For the past two years at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, I’ve worked with women students in the Journalism Department and in the Isenberg School of Sports Management to plan and hold a Symposium on Women in Sports Media. The daylong event, made possible by a grant from Women for UMass Amherst, encourages women students to mingle and learn from professional women in the field.
The goal is simple: to help get women students on a solid path towards a career in sports media — a field dominated by men. Yet, in order for true change to happen, men need to attend. To date, the Symposium has mostly been attended by women.
At the Symposium, we talk a lot about language. Mostly about how women in this field can’t allow themselves to be talked over by men and how they have to find their voice and stand their ground not only in press conferences but also in company meetings.
And every semester, I mention early in my Sports Journalism class that women students can expect harassment in some form from the male sources they speak with. There have been too many examples of it happening in recent years for me to think otherwise. We talk a lot in class about language and how to keep interviews professional.
And now we have the language of rape culture landing squarely in the center of the UMass football program.
In case you missed it, Mark Whipple, the head football coach for UMass said in a post-game interview Saturday:
“We had a chance there with 16 down and they rape us, and he picks up the flag,” referencing a non-call by a referee during Saturday’s 58-42 loss to Ohio.
After initially issuing a “no comment,” Athletic Director Ryan Bamford suspended Whipple for a week and ordered him to go through “sensitivity training.”
Context is everything, and to think that Whipple’s tone-deaf statement was made in the era of the #MeToo movement and a day after the controversy surrounding the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the U.S. Supreme Court — well, it’s just a little hard to comprehend.
“Especially after the gravitas of Christine Blasey Ford’s eloquent testimony, I have no patience for anyone misusing this term. Find another verb,” Leslie Morgan Steiner, a women’s rights advocate and author, and a former colleague of mine, said in a Facebook comment.
“Disrespect for women comes in so many forms. No one who has ever been raped or who’s lived with the fear of assault would ever use this particular word. Thoughtless.”
The only statement from Whipple so far has come via a written statement that seems straight out of PR 101:
“I am deeply sorry for the word I used on Saturday to describe the play in our game,” Whipple said in a statement. “It is unacceptable to make use of the word ‘rape’ in the way I did and I am very sorry for doing so. It represents a lack of responsibility on my part as a leader of the program and a member of this university’s community, and I am disappointed with myself that I made this comparison when commenting after our game.”
Rape culture is everywhere — even in liberal, earthy Amherst. I could spend this entire column writing about the pervasiveness of the language of the rape culture, but I had a pair of students do that pretty well in a class project that was published by the Huffington Post a few years ago.
But I worry about the impact of a leader like a football coach using such language and its impact on young men and young athletes. How can we get past such language? More importantly, how can we as educators move males away from the language of rape culture?
I put some of these questions to a colleague, Lynn Phillips, a senior lecturer in the Department of Communication who has done considerable research in this area. “Individually, comments like ‘I raped that test’ or ‘that player was raped’ may seem to many not to be a big deal,” she said. “But collectively, they join countless other cultural practices — from so-called ‘dirty jokes’ to violent pornography to a legal system that re-victimizes survivors — that condone, make fun of, eroticize, and trivialize violence against women.”
To be honest, the UMass response doesn’t seem like much. A week suspension seems light, but I’m not sure this uneasy feeling would leave even if Whipple was fired. To me the answer lies in education, but a little more than a sensitivity seminar.
Some ideas:
I would love to see UMass coaches and players become more involved with the Women in Sports Media Symposium.
It also might be good for male coaches and male athletes to become more involved in working with rape survivors and survivors of domestic violence. Volunteering and fundraising for a group like the Northampton-based Safe Passage would be a good place to start. Their Say Something program is aimed at making people more attuned to the kinds of language that demeans people and fosters rape culture and abusive relationships.
Finally, athletes and UMass administrators need to realize that language matters. And that also means having open conversations, not issuing boilerplate press releases and hoping the issue in question magically disappears. The language of rape culture clearly is not going away.
“‘Rape culture’ doesn’t mean that these kinds of comments directly cause rape or are the equivalent of rape,” says Phillips.
“Talking about rape culture means looking seriously at the ways common cultural attitudes and behaviors enable us to tolerate, and in some cases even encourage, sexual violence and to blame those who are victimized.”
Steve Fox is a senior lecturer in the University of Massachusetts Journalism Department and is the director of the Sports Journalism concentration.