What Female Athletes Wear...

It seems we can’t go very long as a culture without someone complaining about how someone else dresses, how long their hair is, or related foolishness.  Most of Curmie’s commentary (at least here) has related to the almost (but not quite) uniformly sexist school dress codes that have forbidden five-year-olds from wearing sun dresses with spaghetti straps, de facto declared clavicles and shoulders erogenous zones, and are so unevenly applied that allegations of selective enforcement border on the obvious.  (Curmie isn’t going to link to all those stories, Gentle Reader, but you’re free to look them up.)

In a variation on the theme, there’s been a fair amount of publicity in the last year or so surrounding what female athletes wear.  There’s Paralympian Olivia Breen, who was told by an official her shorts were too short (this does not seem to have affected her eligibility, however).  There was the brouhaha over the Norwegian beach handball team’s decision to (OMG!) wear shorts instead of bikini bottoms, in defiance of the profoundly sexist edict of the International Handball Federation.  There was the IOC’s inane decision to prevent black women swimmers from wearing “soul caps,” which, if anything, would have created more drag than traditional headgear.  (Curmie actually wrote about this one, here).  Indeed, the fact that the German women’s gymnastics team made headlines for wearing regulation-compliant unitards rather than “traditional” leotards at the Olympics tells us rather a lot.

So here are two more stories about how female athletes choose to dress and the silly responses of people in power.  Both stories involve change.org petitions, although Curmie learned of one of them through other means.

Team members posed in sports bras
for a photo to accompany the change.org petition

Let’s start with the girls track team at Albany (NY) high school.  This may come as a surprise to you, Gentle Reader, but sometimes it gets hot in May.  Not only that, but doing strenuous exercise in that heat makes you feel even hotter.  Thus, some of the girls on the team, noting that the boys team was allowed to practice shirtless, sought to practice in sports bras.  Seems reasonable, yes?  No, of course not, according to school officials.

According to the Albany Times-Union, on May 12, Athletic Director Ashley Chapple asked the girls thus attired to leave practice.  The girls complied, but Jordan Johnson, a sophomore sprinter on the team, posted a petition on change.org to rally support for their cause.  At the Times-Union’s press time on the 17th, the petition had gathered over 2500 online signatures; as Curmie writes this on the 22nd, the petition has over 10,000 signatories (including Curmie’s).  You should feel free to increase that number, of course.

The girls—13 members of a 15-member team, apparently—were subsequently banned from attending a lacrosse game later that day, and suspended the following day for “inappropriate and disrespectful behavior directed toward an administrator,” which, of course was “in no way related to wardrobe.”  Oh, no, of course not.  You may believe this if you choose, Gentle Reader, but Curmie will indeed lower his opinion of your sagacity. 

The Hegemonic Legion of Doom School officials held a meeting on Monday with the girls—parents were forbidden from attending, for reasons you’re no doubt sufficiently worldly to guess, Gentle Reader—and reiterated their position before re-instating 12 team members (what happened to the 13th is unclear).  Of course, the pseudo-educators in charge can’t even keep their story straight.  According to the girls, they were told by Principal Jodi Commerford that they were suspended for not wearing something over their sports bras because there were male coaches present.  What an insult to those coaches that they are presumed not be able to concentrate on their duties because some high school girls were wearing only a little more above the waist than those gents would see at any beach or swimming pool!  (OMG!  Midriffs!)

But if Superintendent Kaweeda G. Adams is to be believed, that’s not true.  So the problem was attending the lacrosse game (why shouldn’t they?)… or maybe something they said at the game?  School authorities say the girls were swearing; they say they weren’t.  The girls wouldn’t be the first to deny doing something they actually did; school officials wouldn’t be the first to lie about students in an attempt to extricate themselves from an embarrassing situation of their own making.  But since the power structure at the school has produced no legitimate rationale for denying the girls access to the lacrosse game to begin with (they aren’t charged with insubordination at their practice, only at the lacrosse game), there are only two possibilities: school officials are lying about the swearing, or they richly deserved it (or both, of course).

The real reason for the suspensions, of course, was that the girls had the audacity to go public with a change.org petition, thereby revealing the school administrators as authoritarian buffoons.

The suspension notices, by the way, state that each girl “poses a continuing danger to persons or property or an ongoing threat of disruption to the academic and athletic process.”  No, Ms. Adams, you’re going to have to look in the mirror to see someone who does that.

Latifa McBryde in action.

The other story pertains to Latifah McBryde.  She’s a Muslim wrestler who, according to the change.org petition, earned a place on the US team to compete at the Pan-Am Games in Mexico in July.  The problem is that for religious reasons, she “dresses in modest clothes and a hijab.”  Ah, but the stupid rules require a singlet.

