Interview: Jennifer Doyle on the Structures of Sexual Assault in Sport
In this episode, Brenda Elsey interviews Jennifer Doyle, professor at UC Riverside and author of Campus Sex, Campus Security. They discuss the gendered structures within society that support a culture of sexual assault in sport, and how to better understand its pervasive and pernicious effects.
This episode was produced by Tressa Versteeg. Shelby Weldon is our social media and website specialist. Burn It All Down is part of the Blue Wire podcast network.
Transcript
Brenda: I am so excited to welcome back to the show Dr. Jennifer Doyle, a professor at UC Riverside, author of Campus Sex, Campus Security, infrequent blogger at The Sport Spectacle, infrequent but powerful Twitter presence @FromALeftWing, and a conspirator and collaborator of mine – and a lot of us – and really an important, critical voice in any discussion about sexual assault in sport and beyond. We're going to talk about that. So, welcome again to the show, Jen.
Jennifer: Thank you for having me on.
Brenda: I want to ask…So, I could repeat the sentence, and probably have, so, I could push the forward button or the reverse button in history and I'd be saying the same thing, which is: recently, there have been a scourge, a spate of allegations – if we want to even use that word – about sexual assault, sexual harassment, a spectrum of gendered violence within sport. And I want to ask you then, how do we continue to have this conversation in a way that's not just repetitive and frustrating? How do we not find ourselves broken-recording all the time?
Jennifer: Yeah. There's a couple of challenges to that. One is that as long as we have this kind of corrupt, patriarchal architecture that's holding our love for the game, you know, that attachment to the game is going to be violated by it over and over and over again. And then within that culture, there's this strange thing that happens where there's like a discourse that on the one hand, you know, there's obviously outrage by sexual abuse and harassment, titillated by sex scandals…We can only look to politics, right, to see the disorienting way in which we have a super abundance of sex scandals that never seem to matter or change anything, right? And I'd say it's even kind of accelerated and condensed around our political culture, as evidenced by the last president. [laughs]
So, you know, sports isn't like a space apart from our political culture or sociopolitical moment on that front. And so sex and power, the story of the relationship between sex and power, it’s like baked in to - again, I'm going to use that word – architecture, to talk about like the infrastructure of the institutions that hold us in relation to each other. And then we have this kind of scandal economy, but we also have this discourse, which is like, “This is a rape free environment, there's no tolerance for sexual harassment,” right?
Brenda: Zero, zero.
Jennifer: Zero tolerance for sexual harassment and abuse. And you know, every time we hear this is like a ginormous eye roll from like the world's population, you know? [laughs] Because of course there is an enormous tolerance for sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia. We can point to what's happening at Netflix as an example. Every time I hear…This is about Dave Chappelle. Every time I hear people talking about it…He made some jokes about transgender people, and that's like the issue? And I'm like, no, the issue is that trans women are being murdered, and he sided with the discourse that supports anti-trans violence, right? So I was like, this is not this simple matter of making a joke. So there are all kinds of ways in which sexual violence actually gets woven into the fabric of our everyday lives.
And then sports…I could do discourse for an hour, [Brenda laughs] so I'm gonna try to slow myself down second. But like, in sports, what we have is a deeply hierarchical structure that manages your access to pleasure and to the game, and also holds out the kind of carrot of enormous success, whether that be representing your country on a national team or having corporate endorsements, becoming a celebrity. It's a really asymmetrical power system. And, like the church, like university structures, like the military, these kinds of deeply hierarchical structures are ones in which harassment flourishes. Harassment loves that dynamic. It's a really great ecosystem for harassment.
Brenda: Fertile soil.
Jennifer: Yeah. And it's also a really difficult one for practicing accountability. So, you know, with the feminist organizations that have helped to carve out accountability processes around violations of trust – and INICITE! is a really important organization that has crafted manuals for how to actually establish accountability processes in your organizations. Those guidelines begin with, “These processes are almost impossible, if not impossible, to stage within a hierarchical structure.”
