Lizzy Seeberg, Daisy Coleman, the Steubenville rape victim — all three young women were targeted by young men who had two things in common: they felt entitled to the bodies of women regardless of whether the women consented to sexual contact, and all were athletes. But a similar attitude about having a sexual “right” to the bodies of men isn’t nurtured on all-female teams.
Over the weekend, The Nation’s Dave Zirin wrote a column wherein he argued what he calls an uncomfortable truth: organized sports, he says, contribute to widespread attitudes of aggressive sexual entitlement to women’s bodies and a disregard for their agency and consent. In other words, “rape culture.”
The jock culture/rape culture dynamic should be obvious to anyone with any connection to organized sports. I saw it on the teams on which I played and I saw it on the team’s I’ve covered. I’ve heard the stories from athletes I’ve interviewed and from women with detailed descriptions of rape that go unpunished if someone with sports-related status is accused. I have seen it in the story of Lizzie Seeberg and the ways people still pretend that Notre Dame football is a bastion of morality.
The fact is that too many young male athletes are taught to see women as the spoils of being a jock. These young men are treated like gods by the adults who are supposed to be mentoring them—like cash cows by administrators who use their on-field exploits to extract money from politicians and alums.
Zirin goes on to argue that, duh, of course not every man who plays aggressive team sports becomes an insatiable rape-bot. But an attitude of tolerance and even encouragement of sexually aggressive and exploitative behavior (or turning a willful blind eye to such behavior) is so woven into “jock culture” that a serious intervention is needed to fix it.
I appreciate Zirin’s take on sex assault, young men, and sports, and I don’t disagree with his assertion that people at all levels of the athletic-industrial complex — coaches, other non-rapey sports playing dudes, athletic directors, etc — need to drive home the point that women are, in fact, people and not prizes. I’m on board with Zirin’s observation that young men who happen to be gifted athletes are enabled and lionized by coaches and treated like fancy show ponies by colleges who massively profit from their on-field exploits. No one intervenes. Kid gloves are donned. And, we end up with Steubenville. Seeberg. Vanderbilt.
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