Here’s the description of “A Wrestling Fan,” who started the change.org petition:

What do people in the wrestling room wear most often to practice? It’s not a singlet. What are high school wrestlers now allowed to wear in competition? Hint - also not a singlet. What does the Iranian Muslim women’s wrestling team wear? … Not a singlet! Latifah wears the same thing that the Iranian women’s wrestling team wears - knee-length pants strongly secured to spandex leggings, a long sleeve shirt also strongly secured at the waist and wrists, and a tightly secured headscarf sewed directly onto a rashguard.

Once again, as in the case of the “soul cap,” wearing what McBryde wants to wear is, if anything, a competitive disadvantage, so there ought to be no problem.  This, however, would be based on the apparently hasty assumption that the hierarchy of United World Wrestling can out-think a dead flounder.  USA Wrestling doesn’t seem to be much help, either.

If the NCAA—not known for either imparting justice or exhibiting intelligence—can ensure that a basketball team from Brigham Young University doesn’t have to compete on a Sunday in the NCAA tournament, then UWW and USAW can remove their phalangeal digits from their rectal cavities and find a way to allow McBryde to compete without violating her religious standards. 

In these two incidents, we see all-too-familiar patterns: blaming girls for being distracting (and concomitantly blaming boys/men for being so easily distracted), school officials believing their actions to be above reproach and their fecal matter odor-free, intransigent requirements imposed by sports authorities based on “the way it’s always been” without recognizing even the possibility of legitimate exceptions to the rule.

Curmie’s natural impulse is to look for guidance from Confucius, who has been referenced with approbation numerous times in this blog.  Alas, this time, Curmie is drawn instead to the wise words of a beloved former student: “People are stupid, y’all.”

An Enemy of the People and the Montana Grizzlies

The first play by Henrik Ibsen (pictured at left) I ever read wasn’t A Doll House, which is probably most people’s introduction to the great Norwegian playwright. Nor was it Hedda Gabler or Ghosts, generally acknowledged today to be, respectively, his best and most important plays. My first Ibsen play was An Enemy of the People; I read it in a college class on Political Ideals as an example of traditional conservatism.

The central character, Dr. Stockmann, discovers that his town’s spa has become polluted, so the hitherto health-giving waters are now in fact poisoning the clientele. At first, local businessmen are grateful to the doctor for his discovery, but that’s before he proposes that the only solution is to shut down the baths until appropriate repairs can be made: a process involving both time and money the burghers don’t want to spend. After all, the waters are central to the town’s economic life, and those bacteria the doctor is complaining about are so small you can’t even see them: how much harm could they do?

Dr. Stockmann becomes a pariah, an “enemy of the people,” to coin a phrase. He bellows that “the majority is always wrong,” and promises to continue his fight even as merchants refuse to serve his family and rocks crash through the windows of his house. Stockmann was presented to those of us in Government 5 as the quintessential conservative for his single-mindedness, his quest for truth, and his refusal to capitulate simply because his was a minority opinion.

This essay isn’t about how far the term “conservative” has migrated from its erstwhile moorings, but rather to observe that Dr. Stockmann was, above all else, a man who believed in the power of truth, in the supremacy of safety over expediency. Needless to say, Dr. Stockmann was not an educational administrator.

In the wake of the Freeh report on the goings-on at Penn State, at which a known pedophile was allowed to continue to claim young boys as victims because it might have embarrassed the university and especially its vaunted and allegedly irreproachable football program to stop him, we get more reports of the same sort of transgressions happening elsewhere: at a high school an hour and a half away, and at a university whose dominance in FCS (a.k.a., Division I-AA) football actually surpasses that of Penn State in the FBS (Division I).

Well, that’s technically not true. The scandal at the University of Montana was already making headlines in the New York Times several weeks before the Freeh report was released; I just hadn’t heard about it until reading Jack Marshall’s trenchant commentary on the topic. The basic story line—one or more members of a school’s most cherished sports team commit felonies; administration does back flips to cover it up—is depressingly familiar. But there’s always a detail or two in which some idiot administrator goes one step beyond the idiocy anyone else anywhere had yet achieved.

Now, to be fair, the Good Ol’ Boy incompetence of Montana officials stretches across all areas of sexual assault, not simply those multiple cases involving members of the football team. Indeed, the most outrageous in a lengthy list of horrifyingly bone-headed moves by Vice President Jim Foley was not, apparently in an athlete-related case. Foley, hearing that a UM student had spoken publicly about having been raped and about the university’s somewhat less than stellar response, sought to punish her. In an e-mail to then Dean of Student Charles Couture, Foley demanded, “Is it not a violation of the student code of conduct for the woman to be publicly talking about the process and providing details about the conclusion?”