Brenda: Yeah. Yeah. Well, and in such a gender segregated space. There's really very few spaces in the world that are as segregated along lines of gender, and a binary concept of gender, as sport. And it's important to point out that one of the things you were saying, whether it's Dave Chappelle or whatever organization we're going to talk about, is that it's a continuum of misogyny. People say, oh, it's just a joke or, oh, it's just that. And you're pointing towards this really important fact, which is you're normalizing it on one side of the spectrum in a way that's going to, at the other more extreme manifestation, result in violence, murder assault, right? So you laugh it off, and when you do that, you're putting into play and normalizing these other types of behavior that you would say are reprehensible and that someone would say they don't participate in.
Jennifer: Yeah. I mean, I'll take a personal anecdote. I remember when I was working in a restaurant, back in…Oh god, this was like the late 80s. And I loved this place, I really did. I loved the people I worked with. And the kitchen was a bunch of guys. I'm from the Northeast, so these are a bunch of guys from the kind of New York metropolitan area. And I love that kind of sense of humor, or the foul language, a lot of the kind of frankness that we associate with somebody like Anthony Bourdain, right? Like, that kind of kitchen culture is really…There are elements of that that I really loved. But I remember one day walking in and the guys had all been out to a strip club and they showed me pictures of themselves with the stripper, and I felt like I was being tested, you know? And I was a college student and taking my radical feminist classes, you know, and I just called them out on it.
But like, when I called them out on it, I remember just feeling kind of blushing with a kind of shame and anger. And I felt like I was the killjoy, I was ruining their fun. I just felt like I was doing something that was going to make working there less fun by doing that. And, you know, I will say too, these are people that I've grown to be friends with over the years, and we talk about this time now. Like, the last time I saw one of these chefs, he was saying, like, I look back on that and it's just like, today, employees will not put up with that, and you can't do that. And it's really changed the culture of the workplace. And that's a good thing. And he observed that came with all kinds of other things about, you know, your willingness to put up with certain kinds of hours or low pay. And from his perspective, a culture shift around sexual harassment was bound up with a better labor practice as well.
Brenda: And it is!
Jennifer: And it is.
Brenda: And it always is. It always is.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Brenda: And so the dehumanization process, the hierarchies of labor are always going to be bound up with these gendered and racialized systems. I want to ask you, something that I really feel annoyed about, and maybe I'm wrong. Maybe there's a pushback to this. But I don't think that this is particularly bad in sport. I feel like sport is a place for aspirations. It's very public. People identify really strongly with players in a way that they probably don't with the CFO of Netflix. But at the end of the day, for me, I don't feel like there's a particular problem with sexual assault and sexual harassment in sport that I don't see in the university, for example. I don't know. When I say that, are you like, that’s bullshit, Brenda? Or…?
Jennifer: I'm totally…I’m so glad you said that. It gets me thinking, because it's like, there are things that are different about sports, and it's the radical gender segregation of sports structures, right? It's not the presence of such sexual abuse, right?
Brenda: Yeah. Yeah.
Jennifer: It's this manufacturing of a universe. Because it's also not just like radical gender segregation. It's the creation of segregated spaces for women's sports that are governed and controlled by men who are furthermore sexist, and I would even say misogynist. To go from just being like a kind of soft bias to actually on some level really hating, hating women and LGBTQ people.
Brenda: They're attracted to that segregated space.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Brenda: There's something about that that they like. And I think when you're talking about being ashamed of ruffling feathers at your workplace, even the men who have these sorts of experiences, I think, also feel similarly, that they’re “ruining the fun.”
Jennifer: Oh yeah. I mean, the restaurant business was…That’s one where sexual harassment has been endemic. And there was a study that was conducted about service workers during the pandemic that found like a really high percentage of service workers have experienced sexual harassment in the workplace, and that women experienced a next level of harassment around masks, you know, where customers would be, “Hey, let me see that face, let me see that smile,” right?
Brenda: Oh yeah! Yeah yeah yeah. I saw that.
