There’s no reason why a woman shouldn’t love sport, just as there is no reason why a woman shouldn’t write about sport. And yet, women sportwriters are still subject to antiquated attitudes and harassment from a noisy minority of commenters. It’s time to change the game, says Antoinette Muller.
By Antoinette Muller*
I have my mother to thank for my love of sport. This revelation is often met with a furrowed brow and a wrinkled nose when I’m quizzed about how I came to love sport so much that I write about it for a living.
“Your dad didn’t like sport?” these furrowed brows would quizzically ponder. Well, he did, but not nearly as much as my mom, I’ll reply with a shoulder shrug as if a sports lover being anatomically female is no big thing.
I find these questions curious because in this day and age more women are watching cricket than men (the limited overs, anyway), women are playing Fantasy Football, women are working in media, women are the highest scorers at cricket matches (yes, they are!) and it’s estimated that one out of three sports fans are women. No big deal, right?
Well, not quite. Women who work in sports media are still constantly berated, harassed and insulted by small-brained imbeciles who seem incapable of any coherent argument. I’m not talking about the most basic “get back in the kitche”n quip (yes, those still happen). I’m talking about seriously vile and often violent insults hurled at women who work in sports media.
Earlier this year, a YouTube video for the #MoreThanMean campaign asked men to read out nasty comments sent to women sportswriters. Some comments were too vile to repeat here, but they all had one thing in common. Instead of challenging the argument the writer was making, the commentator would focus on the writer’s gender and try and break down her character.
If you think this is a small sample of people who spew such bile, you’re wrong. This happens all the time. I tend not to read the comments, but I have had my fair share of ‘women should not write about sport’ appear below the line. While I’ve never been violently threatened in comments (that I know of ), being a woman in what was traditionally a “man’s world” seems to really get under the skin of some people.
That brings me back to my mother and her love of sport. We are often told about the importance of representation. From the workplace to the media to the sportsfield, adequate (and one day equal) representation is something that we constantly hear about. I’d never thought about the importance of it until much later in life.
The representation of a sport-loving female demographic was always prevalent, thanks to my mom. I never felt weird or threatened for loving sport, because to me, it was just the normal thing to do even if you were a woman.
I suspect that this is not the case for all young girls growing up, even now. Female sports journalists are still a rarity and I can count on two hands the female sports writers in South Africa. Press boxes heave with testosterone while women are often nudged into “public relations” roles rather than tapping away on the press banks. Much of this has to do with representation and “passive role models” like my mom was.
You cannot dismiss the importance of seeing somebody you identify with doing things you are told ar “not for girls”. At my ever job in sports media, I worked in an office where a woman was an editor for a Formula 1 site and the women on the cricket desk out-numbered the men. More importantly, none of them ever wondered just why a woman was so obsessed with cricket.
Passive role models are a crucial part of shaping our views of the world and helping us deal with challenging situations and smashing stereotypes. So, when I landed my first column on South Africa’s biggest sports news website, I simply shrugged off being told to get back in the kitchen. After all, my bad-ass mom managed taught me to love sport while pottering around in the kitchen and whipping up an incredible dinner, all while keeping on beady eye on the sport.
- This article first appeared on the Change Exchange, an online platform by BrightRock, provider of the first-ever life insurance that changes as your life changes. The opinions expressed in this piece are the writer’s own and don’t necessarily reflect the views of BrightRock.
