I once made the mistake of watching a football game with an Italian woman who was studying medieval gender roles, and with whom, rather unimaginatively, I hoped to have sex. It was the sort of mistake one makes in one’s twenties, before one has developed a proper appreciation for the virtues of compartmentalization.
“They are spending most times hugging,” Elena observed.
“Those are blocks,” I said.
“Then at the end, they make a big pile on the ground and grind each other.”
“There’s no grinding.”
“Then they spank the others on the behind. It’s a gay ritual!”
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“But look. Before each time, the skinny one, the sex leader—”
“The quarterback—”
“He makes all the big boys bend over. Then he chooses his favorite and comes up behind the lucky one and makes a pantomime of sodomy.”
“No,” I said. “No no no. That’s the snap. It’s how the play starts. And the quarterback gets the ball from one guy, the center. It’s not a choice. He can’t just come up to, like, the tight end.”
Elena looked at me for several complicated European seconds. “The what?”
Earlier this year, a University of Missouri football player named Michael Sam announced that he was gay. He’d never worked hard to hide who he was. He dated a man throughout college. He frequented a gay club in Columbia. He came out to his college teammates before his last season. Many of them already knew.
As a kid growing up in Texas, Sam watched one of his older brothers die from a gunshot wound. Two more of his seven siblings died, and two others were imprisoned. He was once maced by police officers who had come to his house to arrest a relative. He also lived, briefly, in his mother’s car. These events probably helped Michael Sam put the issue of his sexual orientation into perspective.
In May the St. Louis Rams drafted the highly touted defensive end in the seventh round. If Sam makes the team, he will be the first openly gay player in NFL history. And thus his decision not to hide his sexual orientation—what we heterosexuals think of as living—became a huge story.
The underlying premise of this story was that the NFL might not be “ready” for an openly gay player. Reporters found sources to mouth the necessary misgivings. Anonymous team officials fretted that Sam’s draft stock would drop because of the media distraction he might cause, to which they were naturally (and, again, anonymously) contributing.
It was one of those media narratives in which the alleged subject (Michael Sam: Gay Guy in Shoulder Pads) was much less interesting than the actual subject: A Workplace Exists in America, Circa 2014, in Which the Prospect of Accommodating a Single Openly Gay Employee Is Enough to Induce Panic.
In what other setting would this sort of bigotry be tolerated? The Armed Forces used to be an acceptable standby. At this point, we’re down to outfits run by fundamentalist religious groups.
The logic seems to be that football is a domain of hyper-masculinity, a physical and psychological space where alpha males do battle. And gay men can’t be alphas because they are fragile and frightened and weak, which is to say feminine.
And everyone knows (and curiously consents to the fact) that the assigned roles of the feminine in football remain safely locked in the pre-suffrage era. The two archetypes seen most commonly on television are cheerleaders and players’ wives. Got that, ladies? You can either dance around on the sidelines as a half-naked sex object or sit in the stands cheering on your man. It remains unclear to me why so many women watch football, given how dismissive the game is of them.
But I’m more interested, for now, in the way a figure like Sam exposes the neurotic sexual conflicts at the heart of football.
Here, for instance, is how a linebacker named Jonathan Vilma explained his concerns about having Sam as a teammate: “Imagine if he’s the guy next to me and, you know, I get dressed, naked, taking a shower, the whole nine, and it just so happens he looks at me. How am I supposed to respond?”
Vilma’s point is that, unlike employees in other lines of work, he might have to be naked in front of Sam, which would make him feel uncomfortable. Fair enough.
But can I just ask: Why is Jonathan Vilma haunted by a fantasy of his own devising in which he is standing naked next to Michael Sam and being visually inspected by him, maybe even (gasp) admired? What is Vilma—a player so vicious that he was suspended for four games last season for attempting to injure opposing players—really afraid of here? That the simple act of a gay man looking at his naked body will call his own sexuality into question? That he’ll catch gay cooties? That Sam will overpower him and force him to have gay sex? Why does Vilma imagine that he has to respond to Sam at all?
Before I go any further with this disquisition, let me confess that I get what Vilma was saying. And if you stripped away all my sensitivo politesse—or just plunked me in front of an NFL game with a bunch of soused buddies—I would cop to the same worry. That’s why I feel comfortable speculating about Vilma’s motives. We’ve got the same issues. Almost all straight men do. We’re afraid of being gay, and that fear (whether we like it or not) contains an unconscious wish. Freud himself believed that we begin life with unfocused libidinal drives and that, though most of us settle into an orientation, we retain an attraction to both sexes.
For the record, if this isn’t already clear, I grew up in a male-dominated home where insecurity and bullying and homoeroticism ran rampant. I dealt with my confusion by throwing myself into sports, as a player and fan. Like a lot of guys, I believed that being a jock, albeit an inept one, would vouchsafe my heterosexuality.
