Men don’t dance with each other, they dance against each other. Choreographic common sense pitches men in rivalrous competition, usually over a woman – it is only through the language of violence that men are allowed to touch each other, to engage each other’s bodies. So when men dance together, they “battle.” Recently Jordan Lennie and Joseph Mercier took one of the queerest texts in all of dance history – The Rite of Spring – and used it to score an experiment in the literalization of the violence embedded into the choreography of men’s relationships to each other’s bodies. Written by Igor Stravinsky for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes, choreographed by Vaslav Nijinsky, the balletic performance of The Rite of Spring sparked “near riots” as audience members to the 1913 Paris debut responded so forcefully to just about everything about the event (the music, the choreography, the set, the whole idea of it) that some people actually threw fists at each other. Mercier and Lennie dove into six weeks of intensive training with MMA coach James Duncalf for this performance: they straight-up fought each other across the four sections of The Rite of Spring, escalating the intensity of the fight with each “act.” You can watch excerpts of the performance here. 

There is a sports version of the problem described her by science reporter Emily Graslie. Everything she says here is why I rarely cross-post on mainstream sports sites. Sexism throws an extra layer of bullshit into your sports-writing life when you venture into that terrain. And it wears you down.

All the conversation about the culture of the NFL has me thinking about Ricky Williams and the “scandal” of the player who walks away.

After spending more time than I ever wanted to thinking about the awful world of Lloyd Irvin, I felt perhaps we could use a strong palate cleanser. What better way to reset the brain than this October barn burner, courtesy of S. 18 of The Ultimate Fighter: Raquel Pennington v Jessamyn Duke.

You can read some of Duke’s thoughts on the fight on Bleacher Report.

For a good while now I’ve been stuck on that phrase “rape culture.” Especially as it gets hitched to “jock culture.”

Not so long ago, Sports Illustrated published an exposé of Oklahoma State’s football program, alleging every sort of misconduct under the sun. The story came under a lot of fire for questionable reporting: as reasonable as an investigation of the program might be, taken as a whole, the five-part series seems unevenly reported and sensational. (For a portrait of the abusiveness of college sports, the standard is surely Taylor Branch’s 2011 story for The Atlantic, “The Shame of College Sports”.)  If you know the subject about which the SI reporters are writing, this story is interesting but not exactly news; in places it is under-researched, and even a little clueless.

One chapter in the SI series drew my attention: “Part 4: The Sex.” I found myself intrigued partly because it opened up conversation again about the forms of sexual coercion that lurk – quite visibly – on the margins of mainstream sports culture. Over the past couple years, thanks to the Penn State, Steubenville and Vanderbilt scandals, US journalists have been paying a little attention to the aggressive sexism that seems to be embedded in men’s sports programs.  (They are paying a lot more attention to it than they used to, but they still pay very little attention to the sexism that structures mainstream men’s sports top to bottom.)

Anyway, thanks to Sports Illustrated‘s portrait of the place of sex in Oklahoma State’s recruitment program, problem-masculinity came back in the news as folks meditated on the kind of man football programs seem designed to produce – national heroes and/or entitled, rage-filled, brain-injured, drug addicted, dog-fighting criminals. Thus the headline given to Jessica Luther’s article on the NCAA’s passivity regarding sexual exploitation within campus football programs: “‘We Felt Like We Were Above the Law’: How the NCAA Endangers Women.” An otherwise good critique of the NCAA’s passivity regarding harassment within the sports program it regulates is framed as a story about rape culture – the way two connect (harassment and rape) is complicated, more complicated than many of these formats allow. One is often presented as reducible to the other. And people resist that reduction for all sorts of reasons. The comment section – never a measure of anything but the lowest – quickly converts her story into a question of who is to blame for what. (Answer, always: “Not me!”) A subset of that discussion are those people who try to draw a line around rape and not-rape: if the women participating in recruitment have sex with players willingly, what’s wrong with that? There’s a lot of fuzzy thinking mapped onto awful situations and little room for insight and progress.

The question of what’s wrong with consensual sex within sexist situations is a good question. And that – consensual encounters within sexist environments – is the background against which “Part 4: The Sex” is staged. None of the people interviewed are victims of rape. One person reports a story about a hostess receiving “unwanted advances” – this gets treated in the story as evidence of much worse.  (An “unwanted advance” does not qualify as harassing in and of itself.  An “unwanted advance” is only harassing when advanced  after a person has said “No thanks.” Or when such things are made into a condition of your employment or study.) That SI profile was written by non-feminists, by sports journalists who have a vague sense that something isn’t quite right about this scenario but who don’t have the political acumen – or desire – to think the story out.

