Unsportsmanlike Conduct. Jessica Luther
I’m discussing.
“Rape” is a much more specific term that refers to someone penetrating another person’s body without their consent. The FBI describes it this way: “Penetration, no matter how slight, of the vagina or anus with any body part or object, or oral penetration by a sex organ of another person, without the consent of the victim.”[12] While this seems like a settled idea, the FBI only recently updated this definition in January 2012 (becoming effective a year later), after it was determined that the eighty-year-old definition (“The carnal knowledge of a female forcibly and against her will”) was too vague. I will use “rape” when talking about cases where one person rapes another person and, if possible and trying not to be gratuitous or sensational, will be specific about how the person raped the other.
“Rape culture” is all around us all the time. It is a culture where people, mainly women, come to expect a form of sexual harassment, assault, or rape at some point, perhaps daily, because we minimize, ignore, or make excuses for the reality of sexual violence in many people’s lives. It blames the victim when violence does happen and it rarely punishes the perpetrator for inflicting it. It is a culture where, no matter what the statistics tell us about the rarity of people lying about being sexually assaulted but also the prevalence of sexual violence, it is nonetheless easy to believe the victim is lying.
“Consent” is someone granting someone else the right to touch, hug, caress, kiss, or have sex with them. It can be communicated in a number of ways but it must be communicated in some way. If anyone is not 100 percent sure they have someone’s consent, then they don’t have it, and should communicate with that person to gain consent before proceeding. It is also the legal concept at the center of sexual assault cases. Minors cannot legally consent to sexual acts, nor can people who are incapacitated (including if someone has had a lot of alcohol to drink, taken drugs, etc.).
VII.
There is much to say about college football and sexual violence, about how it is and how it could be. And so this book is divided into two sections.
First, I sketch out the playbook everyone has been following for decades when someone reports that a college football player has sexually assaulted them. I look at the patterns across the cases I’ve uncovered and establish the field of play on which this playbook is enacted. After tackling the complicated ways that race, gender, and money affect how we view these cases and the players involved in them, each chapter examines the kinds of plays different groups opt to run in response to reports of sexual violence: universities and their athletic departments ignore them, the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) keeps its head in the sand, the media try to move on quickly, and fans get mad.
By shining a light directly on this playbook, this book attempts to start multiple conversations around a topic that shows no signs of going away anytime soon.
Second, I draft a new playbook, one full of possibilities for mitigating these problems. It is a desperate list of alternative plays that will be more difficult to implement than what we are used to. But they will push on our established ideas about how the game is played and, in turn, offer the possibility of a better, safer, more fair game in the future.
There is an idea that sports teach kids discipline, rule-following, and sportsmanship. The last is a loosely defined concept that encompasses such things as respect for the opposing team, graciousness in defeat, and humility in victory. True sportsmen are never mean in their interactions with the other team, they are not flagrant in their fouls, and they do not bring violence into the game that goes above and beyond what is written into the games’ rule book. In college football, unsportsmanlike conduct can get you thrown off the field. Racial slurs and swinging punches can get you ejected. Because to be unsportsmanlike in your conduct is to destroy the very heart of sport, to make a space governed by rules suddenly dangerously unpredictable and even violent.
In the playbook as it stands now, sexual assault is not an immediate ejection from the game, sometimes not even a foul. It is easy to say that you do not condone this kind of violence; it is infinitely harder to take a hard look at how the very sport you love contributes to a culture that ignores, minimizes, and sometimes perpetrates it. It can feel that to change it is impossible. Let’s do that hard look and then let’s draw up a new playbook that says sexual assault is, in fact, unsportsmanlike conduct.
To do any of this without first addressing the idea that these cases are isolated events, not part of a larger pattern, would be irresponsible, because there is a pattern if you are willing to see it.
This is a book about college football and sexual violence. There’s nothing easy about what lies ahead in the following pages. I will not sanitize descriptions of violence, and violence is what this book is about. It’s a kind of violence that is all around us all the time, that affects so many people, often repeatedly throughout their lives. This is a warning then for those who might be triggered by descriptions of sexual violence or interpersonal violence. If you turn back now, get to a point in the book and put it down to never return, skim over large chunks, or read it in short, manageable pieces, then you will, in some way, mirror my own process of writing this. Dealing so directly with this kind of everyday violence that we are constantly forced to make sense of is hard emotional work. Reading this will be that too.
It’s worth it, though. Because we need to have this conversation and we need to be honest when we do it.
PART I
The Playbook As It Is
1.
The Field
I.
A playbook only exists if you have a field on which to run your plays. That “field,” for this playbook, is a football culture saturated with a masculinity which can manifest in horrible ways.
Football is one of the premier lenses through which we define masculinity in our culture. Who is more masculine than men who take to the football field and run headlong into each other, battering their bodies together, doing what most of us would be terrified to do if placed in that space? But that masculinity can encourage terrible behavior.
In a piece for the Advocate in March 2015, Wade Davis, a former NFL prospect and the executive director of You Can Play, an organization whose mission is to help end homophobia in sports, defined masculinity as “the ways in which we expect ‘men’ to act,” but noted that there is no one standard definition.[13] There are a multitude of ways that one can be “masculine,” based on the person or grouping defining it. One of the most important ways it is defined is as the absence of the feminine. Davis writes, “If masculinity is idolized, then ‘femininity’ (another indefinable word) is, by default, demonized, and for many, never as worthy. Sexism, the root of homophobia, creates the conditions for individuals to feel as if they have to perform certain rigid tropes of masculinity and femininity in order to be perceived as normal and acceptable.”
In sports, football in particular, masculinity that is considered “normal and acceptable” can be dangerous, both to the players themselves who put their bodies on the line and the people around them in their off-field lives who have to interact with these hypermasculine men. A 1999 study found that the message boys receive when watching sports is that
a real man is strong, tough, aggressive, and, above all, a winner in what is still a man’s world. To be a winner, he must be willing to compromise his own long-term health by showing guts in the face of danger, by fighting other men when necessary, and by “playing hurt” when he’s injured. He must avoid being soft; he must be the aggressor, both on the “battle fields” of sports and in his consumption choices. Whether he is playing sports or making choices about which products to purchase, his aggressiveness will win him the ultimate prize: the adoring attention of beautiful women and the admiration of other men. [14]
The outcome of this in real life can be confusing. While players are celebrated and financially rewarded for being aggressive, strong fighters