And yet it’s also true that I found in the world of sports a way to sublimate my feelings of affection and desire for men. I did look at other guys in the locker room and I thought a lot about their bodies. I didn’t fantasize about having sex with them, but I did envy the power and confidence they possessed and I wanted to be close to them. It got sloppy. I can remember my mother walking into my room one night only to discover, to her obvious distress, that I was giving a back massage to a shirtless friend. Another time, behind a locked door, two soccer buddies and I measured our erect cocks in anguished silence. That’s a decent executive summary of my adolescence: endless dick measuring.
After his first year in college, my twin brother Mike told me he was gay. I was absolutely floored. I’d been harboring the suspicion that he was sleeping with my girlfriend. He had dated women in high school and been a standout on the swim and water polo teams. But I wonder now if my obsession with sports was in some ways a response to whatever part of me recognized Mike as gay. Later on, it would become clear that Mike tended to date African-American men. Was my fandom in some ways a coded expression of the same attraction?
My own view of sexuality at this point lines up with Kinsey. Our desires are a lot more fluid than we like to admit—a spectrum, not a duality. I like to joke that my friend Billy (who hates sports and dresses like the New Jersey equivalent of a peacock) is 23 percent gay. What I’m really saying is that I’m 23 percent gay. That’s how it works with homophobia. It’s just one big projection racket. Anybody who says he hates gay people is really saying he hates the secret gay parts of himself.
I believe there have always been people who are more sexually attracted to their own gender than the opposite gender, and the ones with the courage to admit to these impulses and act upon them get labeled gay. In the end, if you look at things objectively, it should make very little difference how people find sexual happiness. It’s their business, just like your sex life is your business. Parts is parts.
Our sexual morality is almost entirely culturally determined. In the world of the Old Testament—a world defined by the patrilineal inheritance of land and the expansion of power by marriage—homosexuality mucked up the given order. So God told a story about how it was deviant. In ancient Greece, grown men wooed and bedded teenage boys. The mightiest Greek soldier of all time, Achilles, loved his friend Patroklus more than any concubine. Nobody freaked.
Here in America, at the dawn of the third millennium AD, 60 percent of us support same-sex marriage. But there’s still this huge undertow of masculinity anxiety. And the preserve where this anxiety finds its purest and most obvious expression is in the Athletic Industrial Complex, especially in the game of football.
No other major sport defines masculinity in such radical terms, as both violent and physically intimate. It is my own belief that the brutality of the game is what allows for such intimacy. Men purchase the right, through their valor, to love other men without experiencing shame. Football is a form of camouflage, a display of manliness so overt that the viewer never questions the game’s subtle oddities.
And I suppose this brings us right to the main event, a document called The Wells Report, which was compiled, at the NFL’s direction, after the starting left tackle for the Miami Dolphins, Jonathan Martin, left the team last October and checked into a nearby hospital for psychological treatment. He quit due to “persistent bullying.” The Wells Report offers a rare peek inside the sanctum of an NFL locker room. It also presents a riveting and unintended saga of homoerotic turmoil.
The dramatis personae are mostly members of the offensive line, a close-knit unit led by a charismatic veteran named Richie Incognito. The authors affirm that Incognito, along with fellow vets Mike Pouncey and John Jerry, engaged in “a pattern of harassment” toward Martin that went beyond the standard rookie hazing. Press reports focused on the racial epithets that Incognito, who is white, directed at Martin, who is African-American. Among the more poetic sobriquets: “half-nigger piece of shit,” “shine box,” “stinky Pakistani” and “darkness.”
Incognito also makes vulgar comments about Martin’s mother and, in particular, his sister, a medical student whom he has never met. (“I’m going to bang the shit out of her and spit on her and treat her like shit” is one of his milder offerings.)
Like a lot of dudes who traffic in this sort of casual misogyny, Incognito and his pals also spout a lot of homophobic trash talk. In addition to hurling racist slurs at a Japanese assistant trainer, Incognito makes it a point to ask him for “rubby rubby sucky sucky.” He nicknames another submissive teammate “Loose Booty,” and routinely grabs him and asks him for a hug. The homophobia has an anxious, compensatory feel to it. At one point, Pouncey restrains “Loose Booty” and tells Jerry to “come get some pussy.” Jerry then touches the victim’s ass in a way that simulates anal penetration. Because, you know, that’s how you prove you’re definitely not gay.
What’s most striking about The Wells Report is its depiction of the volatile friendship between Incognito and Martin. Teammates describe the two as inseparable. In the course of their stormy fourteen-month relationship, they exchange 13,000 text messages, or nearly 30 a day. They seek each other out “at all hours of the day or night” and discuss “the intimate details of their sex lives, often in graphic terms.”
