A playbook only exists if you have a field on which to run your plays. That “field,” for this playbook, is a football culture saturated with a masculinity which can manifest in horrible ways.
Football is one of the premier lenses through which we define masculinity in our culture. Who is more masculine than men who take to the football field and run headlong into each other, battering their bodies together, doing what most of us would be terrified to do if placed in that space? But that masculinity can encourage terrible behavior.
In a piece for the Advocate in March 2015, Wade Davis, a former NFL prospect and the executive director of You Can Play, an organization whose mission is to help end homophobia in sports, defined masculinity as “the ways in which we expect ‘men’ to act,” but noted that there is no one standard definition.[13] There are a multitude of ways that one can be “masculine,” based on the person or grouping defining it. One of the most important ways it is defined is as the absence of the feminine. Davis writes, “If masculinity is idolized, then ‘femininity’ (another indefinable word) is, by default, demonized, and for many, never as worthy. Sexism, the root of homophobia, creates the conditions for individuals to feel as if they have to perform certain rigid tropes of masculinity and femininity in order to be perceived as normal and acceptable.”
In sports, football in particular, masculinity that is considered “normal and acceptable” can be dangerous, both to the players themselves who put their bodies on the line and the people around them in their off-field lives who have to interact with these hypermasculine men. A 1999 study found that the message boys receive when watching sports is that
a real man is strong, tough, aggressive, and, above all, a winner in what is still a man’s world. To be a winner, he must be willing to compromise his own long-term health by showing guts in the face of danger, by fighting other men when necessary, and by “playing hurt” when he’s injured. He must avoid being soft; he must be the aggressor, both on the “battle fields” of sports and in his consumption choices. Whether he is playing sports or making choices about which products to purchase, his aggressiveness will win him the ultimate prize: the adoring attention of beautiful women and the admiration of other men. [14]
The outcome of this in real life can be confusing. While players are celebrated and financially rewarded for being aggressive, strong fighters on the field, they are demonized for what that masculinity looks like in the rest of their life. As Andre Perry wrote in 2014, to be a man and participate in football culture is to “be a bounty hunter, a missile, a shamer, homophobe, punisher, beater, and extortionist who will get on his knees and be thankful for winning a game.”[15]
A large reason we had such a robust discussion around out gay NFL recruit Michael Sam is that homophobia is predicated on the sexist idea that being weak is to be female, or to be female in any way is to be weak. Football players are the height of masculinity, and since we have determined gay men to be feminine, how can you have a football player who is also gay? The answer is that you have to push on antiquated ideas about masculinity. And there’s no better space to do that in than football.
In March 2015, the same month Davis published his piece in the Advocate, I interviewed him. We were sitting in a large suite in Austin, Texas, the room’s wide windows looking out over the river and toward downtown. Reclining casually, one leg propped up so his foot was resting on his knee, Davis talked with me about masculinity and homophobia in football. He told me that gay players and the work that You Can Play is doing are “redefining how people view manhood and masculinity and femininity.” Referring to Michael Sam kissing his then-boyfriend on camera on ESPN when he was drafted into the NFL in 2014, Davis said, “What I really love about what Michael did, very few people from the age of probably twelve to seventy will ever be able to say they didn’t watch two men be intimate while watching football. And football is the holder of masculinity. To have two men be intimate in that space in a such a public way, you watch Masculinity cry, ‘No! Not me! NOT ME! No! No!’”
That matters because of the impact that football culture has on how we think about masculinity. And as Davis explained, football has the power to affect or change the bad parts of modern masculinity.
Still, right now, the masculinity fostered in football locker rooms is often homophobic and incredibly misogynistic. And sometimes it is downright dangerous.
And so, when we look at all the known cases of college football and sexual assault, there are certain patterns that emerge: the prevalence of gang rape, threats against the person who reported, and ease with which people avoid taking responsibility for any of it.
II.
I have collected a list of more than 115 cases of college football sexual assault allegations, spanning from 1974 to 2016. Over the last four decades, through each one of these, coaches, athletic directors, universities, the NCAA, police who investigate the crimes, the media who cover it, and the public who they all report to have learned how to think and talk about the athletes involved, the women who report the crime(s), and every institution that’s implicated when there’s a failure in the system.
One hundred and ten is not such a high number considering how many college football programs there are and how many men play on each team. But the numbers are not hard and fast. First, many of these cases involve multiple players. Also, the idea that you could be raped by someone other than a stranger is a fairly new concept in and of itself. The term “acquaintance rape” first appeared in print in the late 1970s and didn’t go mainstream for another decade. A ripple effect of this is that sexual assault is woefully underreported, especially on college campuses. Finally, it’s much easier for me to locate cases from the last decade or so, since newspapers and TV stations began putting their content online. My Google alerts over the last three years have flagged cases that probably would have gone completely under my radar in the past. The list then is top-heavy over the last few years.
Here’s a sense of the problem, though. In 2015, there were allegations against players at Florida International University, the University of Tennessee, UCLA, and Santa Barbara City College. 2014 saw cases at Utah State, Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma, Texas, Tulane, Bowling Green, Tulsa, Culver-Stockon College, Miami, Vanderbilt, Kansas, New Mexico, Ole Miss, and Eastern Washington University. In 2013, there were cases reported at Baylor, Brown, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, Pacific University, Ohio State, Arizona State, Vanderbilt University, McGill University, Wisconsin, and the University of California, Los Angeles. In 2012, there were allegations against players at the University of Texas, Appalachian State University, Baylor, Old Dominion, Morehouse, and the US Naval Academy.
You get the idea.
III.
Many of the sexual assault cases I’ve found involve multiple athletes as either participants in or witnesses to the sexual violence, which is a particular facet of hypermasculine spaces. In Fraternity Gang Rape: Sex, Brotherhood, and Privilege on Campus, Peggy Reeves Sanday says that this behavior is common when there is “a group of persons associated by or as if by ties of brotherhood.”[16] These men end up “bonding through sex.” Participating in a gang rape “operates to glue the male group as a unified entity,” Sanday argues. “It establishes fraternal bonding and helps boys to make the transition to their vision of a powerful manhood—in unity against women, one against the world.”
That multiple football players would participate in sexual violence together, a communal act that Sanday says is based around asserting one’s masculinity, makes sense considering how important masculinity is to football (and football to masculinity).
There are so many cases of gang rapes involving college football players.
