The Plight of the Female Sports Fan
Alyssa Rosenberg at The Atlantic
Players on both teams—Ben Roethlisberger of the Steelers and Green Bay’s Brad Jones, Clay Matthews, Josh Sitton, Khalil Jones, Korey Hall, Matt Flynn, and Brandon Underwood—have all had serious sexual assault allegations made against them recently (the most recent allegations against Roethlisberger were dropped because the victim didn’t want to go through a trial; Jones, Matthews, Sitton, Jones, Hall, and Flynn were cleared; Underwood remains under investigation). As a result, I’m trying to figure out who I want to lose less: the quarterback around whom there seems to be a perpetual fug of ugly sexual behavior towards women, or a player who may have assaulted two women at a single party.
And having to prove ourselves isn’t the worst of our problems. I found reading Gabriel Sherman’s GQ profileof Deadspin editor A.J. Daulerio sickening, in part because of one particular incident described in the article: It took Daulerio—who runs what is supposed to be a sports site—days to recognize that perhaps it was unwise to run a video of an extremely intoxicated young woman potentially being raped in a stadium bathroom. An editorial approach like that, if that’s even what Daulerio’s decision-making process in that case can be called, violently excises women from the potential Deadspin audience. And it’s of a piece with ugly behavior like Gate D at Giants Stadium during Jets games, where male fans try to harass women into taking off their tops.
It’s not that I walk around at games with Mace in my purse, or that I think that all sports reporters are profiting off the sexual humiliation of women. But it seems to me there’s something ugly in mainstream American sports and in mainstream American sports fandom, when one class of fans isn’t taken particularly seriously, and in the wrong situation can be seriously at risk.