Martin tells the investigators he befriended his tormentor hoping to stem his abuse, as victims often do. He appears genuinely perplexed by Incognito’s mood swings. “At one point he pulled his shirt off & tried to beat my ass yesterday,” he writes in one text. “Then 5 min later it was like nothing even happened and we went to the strip club.” He refers to Incognito as “bipolar.”
But the deeper one reads into the report, the more it seems to describe a psychic crisis. Richie Incognito is guilty of bullying. But his true crime seems to be that he harbors forbidden desires for Jonathan Martin.
As he admits to investigators, his term of preference for Martin is “my bitch.” When Martin declines his offers to socialize, or to take trips together, Incognito reacts like a spurned lover. His invective reflects a familiar preoccupation. At one point, Incognito pressures Martin to vacation with him in Las Vegas. Here’s the exchange of texts that causes Martin to back out:
INCOGNITO: No dude hookers [male prostitutes] u faggot
INCOGNITO: Don’t blame ur gay tendancies on [Player A]
MARTIN: I’m gonna get more bitches in 2 nights than all of you combined
INCOGNITO: Stop it. By bitches u mean cocks in ur mouth
INCOGNITO: U fucking mulatto liberal bitch
INCOGNITO: I’m going to shit in ur eye
INCOGNITO: Goodnight slut
But beneath this profane banter, a genuine tenderness emerges. “Let’s get weird tonight,” Incognito writes to Martin, at one point. And a bit later, “What’s up pussy? I love u.” Even after Martin has left the team amid controversy, the two continue to text.
“I miss us,” Incognito writes.
As I pored through The Wells Report, I kept thinking about this book I reviewed a few years ago called The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists. The author, Neil Strauss, and his fellow pickup artists obsess over their masculinity and delight in detailing their conquests. But a familiar suspicion lurks beneath the braggadocio. “I was in the game to have more women in my life, not men,” Strauss writes. “And though the community was all about women, it was also completely devoid of them … The point was women; the result was men.”
This, it seems to me, is an apt description of the life many pro athletes lead. They have engineered lives in which they work and eat and bathe with other men and live by a set of masculine codes that discourage empathy, introspection, any sign of weakness really. A guy such as Richie Incognito functions like a modern-day Achilles. He may embrace women as sexual objects. But his deepest love is reserved for the men with whom he goes to battle, and it is sometimes difficult for him to regulate the sexual and aggressive drives that roil within him.
As history attests, there are clear social and political ramifications to this internal schism. The reason so many societies have attacked homosexuality is not just because their leaders were sexually insecure (though they were). It’s also because the most effective leaders exploited the homoerotic anxieties of their male populations. They defined masculinity as a willingness to do violence without remorse, and offered men the chance to atone for aberrant urges by persecuting homosexuals. This impulse might have found its earliest expression in religious allegories such as Sodom and Gomorrah, but it’s not some wild coincidence that fascist cultures and repressive regimes exhibit this same genocidal mania.
Being a jock also provides a safe haven from the emotional and psychological demands of women; it’s what an old girlfriend of mine used to call “regression to the mean.” Fans experience this as well. The reason I love going out to a bar to watch a football game with Sean (our wives call these excursions “man dates”) is precisely because we can just sit there eating onion rings deep-fried in cholesterol, watching the Raiders choke, and not discussing anything deeper than the risks of calling a naked bootleg in the red zone. It’s a way of clinging to adolescence.
And I can tell you exactly what happens to any dude who dares to speak out about the moral complexities of football. Here’s a sampling of the e-mails I received after writing such a piece for The New York Times Magazine, printed here verbatim:
OMG. I am progressive on social issues but dude—you are the biggest fucking pussy on the face of the earth. Change your tampon you woman.
I read an article you wrote about football and I couldn’t help but think of a slutty girl I knew growing up. I thought she had the biggest vagina I’d ever seen before until now … congrats dude, you have a bigger one.
Why do libs have to ruin everything we do for fun or to take our minds off of the world? I don’t even like the Redskins but if that kind of stuff offends the large vagina crowd, I am a fan now.
Well, then. That was certainly bracing.
I realize that you think I’ve cherry-picked these. But I swear to you, nearly every piece of hate mail I received made reference to my vagina, which was usually characterized as very large.
As the son of two psychoanalysts, I suppose I am obligated to speculate on this odd size fixation. Fine. On one level my correspondents simply wish to convey the exaggerated nature of my femininity (i.e., larger vagina = more feminine). Still, it’s hard to ignore that a large vagina suggests an unconscious fear of male inadequacy. Is it possible that merely asking these guys to examine their motives for watching football made them feel small?
We can say for sure that these men feel accused. That someone might make them feel guilty for watching football represents the ultimate gender betrayal. The prescribed punishment appears to be the revocation of one’s male genitalia.
