I hear you sister
Anna Clark from Bitch Magazine explains why feminism and the love of sport are not incompatible
Top Ten Reasons Why This Feminist is a Sports Fan: #10
So. This doesn’t happen all the time. But it happens a lot.
I get quite a bit of surprised responses when folks find out that I’m an avid sports fan. An incredulous “You really know your shit,” says someone, or maybe, more derisively, “Where did that come from?” Or else, I get a well-meaning affirmation that I’ll make some guy very lucky (presumably because the guy will get to share his presumed sports fandom with his girlfriend).
These are the reactions that come from folks who simply don’t expect females to know much about sports. But there’s another kind of surprised response that I get from progressive friends who don’t buy into sports and, especially, sports culture. They will point out that the sports world is saturated with macho posturing. It frequently excuses the bad behavior of its heroes; it celebrates brute force; it’s history is poisoned by cheating and drug-use; and it is often actively and explicitly hostile to women.
How, these friends wonder, can I get into it? How could I possibly reconcile my feminism with it?
Well, folks, I do, and quite passionately so. (Though of course I have my eyes wide open; it is because of my love of sports that I intend to not ever justify the worst of it).
Why that love? I offer a Top Ten list as my feminist case for why sports are so meaningful and so much fun … coming to you in a series of parts:*
Read on http://bitchmagazine.org/post/top-ten-reasons-why-this-feminist-is-a-sports-fan-part-1
Footballers behaving badly on RN
I love an ambiguous headline. Actually it’s Kim Toffoletti talking about footballers behaving badly in her recent
2010 Pamela Denoon lecture.
Allegations of sexual misconduct by sportsmen seem to appear in the Australian news media on a disturbingly regular basis. Using the 2004 allegations of sexual assault made against AFL and NRL players as a starting point, this talk asks why it is that male athletes of major sports like football and rugby are often linked to incidents of bad behaviour toward women. Do men’s sports breed a negative attitude toward women? And what can be done to change how players relate to women in off-field situations? Drawing on my own research into women sports fans’ perceptions of player misconduct, I reflect on the consequences of ‘footballers behaving badly’ for women within and beyond the sporting sphere, and consider how feminist thinking and action can play a role in changing the way that we, as a community, respond to sportsmen’s attitudes toward women.
Listen to it here: http://www.abc.net.au/rn/bigideas/stories/2010/2849820.htm
Fevola’s Ass
This could be Brendon Fevola’s ass. It’s not – but it could be. Then again it could be his head. (Apologies to whoever’s ass it actually is)
I’ve never looked closely enough at Fev’s ass to know what it might look like when it’s not in a pair of shorts. In fact, surprisingly, I’ve never looked much at any footballer’s ass. My husband is an ass man (he does prefer women’s asses, though – who wouldn’t). I prefer shoulders. Preferably shoulders that have a modicum of intelligence attached to them.
Footballers do tend to have nice shoulders. But curiously I’m only interested in them when they’re attached to arms that are gathering the football on the half forward flank and dropping it onto their boot to spear it to a leading Richmond forward 25 metres out, directly in front. Or when they’re attached to a body that’s laying a fierce bump on an opponent to knock them off course and force a turnover. Or when they’re part of the majestic silhouette that forms when a player takes off and pulls down a contested mark.
About 50% of people who support football are women – that’s not a guess, that’s a fact. And yet the myth that women watch football because they like to watch hot guys run around in shorts persists. Now the first point to make is that not all footballers are hot – Fevola is a case in point. Unlike Fev a lot of footballers are nice guys – despite reports that reduce all of them to the caricatures that non-football fans like to believe accurately describe footballers in ways that would be decried and despised if they were applied to any other section of the population. But nice is not really motivation enough to turn up week in and week out to support a team. And if female spectatorship was really driven by desire, then the sounds of the game might be noticeably different.
I can’t speak on behalf of hundreds of thousands of women, but I can say that the same things that attract other supporters to football are the very things that attract me. The spectacle, the camaraderie, the drama and admiration for and derision of sport played at its best and its worst. Plus the little things that characterise my personal experience – meeting friends at the pub beforehand and the walk through the back streets of Richmond to the G, standing with my son sharing something that doesn’t really require conversation, the anticipation before a game and the occasional joy from a win which is then watched and relived again on returning home.
It’s curious that men are never asked to justify their passion for football and yet women are constantly answering the question. But for the record, it’s got nothing to do with Fevola’s, or anyone else’s, ass.
Pamela Denoon Lecture: Wednesday 10 March at 8pm. Manning Clark Lecture Room, Australian National University, Canberra.