Jennifer: “Let me see how pretty you are,” right? “So I can tip you correctly,” you know what I mean? This kind of thing is so woven into an expectation of what a server will do. And my experiences with that was particularly bad, when you were waiting on rich white men. That is really, really intense. And then some of my coworkers who are men also were harassed in the workplace by men, you know, in complex, kind of quasi-closeted 1980s corporate culture dynamics where it was like they were hiring a gay chef to be their pet in their home, you know, who they may sexually harass behind the back of their wife. Like, that's an actual story I witnessed with my own eyes. So, feminist anthropologist Mary Douglas, who–
Brenda: I love Mary Douglas!
Jennifer: Yes!
Brenda: Since Purity and Danger I've loved Mary Douglas.
Jennifer: Yes! This is in that zone, right? Like, it's that sex and sexual relationships, intimacy practices. They're a part of every organizational structure, and in those places where there's a disavowal of that fact, so like in academia, right? Like, “Of course there's no relationships between teachers and students,” and, “We, as colleagues, are having an affair with each other, but that has nothing to do with our work,” or…You know?
Brenda: [laughs] I hate to laugh, but it’s…Oh, yeah.
Jennifer: There are all these things that happen around our work. And to go back to sports, it's like all those years where there would be no acknowledgement of the personal lives of lesbian players. So it was like, never a gesture towards who is in a long-term relationship, who is having kids with their partner, who's not having children. Like, all the stories would be about straight players who were getting married and having kids. And then you would get an access to their family. Maybe you might see like a gay player’s parents somewhere, but you wouldn't have an acknowledgement of the sexuality of those players, because the whole kind of sporting environment – including sports media – would seize up with anxiety at the prospect of acknowledging that there are a lot of gay players in women's soccer, or women's sports in general, because of course this is true for basketball as well.
And, you know, that's where you see that there is a sexual culture, right? It's not the same thing as being like a service worker within a highly sexualized industry – sex workers, body workers are often in those kinds of spaces, right? These are not forms of labor that are defined by sexual relationships, right? But sexual relations structure the social culture of the workplace, and people are variously vulnerable depending on where they sit within those cultures. And sexual harassment and abuse becomes…It kind of nests within those sorts of structures. I feel like I'm kind of speaking very abstractly, but you know, in academia, this has been an issue as like senior male faculty – I’ll take the paradigmatic case, right? – groom and sexualize their mentoring relationship with their advisees.
So they'll be engaging in grooming practices with their advisees that isolate them from other advising structures, make them totally dependent on that person, and then turn that relationship into a highly sentimentalized romantic space. Which may be sexual or not, right? But it becomes a kind of love relation that's masquerading as a work relation only. Then it's like, you don't even know how to talk about it, because there's been this…It’s like this whole emperor with no clothes sort of situation where everybody is seeing what's going on, but the day to day operations are dependent upon no one actually saying out loud what they're seeing.
Brenda: Which is a really good mirror of Paul Riley and coaching. It's a very similar dynamic, and it goes on for years and it doesn't unfold in one dramatic event, but instead is a repeated boundary crossing. It's very difficult and it's very high stakes for workers. And in this case, this is part of the problem I think too, much like graduate students, much like servers in the kitchens, or bussers or whatever. They are trying obviously to create a professional space for themselves, and there's very high stakes for coming out with it, or even…And it's very difficult to even recognize it. I mean, that's one of the painful things of listening to these women discuss their experiences. It’s very hard. I mean, what you want to believe about yourself and how a mentor can shape you is no joke.
Jennifer: I remember in grad school trying to talk with some of my male friends who were also in grad school about my own experiences as an undergraduate and how every now and again, you would…It’s like a professor might give you extra special attention in class and you would think it might be because you'd done the homework and you were smart. And then there would be this moment when you would realize it was something else. And then you'd be kind of frozen – I found myself often kind of frozen by that situation. And I had that kind of dynamic in a light way. It wasn't like a personal thing where the guy was trying to seduce me or something like that. It was the way he behaved to me in the classroom itself.
