IN a world in which female football players struggle to garner a fraction of the media coverage that their male counterparts attract, it should have been encouraging to see an article about women's football as one of the top stories on the BBC website, as it was at the start of this week.
The story was not about a great goal or some transfer news or a match report though - rather, it was about Manchester City's Jill Scott headbutting Arsenal's Jade Bailey during their Women's Super League match on Sunday.
Firstly, it should be noted that Scott's attempt at a headbutt was not great; it was barely a headbutt at all, it was more of a push with her forehead. It was a relatively innocuous act - Bailey hardly reacted to it and was certainly not hurt. That is not to excuse Scott's actions and her red card was fully deserved but far more violent acts than hers have been carried out by men on football pitches around the country.
Which is why the brouhaha surrounding Scott's case is interesting. If a male footballer had committed a similar offence, it is unlikely that the story would have made it into every newspaper, never mind being one of the main articles on the BBC. So why is a story of a female engaging in mild violence quite so newsworthy? There is still an element of shock expressed by many observers when female athletes explicitly display aggression, whereas when a man exhibits aggression it is, if not predictable, then certainly unsurprising.
It is an intriguing disparity. Why should elite female athletes be any less aggressive than their male counterparts? To make it to the top in any sport is a long, hard slog that requires an innate drive and ambition that varies little between sports and, unsurprisingly, between genders. When a female athlete is on the football pitch or athletics track or tennis court, the game matters just as much as it does to male athletes. At the time, the impending result feels like life or death. And it is this gravity of the result which makes an athlete snap, mentally, whether they be male or female. Yet the reaction to female aggression in comparison to male aggression is time and time again, more pronounced.
In 2009, Serena Williams was playing in the semi-finals of the US Open and was foot-faulted at a crucial point in the match. She went berserk at the lineswoman, shouting that she was going to "shove this ball down your throat." This is clearly inexcusable but considering that it was unlikely that Williams was going to carry out her threat, the reaction was somewhat overblown. And part of the reason the response was amplified was, in my opinion, because Williams is a woman. This kind of aggressive, combative behaviour is not what "society" expects of women. But no one can tell me that Williams, who learned her trade in Compton, Los Angeles and is one of the very few African-American tennis players to make it to the top of her sport, has any less pugnacity or vigour or desire for success than a male athlete. Bad behaviour is not excusable from either gender but neither should there be a difference in how shocking or surprising that behaviour is when it happens.
A few years ago, a female player in the US Women's College Soccer League lost her cool and attacked another player on the pitch. The fallout was extreme but it was the response of the coaches in the league that was most thought-provoking. "I think we are somewhat sexist in our opinion of sport. I think maybe people are alarmed to see a woman do that, but men do a hell of a lot worse things. Was it good behaviour? No, but because it's coming from a woman, it made a headline," said the player's coach. A fellow coach elaborated: "Women play with just as much intensity, work ethic and sometimes aggression as guys," he said. "But although men can be celebrated for extreme aggression, like knocking out a quarterback in the NFL, women are held to a different standard. I hate to call it a higher standard, but it's almost like they crossed a gender line they weren't allowed to cross, like we want to take them out of the athletic arena and put them in the nurturing, caring role as mothers of children."
These are valid points. The Daily Mail - admittedly, not the most balanced or feminist-leaning of news sources - this week ran the headline about Scott's headbutt: 'That's Not Very Ladylike." Eh? Admittedly, a headbutt is not ladylike, whatever that phrase means, but nor are almost all aspects of elite sport. To have an expectation that elite female athletes should behave any differently from men is preposterous. Sport at the top-level is cut-throat and the athletes competing are equally motivated to succeed - and that sometimes means that they will snap whether they happen to be male or female.
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