Sport, media and the gender-based insult

Public evidence is increasing that the gender-based insult is routinely practiced even within those male team sports that are subjected to intense media and public scrutiny, and whose associations are officially mandated to eradicate prejudice and discrimination, and to foster respect among players, officials, and fans (such as the “Respect” and other social responsibility initiatives of Union des Associations Europeennes de Football [UEFA], the governing body of European association football). However, what is perhaps more shocking about the common resort to gender insult as a weapon is that it generally fails to shock or to incur widespread condemnation. In stark contrast to the consensually condemned racial insult, the comparative normalization of the sex/gender-based insult is often thrown into sharp relief during media sport scandals arising from confrontations in male team sports, where masculinist insults (based on the assumed innate superiority of aggressive maleness) are revealed as routine constituents of inter-player discourse. This observation by no means implies any diminution of the gravity of the offense of racialized denigration in sport, nor does it try to set up forms of denigration in competition with each other. Indeed, as will be argued on pp. 398-400, “race-” and gender-based insults are not infrequently combined in the exercise of a more comprehensive vilification of sporting opponents, and of those with whom they are materially and symbolically associated (see also Rowe 2010a). Nor do I suggest that sportswomen do not also sometimes insult each other (such as by using the common misogynistic term “slut” or through expressions of ”violent femininity”-Gill 2007). The foci of this chapter, however, are the gendered power relationships within and surrounding sport that clearly persist beyond “plain sight” despite professed dedication to the eradication of gender inequality in sport, and in which the media are key players. Here the gender-based insult in sport is analysed as a form of “power play” exercised through everyday, naturalized masculinization and feminization. It comes to light often only incidentally in pursuit of another kind of offense reported in the news and sports media.