Sexism & sports: the playing field of profit
By Minnie Bruce Pratt
The historic struggle for women's liberation
in the United States, celebrated in March, continues today from
legislatures to factories--to the sports arena. Title IX, the
landmark legislation passed by Con gress in 1972, prohibited
sex discrimination at schools receiving federal money. It also
launched an exciting expansion of women's athletic teams and
participation by women in sports at every level, from high
school to professional.
But sexism and oppression are still serious factors in
women's relation to sports. This is seen in the recent spate of
"sex scandals" at NCAA Division 1 schools like the University
of Colorado-Boulder football program.
Katie Hnida, a former place-kicker for Colorado, recently
revealed in a Sports Illustrated interview that she had endured
years of verbal and physical sexual abuse at the hands of male
teammates--groped in team huddles, called sexually graphic
names, and, one night as she sat watching TV, was raped by a
teammate she had thought of as a friend. (Sports Illustrated,
Feb. 23)
Hnida, an honor-roll student, now plays for the University
of New Mexico, where this season she made football history by
becoming the first woman to score in Division I football by
kicking two points-after-touchdown in a Lobos victory.
In response to Hnida's comments, Head Coach Gary Barnett
made sexist and dismissive remarks. For this, Barnett has been
suspended by the president of UC.
Six women, non-players, have now come forward to say they
were sexually assaulted by football players since Barnett
became coach in 1999.
Three of the women who came forward have filed a lawsuit
against UC. Their testimony shines a blazing light on athletic
programs' big-business practices.
In order to recruit top high-school pro spects, college
sports programs put on "sex parties," hire call girls,
"escorts," and strippers, and lure young college women to serve
as "hostesses" to entertain the 16- and 17-year-old high-school
players who come to campus expecting sex.
A former Northwestern lineman, Chris Leeder, says: "Selling
sex to recruits is not something they invented at Colorado.
Every school does it." (Sports Illustrated)
The result? Sexual abuse, rape and victi m ization of women
who are then assigned blame for the situation. Joyce Lawrence,
co-chair of the UC Board of Trustees, ques tioned why the raped
women were "putting themselves in a very threatening position."
(Sports Illustrated)
In addition to sexism, racist attitudes in sports are
shockingly common. Male athletes, often young men of color, are
demonized as "criminal" and inherently violent, or as
incompetent.
Examples abound: for example, the vilification of
Philadelphia 76ers basketball star Allen Iverson for his
hip-hop style; or ESPN commentator Rush Limbaugh's attacks on
Donovan McNabb, Philadel phia Eagles All-Pro quarterback and
former NFL Player of the Year. Both Iverson and McNabb are
African-American.
What is really going on here? Sports sociologist Richard
Lapchick, director of the Institute for Diversity and Ethics in
Sport at the University of Central Flo rida, estimates that one
out of seven female college students is sexually assaulted on
campuses. He says: "I really don't believe that athletes are
disproportionately involved. They're part of a huge problem in
our coun try. And where a climate of a low regard for women is
created ... then it's kind of open season." (Associated Press,
Feb. 21)
The Miles Foundation reports that 30 percent of female U.S.
armed-service veterans report rape or attempted rape during
active duty. Reports of male troops raping and sexually abusing
female service members in Iraq are so serious that Secretary of
Defense Rumsfeld has had to order a Pentagon inquiry.
Brutal impact on women
Economic pressures in a declining eco nomy and cutbacks in
student-loan accessibility under the Bush administration are
having a brutal impact on college-age women. Some are turning
to sex work or prostitution to survive.
Juli Parker, director of the Women's Resource Center at the
University of Massachusetts-Dartmouth, told Workers World: "I
have women students who strip for money, and they do it because
they need the money. Why wait tables three nights a week when
you can strip once a week for the same amount of money?"
Young women are also living in an era when the women's
liberation movement has opened up chances for them to connect
to the power of their own physical capability and sexuality.
Parker says: "I can see why women would volunteer them selves
to do something like this [hostessing for recruiting parties],
both if they are financially strapped and also if they might
want to explore their sexuality.
"Women are trying to explore their sexuality. I see young
women who are more comfortable in their bodies, even letting
bodies show when they don't fit the comfortable Barbie doll
image, women who are more confident at bodily
self-expression.
"They might think they are exploring their sexuality in a
safe place but then they are not. There is a lot of promotion
around women's sexuality that can be taken, utilized and
twisted."
Who benefits?
And who benefits from this brutal twisting of women's lives?
The big business of college sports and related corporate
sponsors.
According to Linda Robertson of the Miami Herald: "Today,
the college sports behemoth must be fed tons of cash-- for the
$2 million football coach's salary, for the weight room and
athletic department offices that get renovated five times as
often as the cancer lab, for debt service on the stadium and
area ... for booster-club cocktail parties. These athletic
programs have become corporations." (June 19, 2003)
An NCAA study in 2000 showed that the average total revenue
per institution in Division I-A sports was $21.9 million. The
highest reported total revenue for a Division I-A university
was just over $73 million. If institutional support was
excluded from the budgets, there had been a nearly 124-percent
increase in profits in athletic programs in two years.
Corporations invest millions of dollars in sports to reap
billions. According to the Daily Pennsylvanian, the Ivy League
University of Pennsylvania athletic program gets from $500,000
to $1 million annually from contracts with businesses seeking a
high-class showcase. General Motors signed a $600 million
contract with NBC to be "the car and truck of the U.S. Olympic
team" through 2008. The 11 top sponsors of the Sydney Olympics,
which included McDonald's, Nike and Coca-Cola, paid a total of
$605 million.
And corporations are putting their names on stadiums--names
that come and go with the boom-and-bust capital fortune of the
companies, as Enron Sta dium in Houston is renamed Minute Maid
Park and the National Car Rental Center in Florida becomes the
Office Depot Center.
Meanwhile, the young athletes recruited by the colleges
struggle to graduate, with many students of color
disproportionately affected. The graduation rate for
African-American male basketball student-athletes at Division
I-A institutions is 38 percent. Also, athletes sometimes suffer
serious injuries. If these are incurred in "voluntary"
off-season workouts, the student-players are not covered by the
school's insurance.
The pressures are most intense in the revenue-producing
sports. "The further a sport is from the money, the higher the
graduation rate," Indiana University-Bloomington English
Professor Murray Sperber said in a 2002 interview.
Some male student-athletes in Cali fornia are attempting to
unionize to win better health coverage and improve sports
scholarships that now don't cover the actual cost of attending
school. Compared to the huge streams of revenue these athletes
generate for colleges, their compensation is small.
The breaking scandal at the University of Colorado is
finally drawing attention to the way women are used, attacked
and discarded in the competition to make pro fits out of
sports. It is apparent how this special exploitation of women
is tied together with the regular function of capitalism in
college sports.
Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, "It is
self-evident that the abolition of the present system of
production must bring with it the abolition of the community of
women springing from that system, i.e., of prostitution both
public and private."
Reprinted from the March 4, 2004, issue of
Workers World newspaper
This article is copyright under a Creative
Commons License.
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