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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