For the record, my vagina is slightly smaller than average.
If, at its worst, the cult of football preys on male insecurity, prizes physical dominance, and denigrates women, it follows that these tendencies would effect not just how players interact with each other, but with women. And I would be remiss, therefore, in failing to mention the pattern of sexual violence against women perpetrated by football players.
Here’s the thing, though: to this point, I’ve avoided citing criminal complaints. It feels unfair to me to smear the many for the actions of a few. Also, the rate of allegation against players appears exaggerated because of their celebrity. The reason I’m making an exception when it comes to sexual misconduct against women is because of a disturbing pattern that goes far beyond the behavior of individual players: the gross negligence of law enforcement and the public.
The most flagrant recent example involves Jameis Winston, a celebrated quarterback for Florida State University. In December of 2012, a nineteen-year-old undergraduate told Tallahassee police she had been raped after a night of drinking at a popular bar. The young woman claimed her alleged assailant, whom she did not know, transported her to the bedroom of his off-campus apartment, ignored her pleas to stop, held her down, and later carried her to a bathroom where he locked the door and continued the assault. There was physical evidence: bruises indicative of recent trauma, blood on her shorts, and semen on her underwear. A friend of the alleged rapist later told police that he’d taped a portion of the encounter on his phone.
Police never saw this tape, because they barely investigated. Neither did school officials, though federal law requires them to look into any charge of sexual assault against a student. It was the alleged victim who, a month later, called police to identify Winston as the man who raped her, after she saw him on campus.
Her family, fearful she would be antagonized for accusing a football player, asked a lawyer friend to contact the assigned detective, Scott Angulo. According to the family, Angulo—who had done private security work for an FSU booster group—refused to order Winston to submit to DNA testing, because it would generate publicity. He warned that Tallahassee is “a big football town and the victim needs to think long and hard before proceeding against him because she will be raked over the coals and her life will be made miserable.” Angulo closed the case without having interviewed Winston or secured his phone records or DNA.
Only after the allegation became public, nine months later, did prosecutors reopen the case. By this time, Winston was one of the best-known football players in the country. Although his DNA matched the DNA found on the alleged victim’s clothing, prosecutors did not press charges. FSU did nothing to discipline Winston, though a second woman sought counseling from the school’s own victim advocate after a disturbing sexual encounter with him.
In the ensuing months, Winston won the Heisman Trophy and led the Seminoles to a national championship. He has been projected as the number one overall pick in the 2015 NFL draft.
His accuser was publicly reviled—viciously slut-shamed, in some cases—and withdrew from classes. Winston’s lawyer accused her of “targeting” his client, though she had no idea he was a football player when she first went to police. She received death threats on social media.
Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the twisted logic of rape culture. The true victim is always the famous baller. And the young woman who goes to the police, bruised and distraught, who submits to a rape exam? She has no right to expect an honest investigation of her allegations. She deserves to be verbally abused, ostracized, then discarded. And why?
Because her claims threaten to expose the whole misogynist underpinning of the fan/athlete dynamic, the sickening arrangement by which we give athletes the cultural power to sexually possess women with little fear of the consequences. It’s a modern form of tribute; to the victors go the spoils.
Thanks to police incompetence, or worse, we’ll never know exactly what happened between Winston and his accuser. FSU has yet to discipline the quarterback, and now joins a host of other colleges under federal investigation for allegedly mishandling sexual assault cases involving athletes. We do know that school officials and students and an entire nation of fans appear more troubled by the prospect of not being able to watch Winston play than by the fact that he might be a rapist.
That’s how much we need our football.
Two years ago, in Steubenville, Ohio, a pair of high school football players sexually assaulted a teenage girl incapacitated by alcohol, giddily documented the attack on film, and shared photos on social media. Members of the community rallied around … the rapists. They assailed the victim for casting the team and town in a negative light. She was pressured to remain silent and was made an outcast by her peers. Three adults, including the superintendent of schools, were arrested for obstructing the investigation.
Given the preponderance of evidence, the boys were convicted in a juvenile court. Poppy Harlow, a CNN correspondent, described the scene by saying it was “incredibly difficult, even for an outsider like me, to watch what happened as these two young men that had such promising futures, star football players, very good students, literally watched as they believed their lives fell apart.”
If the convicts had been drifters or undocumented workers, we can assume they would have been perceived quite differently. But Harlow’s little soliloquy reveals a darker possibility: the fact that the assailants were star football players might help explain their crimes. The people of Steubenville—fans, parents, coaches—made those boys feel chosen, as if their physical gifts entitled them to special rights, made them impervious to the codes of decency that govern the rest of us, as if their athletic fate mattered more than the dignity of the unconscious teenage girl they raped and humiliated.