{"id":1387,"date":"2014-12-15T23:36:13","date_gmt":"2014-12-15T22:36:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/?p=1387"},"modified":"2014-12-16T13:39:40","modified_gmt":"2014-12-16T12:39:40","slug":"itd-be-stupid-not-to-be-on-my-own-side-beware-theres-a-curmudgeon-in-the-ranks","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/itd-be-stupid-not-to-be-on-my-own-side-beware-theres-a-curmudgeon-in-the-ranks\/","title":{"rendered":"”It’d be stupid not to be on my own side” (beware, there’s a curmudgeon in the ranks)"},"content":{"rendered":"

British sport\u2019s annual celebration of itself has passed, with the 2014 BBC Sports Personality of the Year on 14 December. SPOTY<\/a>, as it is known, like a tragic adolescent is marked by slightly insecure self-congratulation. The 2014 award went to Lewis Hamilton \u2013 there no real surprise there, except among those who question the extent to which Formula 1 should be seen as a sport. More interesting was the presence of several women in the nomination list \u2013 middle distance runner Jo Pavey came in third (after golfer Rory McIlroy) while women Olympians were placed fourth, fifth and sixth in the popular vote (Charlotte Dujardin \u2013 dressage, Kelly Gallagher & Charlotte Evans \u2013 skiing, and Lizzy Yarnold \u2013 skeleton), but then these three sports have a long way to go before they have a significant hold on the British public imagination (and I am loathe to mention a good walk ruined or success only where the athlete sits down, or that I was paying attention only because I had voted \u2013 first time \u2013 to support a former student on the list; she came in 6th). By the standards of sport\u2019s usual celebration of blokes, this presence of women is impressive.<\/p>\n

There has been justified celebration of Jo Pavey\u2019s place on metaphorical podium, but the big excitement has been the Team of the Year award going to the English women\u2019s rugby team<\/a>. This was well deserved: they won the World Cup \u2013 leaving aside the men\u2019s rugby team, this is not something many English teams have done on recent years. But they have won it before, and in the years that I have been paying attention to women\u2019s international rugby (about 20 or so now) England has been a major force in the game, consistently ranked in the top two or three, and unlike the men\u2019s team the women have been consistent in their ranking rather than peaking in World Cup years. Until this year, New Zealand has always been there as well (much as it pains me to say, they aren\u2019t and they don\u2019t deserve to be): there is no doubt that the England team is the dominant women\u2019s team in rugby.<\/p>\n

The response to this award has been fulsome; for the most part just a little excessive in the claims that the world of sport has changed as a result of this recognition (coming on top of the 45,619 who turned out to see women\u2019s football teams from England & Germany play at Wembley<\/a> in November, the excitement is easy to explain). [I just know I\u2019m going to be held up as a curmudgeon, cynic and scoundrel for this\u2026\u2026. including by many chums whose Sunday night social media excitement seemed to get the better of them.] Other than winning the world cup this year, which they have done before (although not for quite a while), it is hard to see any \u2018objective\u2019 change in the England women\u2019s team that should have resulted in this award \u2013 that is, that resulted in the recognition of the team\u2019s years of success and quality by the sports establishment, so maybe the \u2018excess\u2019 has some basis and this is a change in the sport establishment\u2019s outlook, but I am sceptical. If they haven\u2019t already, wait for the right-wing commentators to point out that 2014 was an abysmal year for men\u2019s teams, so the England women\u2019s rugby team didn\u2019t have much competition \u2013 but then most years are abysmal for England\u2019s men\u2019s teams in most sports.<\/p>\n

The danger of the \u2018this changes everything\u2019 rhetoric is not how these misogynist dinosaurs respond to this award, but the way it can be used to feed sports\u2019 dominant anti-feminism \u2013 the line that, in its polite form, resembles the \u2018things are getting better, so tone down the complaints\u2019 statements we seem to hear so often. There have been plenty of things in the current year that tell us that feeding the \u2018things are getting better\u2019 beast should be avoided: not entirely at random, I turn to four cases of a very different kind, but a common theme \u2013 things might be getting better, but there is a hell of a long way to go before we might even start to hope that sport is a welcoming place for women (let alone gay men or transgender\/transsexual athletes).<\/p>\n