I could look back on it now and I would say, like, I had a need to feel special, right? I mean, as do most of us, right? On some level, you want to believe you're special. And in a place where you're performing knowledge or skills, where your whole life might be organized around the development of that skill set, when somebody in a position of power in that system acknowledges your specialness and your talent, that’s a really personal experience and it's very confusing when somebody sexualizes that. Even turning that into a personal friendship, right
It takes a high degree of trust and willingness on the part of the person in the supervisory position to name what's going on and to say, like, we're moving in our conversations and in our coaching and mentoring relationship into a space that feels personal, and I want to acknowledge that that's happening in order to start to re-articulate the boundaries between us, right? Like, I can be a mentoring friend to you, but being a mentoring friend will mean that I don't, for example, share with you my own personal struggles and ask you to take care of me. It's really hard to have that level of intention and clarity in your advising relations. I mean, those of us who teach–
Brenda: Oh yeah.
Jennifer: You know, especially grad students, because you work with grad students over such a long period of time and you work with their work so closely, professional ethics really mandates that you take responsibility for the direction of that relationship and that you steer it actively. What you see with Riley is that he's, you know…I can't speak to his psychology, but he's steering his relationships with specific players into a very personal direction and manipulating them around their own need. And in soccer, at that level, it's also like a need to feel special, but that's also about your survival as a player, because that's about whether or not you're going to have a place on a team.
Brenda: Yeah. And so I do think, once again, it's important to think about them as workers and as professionals. I mean, it's hard because in a capitalist system, too, I don't always want to think about my students as my clients. You know, that's disgusting to me in some way. But in another way, the very idea that we somehow have this idyllic, privileged apart-from-relationship that's so special and whole and pure – and, like an athlete and a coach, is more problematic in some sense to me than trying to look at it as a workplace relationship. This is what I get paid to do.
Jennifer: Yeah. This is the place where…So, one of my great passions as a scholar is Marxist feminist writing. And this is really the heart of what Marxist feminists think about, right? Like, what is the space of, for example, like reproductive labor, highly gendered forms of labor, which within capital get marked as paid less, but also as something for which you should not be paid at all.
Brenda: Right.
Jennifer: So, the stigmatization of sex work…Who thought we'd be talking about this in the sports context? But the stigmatization of sex work is dependent upon the sense that sex itself cannot be a form of labor for which a person is remunerated. And that is actually like the bedrock for the sexual exploitation of people within the workplace, right? It’s that you're in essence extracting a form of affective labor from your subordinates. It’s as if that is happening in some other space, right? As if you can set aside the whole labor relation when it switches into a sexual gear, right? And that's a place where we can feel, you know, like at the root of capital are all these different forms of contradiction that get mobilized against us. And the relationship between sex and work is one of those big, giant kinds of contradictions. And that's why, so for example, in what's happening in NWSL, I would say that one of the reasons we're seeing so much being unlocked around that is because players are organizing, right? And they're seeing this as a labor issue. And that's the thing. That's the big intervention, and a really productive one.
Brenda: I think it's a really productive one. And I think it speaks to the need for unionization. You know, that's always been kind of my first answer for how do you fix women's soccer, when there are just general questions. But also recognizing, okay, that that bedroom of capital also comes with the link – and we don't see this link being made in the media, and I find it really frustrating – between this scourge of sexual harassment and assault and misogyny in women's soccer, and what we find in men's soccer. And so, that part of the promise for these male stars is to be able to access that labor that they don't consider labor, right? To be able to access women's bodies, to be able to access more vulnerable men's bodies at will. That's part of their success. That's part of the promise of them becoming the top of their field.
Jennifer: Yeah. And I'll go back to that workplace story of coming to work and having my coworkers show me pictures of themselves at a strip bar, and that moment of being tested in relation to that. Obviously men in patriarchal structures, like men's football, that's like…I’m assuming that's just basically par for the course in terms of your day to day life, right? Is that locker room culture. But also just the homosocial spaces, meaning like single-sex spaces, where people are kind of bonding with each other. That part of the rituals of those bondings…In one blog rant I wrote years ago, I just grabbed it as like the sexist handshake. It's like, slaps on the back and jokes that you make to each other that are identifying each other as participants in a very specific kind of sexual culture, where you're positioning yourself…As you were saying, like, the desired result is one in which you are a part of a group that has access to the bodies of subordinates.