In another case, Couture apparently “repeatedly” warned a student, a Saudi national, that he had been accused of sexual assault. Before the actual police had been notified, the man fled to his homeland. This… erm… problematic response was then hailed by university president Royce Engstrom as “timely” and “appropriate” because “We can let people know we have dealt with these (alleged assaults) and that particular perpetrator is gone.” Yeah, well, I’m guessing that maybe the victims would have preferred that you’d done your freaking job, notified the police before de facto suggesting that the perp flee the jurisdiction, and set a precedent of prosecution rather than enabling the flight of a felon.

But we can always return to the staples of such stories: rapes by jocks. What’s your preference, Gentle Reader? The story about Foley’s objecting to the term “gang rape” when a woman was forcibly raped by four football players and an accomplice because the university’s preferred term is “date rape”? These asshats would call it a group hug if they thought they could get away with it. Couture may not have handled the other case very well, but to his credit he replied to Foley’s snot-gram by saying that he’d called it gang rape “because that’s what it was.”

Or Foley’s decision, in the words of Gwen Florio of The Missoulian,

… to delay releasing UM’s final report on the sexual allegations for fear it would coincide with a scheduled hearing on a restraining order filed against Grizzlies quarterback Jordan Johnson, accusing him of sexual assault. “I would prefer to not send this out on that day for the same news cycle the following day,” Foley wrote.

Or the fact that even when the administration, including deans and directors, was urged to attend a webinar entitled “Sexual Assault and Crime on Campus: What Higher Education Leaders Need to Know,” sponsored by the National Association of College and University Attorneys, the university legal counsel suggested that “we’ll be lucky” to fill a room that can accommodate two dozen people? Engstrom couldn’t go, and his designated surrogate skipped it, explaining in an e-mail that her day was “too crazy” to get away.

President Engstrom professed himself “surprised” that the US Department of Justice launched an investigation, which makes him one of the most easily confounded adults in the history of the universe. In all, just in the New York Times article by Jim Robbins, there are references to nine (!) different football players (unless, perhaps, one or more overlap across incidents) implicated in sexual assault since December 2010; that figure doesn’t count the one convicted of biting a woman (the Athletic Director showed photographs of the bite mark to reporters in an attempt to convince them that the bite “was not that serious”). Of course, “implicated” doesn’t mean “convicted.” Sexual assault cases are notoriously difficult to prosecute, especially if university officials, police, and prosecutors have no particular interest in either finding the truth or punishing the guilty.

[Note: for much of the next three paragraphs, I’m quoting or paraphrasing myself in a comment on Jack Marshall’s Ethics Alarms blog, linked above.]

There is, seemingly even more so today than a generation ago, a virtually endemic de-valuing of rape and sexual assault as an issue. The usual excuses (“she was asking for it,” “boys will be boys,” and variations on the theme) get trotted out. The same “blame the victim” mentality comes into play. More problematically (because seemingly more innocently), public relations concerns trump safety (just as Ibsen said the bourgeois mindset would do). We don’t want to make it seem as if an incident is anything but an isolated event, an aberration, an anomaly. There is prudence in this thinking. There is also denial.

I was talking with one of my students a couple days ago about the “training” she has to go through to be able to be a counselor for our high school camp. This “training” consists of watching a stupid video and answering a couple of questions that anyone with a brain could answer without the video, in part because the answer is always the one that most suggests that there’s a problem. Such exercises are met with contempt by students because they deserve to be.

I contrasted this with the training I received 20 years or so ago on rape crisis intervention. This was a 4-day event that contained real information, real strategies, real approaches. Was it worth it? Well, I’ve only used that training three times in 20 years… but I’ve used it three times. That’s me: a middle-aged male whose persona is hardly that of the traditional nurturer. Imagine how many more young women are more comfortable with a female confidante… or, worse yet, don’t talk to anyone. There’s still a stigma attached to being a rape victim, and if the rapist happens to be popular—or worse yet, a star quarterback or something like that—then accusing him brings incalculable social risks to the accuser… and there’s certainly no guarantee of justice at the end of it all.

When a school like the University of Montana fires its football coach and athletic director after the team went 11-3 and made it to the national semi-finals, there’s something up. Maybe that has something to do with an encomium from then-coach Robin Pfugrad about his star quarterback who just happened to be a rape suspect, describing Jordan Johnson’s “tremendous moral fiber.” Look, innocent until proven guilty and all, but just say that “he’s a member of the team until the judicial process runs its course and we’re happy to have a player of his skills on our side of the ball” or something similarly innocuous. Praising a rapist—which Johnson quite likely is, although perhaps it can’t be proved—is tacky, even by football coach standards.

There’s little wonder that there’s a widespread belief that 1). sexual assault is not being treated very seriously in Missoula—not by the university and not by the local police, 2). the looking the other way is especially pronounced when football players are involved, and 3). the intervention of the DOJ is not merely appropriate but necessary.

Conservatism, this is not. Ibsen is scowling. Of course, he always did. Maybe the prospect of a Curmie nomination for the fine folk at UM will cheer him up? Nah, probably not.