High-profile sports stars are role models – what they say matters –
IT WOULD be wrong to conflate the tone and content of the WhatsApp messages in the Ulster rugby rape trial with rape culture. This is a ‘contempt for women’ culture.
It is a ‘complete lack of respect for women’ culture.
It is ugly, degrading and lacking in even basic dignity.
Like most women, I find such derogatory terminology disgusting and offensive. And why wouldn’t I? I am a human being after all.
However, there is nothing new about gendered insults about women. Women have been derided in coarse sexual terms since time immemorial by a certain cohort of men.
What is new is seeing them written down and having them used as evidence in a high-profile trial in the form of social media messaging.
The jarring effect of seeing multiple uses of the term ‘slut’ in particular has shocked many women.
‘Love Belfast Sluts’ was the caption included on a selfie photo by Blane McIlroy with three women. Nice.
Like most women when I read that, a film of utter fury enveloped me. ‘How dare you?’ I thought, along with almost every woman in the country.
‘Any sluts f***ed?’, a friend enquired of Stuart Olding. His response was: ‘Pumped a girl with Jacko on Monday. Roasted her’.
These exchanges have galvanised women’s voices, particularly young women. Given the context, this is hardly surprising.
And whether they wish it to be so or not, high-profile sports people are, by default, role models in society. So what they say matters.
That is why they are paid very handsome amounts of money and are expected to behave like professionals.
A slut is defined as a woman who has many casual sexual encounters. I am not aware of a similar derogatory term for men who have multiple casual sexual partners.
This amounts to double standards. A woman who engages in sexual activity is derided while a man in the same situation is a ‘top shagger’, it seems.
It is hard to believe that in 2018 young men in their 20s are so ridiculously out of touch with social mores to imagine that this sort of thing is actually how real life works today.
The playing field between men and women has been levelled in the last few decades, but clearly this message has not reached this group of rugby players.
This is called slut shaming of and it is odious and deplorable in equal measure.
The issue here is that the language used is loaded and designed to demean. When that language is preserved on social media platforms, this compounds the matter.
The cumulative effect of slut, brasses and all the rest left most women reeling at the utter baseness of it all.
And no, dismissing it as no more than male banter misses the point by a mile. It is hugely insulting to and disrespectful of women. This is at the core of the anger among women about this trial.
It is quite simply verboten in educated or civilised circles to use such language to describe women.
A fairly grovelling apology, a full nine days after the acquittal verdict, is academic.
The damage has been done and, as is always the case with an apology, timing is all.
To all intents and purposes it reeks of little more than a selfserving gesture, designed as a personal damage limitation exercise.
Rugby has traditionally been a middle-class badge of honour game, favoured by chunky chaps – often pompous, with overinflated egos, but not coarse or insulting to women.
Rugby has changed, it seems. The vast hordes who now follow rugby because of the middle-class badge it appears to confer, have contributed to diluting the carefully crafted and lucrative brand.
Rugby players used to be poised to become pillars of the community, moving easily in polite circles. ‘He played rugby’ was a euphemism for he comes from good stock. It was also a good career opener to business, legal and medical circles.
The shocking details of this nine-week rape trial in Belfast have savagely tarnished the brand that is Irish rugby. For those players who do not treat women disrespectfully, this is most unwelcome and unfair.
However, a few rotten eggs do create quite a nasty, noxious stench that lingers.
If 139 members of the public contributed to a crowd-funded advertisement in ‘The Belfast Telegraph’ requesting that neither Jackson nor Olding play again for Ireland, you can rest assured that the fall-out from this trial is not going to disappear any time soon. The ad stated that the content of social media exchanges between the two was ‘reprehensible’.
THE #MeToo movement, the forthcoming Referendum on the Eighth Amendment and the salacious nature and misogynistic tone of the Belfast trial, all seem to have created a groundswell of Irish women’s voices collectively saying ‘enough is enough’.
‘I Am a Woman, Not a Merry-goRound’ declared a poignant, home-made poster, held up by a woman at one of the solidarity marches for the complainant, after the verdict for all four accused was delivered.
Yes. Language matters and it matters a great deal when it is carved in digital granite, otherwise known as social media platforms.
Irish rugby players Paddy Jackson and Stuart Olding were cleared of raping a 19-year-old woman. Blane McIlroy and Rory Harrison were cleared of indecent exposure and perverting the course of justice respectively in the same trial.
Dismissing it as no more than male banter misses the point by a mile. It is hugely insulting to and disrespectful of women. This is at the core of the anger among women about this trial