OPINION: Women Are Sacrifices For The Football Gods

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Steubenville-protestThe message was sent loud and clear Thursday. It was not in a joke, or in an angry tweet, or on a radio or TV show, or even in a pornographic video. The message was sent by one Roger S. Goodell. He’s not some asshole on the street, or the head of a regional conference, or even the marginal leader of a national association. Goodell IS the man in charge of running one entire sport. He is perhaps bigger than Sepp Blatter, Bernie Ecclestone, or even the head of the IOC. His decisions affect his one sport played around the world; no one is higher than he, even if there is a fledgling international federation. And the message he sent was clear: “women are to be sacrificed to our warriors, no matter the cost.”

The internet activists claim it is language, or religion, or television, or even rap music that creates a rape culture. That isn’t true: it’s power. Power to take what you want, and power to get away with it. What Roger Goodell signed off on with his pathetic two-game suspension (three less than Terrell Pryor’s ban for selling his own jersey, and that wasn’t even a league rule) was what every athletic director, school administrator, coach, and booster already practices: “winning comes first, nothing else matters.” It is the corrupt people in power, and we who watch the sport, who have turned that mantra into a weapon against women. It’s the chase of dollars for the administrations and the false hope of glory for the fans that have created this Football Culture.

Almost nine months ago, I wrote a story detailing the rape cases of Daisy Coleman, Lizzy Seeberg, and other nameless victims who’s cries were ignored because the football team came first. Since then, there’s been the revelation that Tallahassee police did not investigate a rape allegation against FSU star Jameis Winston. There was the revelation that Missouri failed to investigate a rape alleged by swimmer Sasha Menu Courey by a football player. The first time Sasha tried taking her life, she fought the first responders trying to stabilize her cut wrists, screaming “The system failed me, the system failed me!” On her second attempt, Sasha was unfortunately successful. We have heard the ugly interrogation of a female midshipmen who claimed she was raped by Navy football players, only to be asked on the stand how she performed oral sex and if she was wearing panties that night. Just this week, two Longhorns were charged with rape and of taking pictures of the underage victim. And then there’s Texas Tech: when a freshman corner is caught on tape punching a female basketball player hard enough to break a bone, not only is he exonerated by a grand jury, she gets a bigger suspension than he does. And the fact that almost the entire grand jury wrote a letter to his AD begging him to be put on the team should definitely make one smell a booster-sized rat. Oh, and did you know Steubenville coach Reno Saccoccia still has his job?

Language or male chauvinism didn’t cause these issues, but the fan-bases definitely deserve some blame. There’s no outrage at the Florida State fans constantly tweeting the accuser’s name to get it trending, or going on radio shows and trying to tell us how she was sleeping with everyone that night. One of those was a woman who called a show and claimed – and I didn’t believe her – that she was a rape victim herself, before going on a slut-shaming rant until the host rightfully stopped her. There’s the Mizzou faithful who try and paint Sasha Menu Courey as mentally unstable even though most don’t know who the accused was. There was the woman one year after Steubenville who, after the crowd applauded a team that got boat-raced by the Big Red, told a reporter that’s proof that they’re not bad people. Texas Tech fans will no doubt be on the defensive this fall, even if their freshman corner never makes the field. And there’s even some Ravens fans (or even potential fantasy owners) who are defending Ray Rice, saying “We don’t know what happened that night.” Even Mike Florio said it was possible he was defending himself in that elevator. Notre Dame has still shown more concern about a fake woman than a real woman who claimed she was raped by a player, who this spring went three rounds ahead of someone who’s a “distraction.”
At the end of the day, that’s the problem: Football Culture devalues women not because of society, but because “winning isn’t everything; it’s the only thing.” That’s what makes Goodell’s offense so odious: it’s reinforcing what’s already been established. The NFL pretends it cares about women by holding tea parties with Mommy Bloggers to (falsely) show how safe their sport is. Then they’ll spend a month with all-pink uniforms, watching anyone who speaks ill of the project get lynched by internet mobs while barely 5% of the proceeds make it to charity. They’ll even trot out the little YouTube star to show how girls can play football, too.

But they’ll never trot out Katy Hnida, though, the other girl who did make the team. The first woman kicker to play on a D-I team faced harassment at Colorado, and at one point claimed to have been raped by a teammate, and her cries fell on deaf ears. When reporters confronted her coach, he said she was “awful” and couldn’t “kick the ball through the uprights.” And while words only have power if you give it to them, the fact that his female university president tried defending his calling Hnida a “cunt” by using some medieval-era jargon shows exactly where the problem lies.
And that happened over TEN YEARS AGO.

So we’ll hear the inevitable shaming of rap music, or jokes, or Twitter, or television, but the real problem with Football Culture’s disrespect for women starts at the top. What Goodell did was give everyone a pass, letting all those within his realm know that it’ll be business as usual. The false image of the strong father figure coach will be in reality a no-necked failure trying to recapture his lost glory by raising his high schoolers as immoral warriors. The administrators will overlook harassment and accusations, and the small-town police will do the same. The college administrators will continue to bury the ugly truth, even though Title IX tells them not to. Campus and town police will continue to look the other way, and the coaches will intimidate any media member who dares bring it up. And with the disgusting conditioning of Football Culture, more players will make it to the NFL like Ray Rice, treating women as breathing sex dolls and warm punching bags.

Worst of all, Roger S. Goodell sent a message to all the little girls and young women across America. He sent a message to every one that said, “no,” “stop,” “please let me go,” or were too secretly drugged to say anything. He sent a message to every woman who said, “stop hurting me,” “why are you hitting me?”, or who couldn’t say anything because they were being choked or even unconscious. He sent a clear message to every girl and woman who deserves to be treated like a human being and not a sacrifice to the football gods. That message was this: “Shut up, lie on your back, put some ice on it, and quit crying.

“Together, we make football….whether you want to or not.”

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