What’s wrong with “hostessing” programs during a campus recruitment effort is not that sex happens in such settings, but that sex happens with the deeply sexist structures of those settings.

It is important to spell that out – because otherwise these stories turn all problems into the presence of sexual desire and or sex itself. And that mode of thinking is symptom number 1 of a sexist environment (and homophobic). Sexism is not simply a system that devalues one gender in favor of another. It is a system that dumps the world’s trouble onto the category of sex, and assigns all of the symbolic trouble of “Sex” to the subordinated gender. In a gender segregated environment, the entrance of that “sexed” gender into the room basically ruins everything. She either destroys the pleasure that men take from their patriarchal relations to each other (making their sexist forms of sociability impossible), or she “ruins” it by drawing out the worst of their “natural” impulses (rape). Often in such stories rape gets naturalized, rendered as inevitable – there’s an incoherent assumption that rape is organic to these spaces but no strong sense of why or how.

What’s wrong football program “hostesses” is that they are the only visible role allowed to women college students who want to get involved with the program, aside from cheerleading. It’s a role specifically designed to bring women into the process, not as members of the sports community but as trophies. And so a former player can say the following:

“There’s no other way a female can convince you to come play football at a school besides [sex],” says Artrell Woods, a Cowboys wide receiver from 2006 to ’08, who says he did not have sex with an Orange Pride member on his recruiting visit but was aware of others who did. “The idea was to get [recruits] to think that if they came [to Oklahoma State], it was gonna be like that all the time, with … girls wanting to have sex with you.” (Sports Illustrated)

The reporters don’t pause over the actual problem here: perhaps because it is too obvious, it’s the “given.” In not only these football programs but in sports media more broadly, it often seems women actually don’t have anything to offer a male athlete except sex. The irony of this story being reported in Sports Illustrated whose only issue dedicated to women is its swimsuit issue is not lost on the story’s readers.

Sports media gives us a funny picture of the world. One in which the seasons roll on, in which one scandal takes the place of another and none seem to produce change in the culture by which we are eternally scandalized. It’s the discourse of moral panic. Communal handwringing over the scourge of this and that. That and this being real, actual problems that get turned, however, into an abstraction, “The Sex.”

Ali throws a right hook against Brian London (1966)

Lynda Nead is a feminist art historian – The Female Nude (1992) and Myths of Sexuality (1988) are pathfinding works. Turns out Nead is a boxer, and has recently turned her attention to representations of boxing. Her 2001 essay “Stilling the Punch” offers an outstanding intervention regarding the ways that people tend think look at sports photography. One thing I really appreciate about this essay is the ease with which she parries the observation that sports is “just” war in the form of play. Yes, she says – but the things shared across representations of war and representations of sports are far, far more interesting than people tend to think. Two paragraphs from the opening pages of the essay:

War cannot be withstood and it is the stuff of pictures – it has within it something pictorial, but so has sport. I am fascinated by this offhand connection between the visual appeal of war and sport and not just in the obvious way that international sport may be seen as an enactment of patriotic interests and national conflicts. Is there not a deeper connection between the idealization and desecration of the body in warfare and in sport that makes this pairing intriguing and provocative? If we shift our attention from war photography to sports photography might we understand something different about violence, pain and representation and the havoc that violence wreaks on the human body?

Sports photography has been completely overlooked in the history of photography. It is unclear why this has been the case, but perhaps it is to do with its everyday nature and its association with the world of leisure; its place on the back pages rather than the front pages of news reporting. If sports photographs are the subjects of exhibitions, as, for example, in the exhibition of photographs of boxer Muhammad Ali in London in 2010, it is usually because of the identity of their subjects, in which the nature of the image changes from sports photograph to portrait. To concentrate discussions of violence and photography on images of war is to limit our understanding of the nature of the visual representation of violence and of how it enters into the language of other areas of social and cultural discourse. –  Lynda Nead, “Stilling the Punch: Boxing, Violence and the Photographic Image” in The Journal of Visual Culture 10: 305 (2011)

Is MMA ahead of every other sport when it comes to the unambivalent, take-no-prisoners presentation of women’s athleticism?