So, you know, those are women, those are women fans. And then also in a different way, like more junior men within that circle, you know? And that's what hazing is, right? A lot, a lot of what we describe as hazing are very sexualized forms of humiliation. And this is the Mary Douglas anthropology thing, right? That these are rituals through which people are solidifying their membership in a group by engaging ritually in the stigmatization of sex as impure or as abject.
Brenda: And who wants to identify with the humiliated and the degraded? So then when we get these stories about why does no one care, why don't people just get up in arms, it's in part, I think, because of that…And women of course participate in this, and girls, because we're all part of this same system. But it's very difficult to get someone to identify with victims and survivors because we are taught through stories and culture and in every way, right? So even of course there's the financial risk and the professional risk and the very real risk of being a victim of violence just by opposing the system. But there's also this other thing that works on people, which is we aren't really taught to have sympathy with sex workers or the degraded or the humiliated, you know? It's scary. We want to identify with winners.
Jennifer: And then what's contradictory about that is that, you know, let's take the kind of paradigmatic high school hazing incident, right? The expectation is that everybody on the team is going through whatever that humiliating ritual is. And guys have been sodomized as a part of that, and there've been legal cases around that, establishing that as a form of sexual abuse and harassment. So it's like, you have this kind of stigmatization, a kind of cultural practice whereby identification with the victim is like unsustainable. And yet people are carrying shame and humiliation inside them. And, you know, one of the most disturbing experiences I've ever had as a sports studies scholar was I was on a panel at the American Studies Association…I think it was a panel where we were talking about sports, or maybe we were talking about Penn State, because I know I was talking about Penn State and Sandusky and Paterno.
And there was a person on that panel who was a Pennsylvania football fan, really deeply attached to that. And his response to me was like, he was violated by what I had said. I mean, he was really upset, and it was like, I've never…You know, I've gotten into arguments with people, but I think I've never been in the experience where I said something in a panel that was so wounding to someone that their response to me was really pretty vile. And what he was responding to was that I was saying that what goes by “rough and tumble play” within locker room spaces can be highly policing and can be structured by really deep forms of misogyny, homophobia and transphobia, and that until we confronted and worked through those elements of sports cultures, we weren't going to be in a place where we could really talk about the place of sex and power, and these structures would just keep reproducing violence, you know?
And then he just was like, these locker room rituals are necessary to football. Like, football doesn't exist without it. And then I remember sitting there and just thinking, he's been through it. He's been through it, right? I mean, of course he has. And I'm asking him casually to confront the possibility that what he went through was violating and actually was part of cementing violation into the culture of power within that sport. I think because I'm mainly kind of in the space of LGBTQ studies and then women's sports, I had underestimated how personal this is for people and how hard it is to actually confront.
Brenda: And how wrapped up it is. When we say it's foundational to society, and transnationally so. I mean, you're confronting something that's so big, that so deeply ingrained, that’s so wrapped up in racism, that’s so wrapped up in inequalities of all kinds, that it does get overwhelming for people and they get exhausted. You know, listening to this interview, if that's what it is, or conversation, isn't going to be something that people are like, “Oh, wow, this is fun, I want to do that again.” [Jennifer laughs] It’s not fun, you know? We're not going to become millionaires with feminist killjoy behavior.
Jennifer: Yup. But, you know, as somebody who started off working in queer studies, queer performance, queer visual culture, you know, my life world used to be things like clubs, right? I mean, it still is. But in terms of as a scholar, I was thinking about spaces that are really defined by pleasure, and pleasure that is furthermore hard to produce, sustain, cultivate and nurture within mainstream spaces, you know? And so you had to create…Like, today I guess we would say a safer space, within which people could be who they are and actually celebrate and love each other. So, these kinds of spaces happen all the time, right? And it's like when we're focused on, say, like the apparatus of FIFA and the World Cup and that whole system, or the International Olympic Committee. One of the effects of that system is to constantly make us feel that sense of scale and feel overwhelmed and powerless before them.
