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Monday, April 6, 2015

Young girls and footy stars: Blatant slut-shaming isn’t even the worst part of this story


THERE was a story in the news yesterday about footy players taking sexual advantage of young girls.
Jesinta Campbell, a TV presenter and fiancee of AFL player Buddy Franklin, is speaking out, disturbed by what’s happening at parties. Apparently some of the girls are pretty provocative, inviting gropes in public, giving it a red-hot go. They dress for sex, they giggle and pout, whisper promises: they’re up for it.
They are young, naïve, hoping to impress. It doesn’t matter that there have been nasty cases where fans just like them have been raped, assaulted, silenced and intimidated. Maybe that happened to dumb sluts, they think. Maybe they couldn’t handle it. Or they just don’t know any better.
Then inevitably there will be another report: a famous sportsman charged with rape. The public will be dismayed: what the hell’s wrong with these guys? Too much money, fame, drugs, steroids, muscle, impulse; not enough education or respect. But in a way you can’t blame them. Those young girls, waving it about, climbing all over them, dressed up like sluts, all too happy to go back to the hotel…
The blatant slut-shaming and the subsequent victim blaming is not the worst part of this situation. The worst part is that women always seem to be the ones doing the fawning, and men are the feted ones holding the power.
Imagine if this story were the other way around. Imagine the athletes are an elite group of extremely well-paid, much-photographed, physically strong and rowdy women. They are basketballers or soccer players, swimmers or hockey players. They train hard, work hard, play hard – and their victims are teenage boys.
Hard to picture? There aren’t many—that is, any—cases of this happening.
And we don’t see many stories about teenage boys cruising parties for sex with celebrities, either. There must be some—young guys love sex, right? And they love fame and sports. But do they hang around, beseeching female athletes to put their hands in their jocks? We don’t know, because teenage boys’ sexuality isn’t examined like that of young women. They aren’t constantly judged according to what they’re wearing, how much flesh they show, what kind of shoes they wear on the night they’re assaulted, whether they look too eager for sex, how late at night they stay out, or if they changed their mind when the woozy drugs kicked in and then ungratefully complained that they were raped anyway.
No one could possibly argue that we should have equal-opportunity sexual assault. And it’s definitely not okay that young women are seduced by the power and fame of older men who take advantage of their desires. Sexual assault in sports, though maybe not the apparently consensual under-skirt groping described by Jesinta Campbell, is a persistent horror and we have to keep talking about it, condemning it, educating about it and looking at the reasons for it.
But the ‘why’ is not rocket science. Young women put out for football players because footballers are male, rich, feted and powerful. The question is why riches, fame and power—and the impulse to rape—still so often belong to men, and why the ones who have to hang admiringly on their lapels are still usually young women. That has to do with a deeper kind of sexism—the kind that makes machismo into a job and leaves women as handbags.
Kate Holden is a columnist, feminist and the author of two books: In My Skin, a memoir about Kate’s experiences as a heroin addict and a sex worker in Melbourne in the 1990s, and The Romantic: Italian Nights and Days


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