Case 1<\/strong>: the British Parliament. In July 2014 the House of Commons Culture, Media and Sport Committee issued a report on Women and Sport<\/a> that spoke of \u201cpersistently low participation in sport by women and girls\u201d who had been \u201cdeterred from participating in sport\u201d, often in a school system where there is \u201ca perception \u2026 that schools care more about, and spend more money on, sport for boys than for girls\u201d. Public institutions and sports bodies were criticised for a lack of imagination in programmes offered for girls and women, often in \u201cdilapidated and outdated facilities\u201d, while women administrators and coaches were subject to \u201csexism and lack of respect\u201d, while both media and other industries marginalise women\u2019s sport coverage and funding. It does not make for celebratory reading, but as with many official reports what it doesn\u2019t say is as significant. The report praises the support given to \u201cdance, running, swimming, tennis\u201d in their efforts to increase participation of women and girls \u2013 but these are sports\/activities traditionally coded feminine or at least neutral; absent is praise for sports traditionally seen as bastions of manliness \u2013 football, cricket, rugby and so forth (which makes the award to the English women\u2019s rugby team all the more impressive). The makeup of the committee is far from radical, and some of its members would likely be horrified to be labelled \u2018feminist\u2019; even so, this is an indictment, but far from radical critique, of the state of British sport for women.<\/p>\n

Case 2<\/strong>: American Football. I doubt I need to say much here. In February Baltimore Raven\u2019s player Ray Rice beat his fianc\u00e9 Janay Palmer unconscious; we know this because he was caught on film in a casino dragging her (unconscious) from an elevator. The team\u2019s initial response was to suspend him for two games. I don\u2019t want to get into the role model thing here \u2013 I don\u2019t buy it, but mainstream sport does play the role model game, which suggests to me that the Ravens management sees violence against women (as in beating her to unconsciousness) as less important\/problematic than recreational drug use. Not surprisingly, there was a public outcry against this decision, and the Ravens finally sacked (the term they use is ’released’) Rice\u2026\u2026 in September, 7 months after the event.<\/p>\n

Case 3<\/strong>: the IAAF. This federation sex tests women, not men, only women, but they\u2019re not worried that men might be pretending to be women on the track; the athletes who have been suspended have been suspected of being (various forms of) intersexual, as in the case of Caster Semenya \u2013 described as having a \u2018rare medical condition that gave her a competitive advantage\u2019 \u2013 or the less high profile cases of Santhi Soundarajan and Pinki Pramanik, or of producing too much testosterone. This question of testosterone-production is this year\u2019s sex testing issue, focussed on sprinter Dutee Chand, dropped from the Indian Commonwealth Games athletics team for having hyperandrogenism, even the name of the \u2018condition\u2019 is telling \u2013 this is not just androgyny, but hyper\u2026.. (These are not well connected or powerful women, but they have had strong support from Indian feminist activists in a wider international network, such as Payoshni Mitra who lays out the issues in this interview<\/a>, in campaigns seeking justice for these athletes.) Dutee Chand\u2019s case is still before the Court of Arbitration for Sport, but the bigger issue here is that the IAAF\u2019s actions cast athletics as a male pursuit, normalise masculinity in athletics and treat women athletes as interlopers in a male domain.<\/p>\n

Case 4<\/strong>: trop belle pour volleyball. During the Asian U-19 Volleyball Championships in Taiwan in July, Kazakh volleyball player Sabina Altynbekova<\/a> was dropped from the team for being \u2018too good looking\u2019. The story is a little more complex than the headline, but not much; and the team\u2019s coach argued that Altynbekova was dropped because the public and media attention was a distraction for the rest of the team, while her response was to call for a focus on her playing abilities \u2013 she became well known for everything other than her high quality play and the institutions of sport failed to support her in that tournament. This is not an isolated case though \u2013 just think of all those photos of attractive young women in sports crowds; at men\u2019s world cup matches in Brazil over the summer; during cricket coverage; at the tennis; and, well, everywhere else.<\/p>\n

So, let\u2019s celebrate English women\u2019s rugby team\u2019s award \u2013 it is a great thing for the team and its members \u2013 but let\u2019s not get too excited. I\u2019m delighted to see so many US athletes taking high profile public stand against racist violence by the police (#blacklivesmatter<\/a>) and pleased that many sports teams and franchises seem to realise that disciplining these athletes would be likely to backfire on them. As I write, trending on Twitter (from @ShequalityMatte<\/a>) there is a Maya Angelou quotation: \u201cI’m a Feminist. I’ve been female for a long time now. It’d be stupid not to be on my own side.\u201d In that spirit, I\u2019m looking forward to the day when the same number and profile of athletes, globally, shift their focus to coordinated work to change the sexist attitudes that pervade sport and its structures and practices that maintain those views. Until then, let\u2019s stick to the feminist guns and not risk giving the sport\u2019s masculinist forces ammunition to undermine the cause: let\u2019s celebrate the English women’s rugby team\u2019s award but let’s not pretend it changes the world.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

British sport\u2019s annual celebration of itself has passed, with the 2014 BBC Sports Personality of the Year on 14 December. SPOTY, as it is known, like a tragic adolescent is marked by slightly insecure self-congratulation. The 2014 award went to Lewis Hamilton \u2013 there no real surprise there, except among those who question the extent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1387","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-okategoriserade"},"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2JbBl-mn","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1387","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/11"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1387"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1387\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1387"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1387"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1387"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}