Brenda: Yes. Yes.
Jennifer: And it's really important to hold on to our faith and our joy and to push back against that, you know? And that kind of pushback happens in all kinds of ways. The most traditional thing that we can point to are kind of grassroots and community-based football practices and independent supporters groups. I'm a part of Rebellion 99, which is an independent supporters group in LA for Angel City, although they predate the formation of Angel City. And I'd say their principles are very, very, very much about that, right? You know, they're oppositional. And it's like, when somebody needs to do something for Angel City, so many people step up, because it's a participatory practice, being a fan in this way. So I'm going to say, like, as an Angel City fan, or not…It’s hard to use the word fan. But I'm a member of a supporters group.
I mean, I think we're looking with some side-eye at the institution or the emerging institution that is the club, and trying to push back and make sure our voices are being heard as we see things that are making us feel a little queasy, like the mobilization of feminism as a brand identity. And then this big question about, well, is that just a brand identity? And I think a lot of us feel vulnerable around that. But we also feel like we can take it or leave it, you know? Because football is something so much bigger for us than a team, right? So anyway, I'm kind of spinning out because Angel City, [Brenda laughs] that’s a whole other kind of fantasy dream problem. [laughs]
Brenda: Well, and we can always wax poetic on how, you know, being anti-racist and being inclusive and feminist is by necessity optimistic. You actually wouldn't get up and do this every day if you didn't think that things could be different.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Brenda: I do want to talk about the article that we wrote recently that never was. [Jennifer laughs] And I think it's important because I think for a lot of sports people that are dealing with this, or listeners, it reveals a lot about the structures of power when it comes to these discussions, which is that Jen and I were approached by The Guardian, by a very well-intentioned editor, [laughs] who shall not be named – because it could be anybody, and it could be any publication – to write a kind of revisitation of a Vice article we wrote on the rape case of Cristiano Ronaldo and the new cases in regards to Benjamin Mendy.
And so what we had argued was that, to understand these cases and why they keep happening, one needs to look at corruption and the issue of corruption in sport, but not just sport, but using sport to think about how corrupt institutions are the bedrock of some of this violence. And if you don't tackle the issue of corruption, and if you can't talk about it and understand it in a holistic and smart way, then you're not going to be able to solve these problems. So, we were approached [laughs] and we tried in the article to write and rewrite this, to get it through, and it was too radical for them. I mean, we’re two professors! Like, we’re not powerful. Why is it that this was so, do you think, troubling?
Jennifer: Yeah. Well, you know, there's a concrete challenge of libel law in England. So it's easier to get sued successfully for libel in the UK than it is in the United States. And so one thing that they were being very anxious about was the language that we were using regarding the accusations against Ronaldo and what happened with the case insofar as the Las Vegas attorneys. Like, they decided not to pursue charges, and how do we narrate this in a way where we talk about the case itself, that documents that were in the football leaks files, because he paid out…I can't remember, it was a figure like several hundred thousand dollars. He paid out money, he gave her money to buy her silence. And so as a part of that, there's this interview in which…It's a document that appears to be Cristiano Ronaldo admitting to having non-consensual sex with her.
And we used language that was modeled after existing reporting. We were really careful to do that. And it was still never published. So, I think that's part of it. I think that's a hesitation around that. But then I think – and this goes more to where we started with the kind of scandal economy – it's like to really write well about these issues, you have to write carefully and it takes a few days. And so it's like, you can't really do a hot take on a rape accusation and really contribute to moving the ball forward in our conversations about rape accusations. And it's like, the moves that you need to do is to de-exceptionalize the story. But when you do that, when you say this is not an exceptional case, this is a typical one, it becomes less newsworthy.
Brenda: Yeah.