By Kim Toffoletti
Allegations of sexual misconduct by sportsmen appear in the Australian news media on a disturbingly regular basis. Why is it that male athletes of major sports like football and rugby are often linked to incidents of bad behaviour toward women? Do men’s sports breed a negative attitude to women? And what can be done to change how players relate to women in off-field situations? How can feminist thinking and action play a role in changing sportsmen’s attitudes toward women?
Kim Toffoletti is a senior lecturer at Deakin University. She is currently investigating female AFL fans and how they maintain or challenge player’s behaviour and this has had considerable media coverage in Victoria.
Entry is by donation and no booking is required. There will be nibbles for free and drinks for sale after the lecture so you can network. For those who cannot come to Canberra we will have the lecture up on our website a day or two after the lecture
The good, the bad and the ugly
Cold reality hits when the AFL ride ends – RFNews – realfooty.com.au
Cold reality hits when the AFL ride endsTimothy Boyle | October 3, 2009
“MOST of the good things that happen to you in the AFL – like most good things in general – are only really definable once lost. You may perhaps know that something is good or be grateful for it, but until that something ends its goodness is immeasurable. I knew to some extent that the AFL as an experience was a rarity, but only now that it’s ended can I take its full measure.
Although the AFL, for the most part, operates under the laws of society, it is by any other measure a world of its own. Like riding in the palm of a giant, you’re held aloft and safe from the world and infused with a brilliant, but false, sense of power.
Eventually, football opens its palm and pours you back into the world. For me, it’s a little colder, a little bigger and a little lonelier than I remember.
I’m sure there were times during injury and poor form that I considered bad times in my career. Maybe there were even times when I doubted football as a positive thing. The mind has a strange way of absolving anything that stains an otherwise good memory and, in retrospect, there are a lot of things I’ll miss.
The drawbacks of a great experience are shelved somewhere in one’s mind for the betterment of its memory. Like a lesson learnt through hardship, barely spoken of again but tidied into self-awareness by the sub-conscious.”
Read more > http://www.realfooty.com.au/news/rfnews/cold-reality-hits/2009/10/02/1254418713081.html
Reading this reminds me of why I despise players like Brendon Fevola. That fact that someone as stupid as Fevola gets so much attention (mainly for being stupid) and takes the spotlight away from the other kinds of young people, like Tim Boyle, who play AFL, is his real crime. Tim is obviously thoughtful, intelligent and not as uncommon as those who want to believe that people like Fevola ‘represent’ AFL players. I was recently at a conference about football, gender and race and one of the speakers spoke incredulously of the possibility of considering AFL footballers as ‘positive role models’. I felt mildly infuriated. But then I realised that to those ‘outside’ football culture, the stories and images that remain in their minds are those created by the likes of Fevola and his knuckle headed mate, Sam Newman.
Nice work, Tim.
Making his mark
My grandfather, Fred Dummett, was rushed to hospital yesterday – he’s 95. It’s not the first time this year but this time his heart stopped twice. Amazingly, they got it going again and implanted a pacemaker. We’re not sure if he’s out of the woods yet. He looked pretty good when I saw him in the hospital today – apart from the black and blue arms and the slightly grey pallor. I asked him what the hell he’d been up to. “You look like you just played a tough game of footy”. He laughed. “Not as bad as that” he said.
Pa was a terrific footballer, a six foot ruckman who played in the 1930′s for Sandringham and the Holeproof factory team. He says he would just tap it down to the little blokes and let them do the rest. I suspect he is being modest. He saw his first game of VFL when he was taken by his uncle Harry Dummett in 1919 to watch Fitzroy play Collingwood at the Brunswick Street Oval. His Uncle Harry would later become a Mayor of Collingwood but he barracked for Fitzroy at the time and made the young Fred promise to do the same. Fred says he crossed his fingers behind his back and promised. But when he got to the ground, he let loose with a ‘Go Magpies’. The Pies won the flag that year and pa, like Digger of Coodabeens fame, can actually claim to have barracked for the Pies for over 89 years.
A host of Dummetts have had successful VFL careers. Alf ‘Rosie’ Dummett played 118 games for Collingwood between 1901-10. Recruited locally, he was a star defender in Collingwood’s earliest league era, played in the 1902-03 Magpie premiership sides, and captained the club for part of the 1906 season. After his playing career ended he served as the Vice President of the Collingwood Football Club and from 1936 to 1952 was the Victorian chairman of selectors. Charlie Dummett also played for Collingwood but only managed 4 games between 1909 and 1911. Arthur ‘Bob’ Dummett played for 77 games for Richmond between 1954 and 1961. He was Richmond’s leading goalkicker in 1956, 1957 and 1959 and played in two Reserves premierships for the Tigers.
