Glad the anti-homophobia campaign is reporting it, but I must confess that I was a bit turned off by their afterthought of a headline: "It's not just for men."