Jennifer: Right? It becomes more of, like, not a story. And this has been the problem in reporting on sexual violence in general and in sports in particular, because you know, the cases of sexual abuse of women players in sports of the sexual molestation of boys and young men in sports. These cases are not new, and the fact that they existed is not new knowledge. But especially in women's sports, there's been a sense of those cases as not being newsworthy, because who cares about women footballers in South Africa in 2010 – when the head coach of the women's team is fired months after the conclusion of the men's World Cup, where it seems very clear, at least to me, as a fan and as somebody who was tracking that World Cup very closely, that the South African football association made that choice to not actually take that man out of that coaching position until after the World Cup was over, because it's bad publicity.
And like, that case is reported in South African news, but never taken up by international news media as indicative of a very, very, very big problem in the administration of national programs globally. And the reason…I had a couple of conversations with sports editors at the time, and they would say, well, where's the story? It’s actually so hard to wrap their heads around the fact that this was newsworthy, because women's sports isn't that, you know…It’s like there's only a couple of types of stories you were allowed to tell about women's sports, and most of them were about how, “It’s getting better! There are audiences for women's sports. Amazing!” You know, you want to talk about something that's not news? That’s not news! [laughter]
Brenda: You know, there's so much that's not news that ends up in sports pages. So much about this, I feel, is access. You know, it's hard because it sounds like I'm being so critical of journalists, but it's a true story. You need access to these teams. You need to access to these coaches. You need access to Man City’s players. And if you're going to come out and say, look, there were three charges that were serious enough that he was put on house arrest, basically, at certain points – Benjamin Mendy I'm talking about, and he's also a French national player. And it was serious enough. Nothing got in the news. None of it, until the fourth time that it came up, right? And you just have to question to what extent are publications worried about their access to these very, very powerful institutions?
And the editor – I'll just come back to this very kind, well-meaning editor, I'm sure – was shocked because he doesn't deal with sports, and he just seemed absolutely befuddled. Like, how is it I'm getting these stops? How is it I can get an article through on Brexit and its racial implications and I can't get an op-ed through about Man City and Juventus? And you know, we just tried to tell him, that's what the whole fucking thing is about.
Jennifer: Yeah.
Brenda: You can't get it through because you don't know how powerful and corrupt these institutions are, evidently. [laughs]
Jennifer: Yeah. And our piece actually got…Because it wasn't spiked, it wasn't like there was a moment where they said we're not going to publish this. It was like, he kept kind of…
Brenda: Like, “I’m committed to get this through! We can do it!” [laughs]
Jennifer: Yes. And then it just stopped. But it was the same timing as a fantastic interview with Judith Butler about transphobia and the gender – I'm gonna put this in giant scare quotes – “gender critical movement.” This is a very powerful like transphobic formation in feminist spaces and in feminist studies, and Butler, who is one of the most important voices in gender studies since the authorship of Gender Trouble and Bodies That Matter, a later book, really important thinker. She gave us an amazing interview about that. And then there was a section where Butler talked about the relationship between “gender critical movement,” anti-trans movement and the far right. And they actually censored that paragraph, and it was around libel anxieties, because she had referenced some things that were happening here in Los Angeles around a super complex and messy story about a trans person who was using a Korean day spa that's very popular here.
And then this became like a flashpoint of far right harassment of the business, you know, making it seem like somehow this person was posing this existential danger to cis girls and women who were using this space. And the same week Butler had referenced that, they took that paragraph out and they did it in a way that was really cruel and upsetting because it really did seem like they were bending to transphobic, TERF – meaning trans-exclusionary radical feminists, but it's basically anti-trans feminists. They were making accommodations to that wing rhetorically and doing that just by suppressing an important moment in the interview where she was linking anti-trans stances and ideology to fascism. And so it's that turn to the very big thinking and really important, necessary thinking that can be the thing that makes something weirdly not sustainable within a news space, you know? That kind of should give one pause.
Brenda: It should give one pause. And especially now that they look to academics for free labor to do op-eds, [laughter] to do this kind of stuff. It's like, it's a really hard balance, because I do feel as though in our academic work where we actually have a lot more freedom to say some things – not always, but you look at academics moving into these spaces, and it really can feel like it's changing work. You know, it's changing the way in which people are…At least their work is being presented. You know, Judith Butler wrote what she wrote, but a lot of people who don't read her academic work will now not have that paragraph.