Fred’s football career was, in a sense, determined by his circumstances. Born the same year that his father died at Gallopoli, Fred spent a good deal of time with his cousins and uncles in Clifton Hill, away from his mother in Fairfield, who took to the bottle after the death of her 19 year old husband. She later married again, to a peanut farmer from Kingaroy, and Fred lived for a while on the farm in Queensland until a tragic accident saw his step-father lose both his leg and his livelihood. The family returned to Melbourne and Fred grew up around Collingwood and Clifton Hill.
As a young man in the 1930′s, Pa was incredibly industrious. He had various jobs, running for an SP bookie, working on the machine at Holeproof textile factory in Brunswick and playing football. He was paid more his football that his work at Holeproof. He was offered four pounds a week (a princely sum) to play for Collingwood but turned it down to play for Sandringham for five pounds a week. His boss at Holeproof got wind of his footballing prowess and asked him to set up a team for the men at Holeproof to play in the in the VFA Thirds competition. This entry from the Northern Bullants website provides more details:
Several V.F.A. clubs had fielded Thirds and Fourths sides in junior competitions, but 1939 saw the formation of the first Preston Thirds team, and after competing against other teams that had existed for some years, they did a fine job to finish fourth, losing narrowly to Brunswick in the semi-final.
The rules under which the clubs played have been lost over time, but it doesn’t appear to have been a competition restricted to a specific age group as there are references to a couple of well-known former senior players amongst the ranks of other teams. The following season provided undoubtedly the wackiest score-line ever recorded by a Preston team when they missed out on a “premiership” by just eight points despite outscoring their opponents by 12 goals!
The Thirds competition consisted of teams directly linked to several senior clubs (Port Melbourne, Prahran, Preston and Brunswick), a couple of teams sponsored by V.F.A. clubs (West Coburg/Coburg and Northcote Sons of Soldiers/Northcote), and a mixture of local and industrial teams.
In 1940, a new team from Holeproof, the well-known clothing manufacturer, joined the ranks. Although they didn’t win many games, Holeproof’s early efforts were competitive, but became rather more modest (although perhaps by design) late in the season.
The year was dominated by Newmarket, West Coburg, Brunswick and Prahran and a quick check of remaining records suggests that none of them dropped a game against a non-final four team.
Perhaps the strength of the leading clubs was behind a decision by the competition’s organisers to augment the normal final series with a second “handicap premiership” for the next four clubs that did not make the normal finals. Just when the series was organised is not clear from the few snippets remaining, but perhaps the Holeproof team saw an opportunity to “run dead” to help their chances of slipping under the handicapper’s guard.
From what can be traced of the known scores, Preston missed the regular finals narrowly and were eventually handicapped on minus 20 points with Port Melbourne on “scratch”, Northcote on plus 20 and the dark horses from Holeproof awarded a whopping 60 points start!
Preston’s 32 (or 12) point win over Port in the second semi-final was enough to get them to the Grand Final, but Northcote’s 12.13.85 “victory” over Holeproof 10.7.67 left them well short of the 40 point margin required.
The absurdity of the handicapping became obvious when Holeproof, although receiving 60 points from Port Melbourne, actually won the preliminary final outright,13.10.88 to 11.18.82 (realistically a 66 point victory).
I’m not sure what the outcome was but it does smack of a certain canniness I see very clearly in my grandfather. While I certainly wouldn’t ever accuse him of tanking, I can imagine him being pleased to create a situation where his factory bosses were pleased with his efforts and the efforts of the team. It was the Depression after all.
Pa would be happy now to accomplish just two goals – to make the tonne and to see his beloved Pies win another premiership. Well, pa, I’m with you on the first one…
And they call us hysterical….
“In the latest dispatch from the End of Civilisation, I feel compelled to reveal a harrowing experience I had recently, an experience so disturbing that I have only just stopped shaking enough to write.
There I was, hoping for a relaxing Saturday, sitting down in front of the TV to enjoy a nice day’s football, when something so horrible, so dreadful, so blood-chilling happened that I can scarcely believe it wasn’t a dream.
The football started, the players hurled themselves into action, but as I pumped up the volume I heard it: a woman’s voice.”
Ben Pobjie’s ironic piece in this week’s Crikey (Keeping women in their place: on the Brownlow red carpet. Wearing dresses – http://tiny.cc/PJHxh) was instructive, less so for its satirising of the hysteria that has accompanied Kelli Underwood’s debut as a commentator (listen to this on Neil Mitchell if you don’t know what I mean – http://tiny.cc/J2LTJ) than it was for the content of the comments submitted on the article.