Jennifer: Yeah. It's interesting. When you think about this with women's sports, about how challenging reporting on women's sports is to traditional news structures, right? How much it has challenged the sense of what constitutes news and what constitutes a newsworthy story. You know, when you look at how much ink is spilled, how much media real estate is given to transfer rumors, which is little more than rumors about how people are feeling, right? [laughter] It's like 80% of that discourse is what people think they might know about how players are thinking and feeling or how management is thinking and feeling. Like, that's a huge space of football media at certain times of the year. And, you know, it's like the day in, day out reporting on the women's game, it's much better than it used to be. I'm extremely grateful for that. But there could be so much more, right?
Brenda: And so much kind of constructive storytelling that would really attach people to the sport and to the players.
Jennifer: Yeah. To bring this back too to the mobilization of sexualized humiliation, violation, right? That this is not specific to sports, not specific to women's sports. But what is specific to women's sports are the very particular ways in which it's vulnerable, structurally, to other kinds of systemic things, like the dismantling of all forms of journalism. [laughter] It’s like, as we wish for more coverage, Brenda and I both know all too well how, you know, there are very few people who are paid to report on soccer, whether it's men or women, right?
Brenda: Right. Right.
Jennifer: You know, that's not just about bias against soccer. That's also about the dismantling of the entire labor ecology and the economy around journalism. And sports journalism in particular is one of the last kinds of spaces where there is kind of an existing daily consumption of stories. But the infrastructure is nowhere where it used to be.
Brenda: Yeah. You know, a lot of times when we talk and write about this, the answers from editors and listeners are, “Can you just tell me what needs to be done? Can you just please write, how should a league handle these allegations? How should fans deal with this?” And I really want to continue to resist giving those bullet points. I think we've laid out some things here that are really obvious. If you listen to the conversation, I don't think there are those things. I don't think, when we're talking about the bedrock foundational part, that we can just bullet it. It's not that we don't have constructive ideas. If we have to kind of distill it, certainly we've already talked about unionization, we've already talked about ways in which you destigmatize sex work, the ways in which you think about corruption and accountability, and going after some of this. Slush money and abuse of power has everything to do with vulnerable people within sport. But there's no magic bullet.
Jennifer: Yeah. There's not like a single fix. That said, we can think about how, you know…So, let's take the story around Riley as an example that with serious investigative reporting around allegations of abuse, landing within a context in which you have a movement of players unionizing, organizing, and then also landing within the context of a league that's been going from one crisis to another, right? That we have a moment in women's football where things are unsettled enough to actually…This is me being very optimistic. You know, that there is room for transformational change. If it's not player centered, it's going nowhere, right? And then furthermore, if victims are not brought in to the process, then none of the things that the league does in response to these allegations will be meaningful. So, Jennifer Freyd, she and her team – she's part of a team of scholars in Oregon – they write about institutional betrayal, and then they also work with institutions to cultivate what they call institutional courage. And sorry, I sound like a consultant when I'm using this language.
But it's about organizations in which there have been violations of trust. Like, taking responsibility for that and making themselves vulnerable in relationship to the people who have been hurt, right? And to say, we have to listen and we have to be accountable and it's not only on us to determine what that form of accountability looks like. And it's extremely difficult for commercial organizations, pro sports organizations to take that posture, to let go of some of the control of the narrative. And I do think when organizations do that, they do actually shift the institutional culture and that it is possible in a place where the fan base, for example, the consumers of women's football…Like, many of us identify ourselves as feminists, right? This is a place where doing the right thing here very much should be on brand. [laughs]
Brenda: Well, before we derail into cynicism again, I want to leave on that positive note.
Jennifer: [laughs] I dug deep for that.
Brenda: You did! I appreciate that. I appreciate that. That's as rose colored glasses as professor Jennifer Doyle and I get. [Jennifer laughs] So I want to thank you for having this conversation and, you know, just tell you how much we appreciate you at Burn It All Down.
Jennifer: Thank you. Thank you.