Apart from the fact that some Crikey readers can’t recognise satire when they see it, one might have expected the level of debate about whether having a woman call the football is a good thing or not might have produced slightly more enlightened comments than that of Crikey reader, Margaret Wenham:
Could be any number of factors: the girly voice, the fact that she (like I) is female and has never played and will never play the game (particularly at AFL level) and therefore can never know what it’s like and what it takes physically and mentally, or the constant stream of call cliches. Most likely it’s a combination, but the latter really grinds my goat. As for the Brownlows, if I had my druthers the chicks would be banned from that as well. Sorry girls, but‘s just not about you.
Hmmmm. Apart from wondering how one does ‘grind a goat’ – the mind boggles – Anthony Hudson and Steve Quartermain, on this reckoning, should be immediately out of a job.
A cursory search of the comments on other publications featuring stories on Kelli Underwood display an expected litany of similar complaints – her voice is too high, she speaks in clichés, and so it goes. Most of it is from men.
Most disturbing though is the level of vitriol coming from other women. Take Kaz from Sydney:
Her voice is annoying that is my primary thing, but yes i will say i don’t like it, what is next a women in the ch 9 cricket team with Bill , Tony and the Boys. I think my late grandfather said it correctly …just cause you can doesn’t mean you should.
Not exactly Solidarity Forever. Still not quite as bad as Vic whose misspelt misogyny took me right back to the days of back to back Magpie premierships and smoking on the ground at half-time:
Shielas calling the football, the AFL is really trying to cut costs now. Managed to hear call 10 minutes of a game just is not right changed the channel. The VFL has gone down the toilet alright.
S’pose the reference to the VFL should have been a giveaway…
What’s right and wrong with Women’s Round
OK. It’s important to recognise the contribution women make to AFL football and to celebrate this as often as possible. But is a dedicated Women’s Round the way to do this?
When the idea was first proposed, the editor of The Age, in an editorial titled ‘AFL’s Women’s Week (ladies bring a plate)’, made the following observations:
For an indication of just how far the football world still has to go on gender issues, consider the following. This coming week has been designated Women’s Week by the Australian Football League. To mark the occasion, the round 7 match between Hawthorn and Geelong at Docklands has, according to the official AFL website, been designated Ladies’ Round. The unanswered question is whether they will be expected to bring a plate. There are, as recent allegations indicate, far more serious examples of the lower status of women in the world of football. That these persist, decades after attitudes that foster discrimination against women have been routed from workplaces, social organisations and even other sports, is a sorry commentary on football, its administrators and the personalities who make a living from promoting the game. (Read the full editorial here)
Pointing quite rightly to the fact that women have made an enormous (often unacknowledged) contribution to the game, The Age alludes to a view shared by many others that while women’s week is a possible step in the right direction, it still falls somewhat short of the mark (pardon the pun). By ghettoising women’s support, supporters who make up almost 50% of the spectator group each week at most AFL games, it runs the risk of positioning women as a kind of ‘special case’. Should there in fact not be a Men’s Round as well – or perhaps a Men Who Never Played the Game But Love It Regardless Round, to be more accurate.
While it is true that most women have not played any football, let alone AFL football, their support is as passionate and ruthless and intense as anyone else’s.
In her provocatively titled essay, ‘Up Yours, Cazaly’ written in 2004, Phillipa Hawker, a die hard St Kilda supporter and lover of the game, argues that Women’s Round, while obviously well intentioned, invokes women’s love of the game as a kind of soft lens version of the real (read male) thing – all slow motion graphics and tea cakes and putting bandaids on little johnny’s knees (my words, not hers).
As she says,
Very nice, very admirable, and nothing much to do with intensity, excess, absurdity and ambivalence, the things that football seems to be about. And hate. Let’s not forget hate.
She has a point. Women don’t just go to the footy to admire the spectacle or to bravely hope for a nice little victory (though we do do both of these things). We go to yell and to despair and to rant as well. Because we all know that joy and pain, like love and hate, are just different sides of the same coin. I love Richmond and I know that part of loving Richmond involves hating Carlton. And I love that they hate us back.
And for female supporters, this love and hate is not something new. Rob Hess, in an article titled ‘Ladies are ‘specially invited: women in the culture of Australian rules football’ quotes from the Argus in 1896:
The woman ‘barracker’, indeed, has become one the most
objectionable of football surroundings. On some grounds they
actually spit in the faces of players as they come to the dressingrooms,or wreak their spite much more maliciously with long hat pins. In the heights of this melee some of the women screamed withfear. Others screamed ‘Kill him’. One of these gentle maidens at the close of the struggle remarked regretfully that it was a pity they ‘let off the umpire in the Geelong match, as they should have killed him. Yet these women consider themselves respectable, and they ‘support’ football, which is consequently in a serious decline. (Quoted in Hess, 2000)
So, where does this leave us? How do we ensure that women are made to feel valued by the competition they love (and hate) but above all support in so many ways?
