If you haven’t heard it before, there’s a term you should know: ‘’. ‘Toxic masculinity’ is all the ways, spoken and silent, that we force boys and young men into perpetuating a particular type of idealised man. Be aggressive. Don’t cry. Solve problems with fists, not talking. Be good at sport. Drink. Another tenet of this particular faith is that women are prizes to be won, and can be won with success - whether financial, sporting, or cultural (music, acting…funnily enough academics never features high on the list of what will get you laid.)
All this starts very early on. Boys sword-fighting with sticks they find in the backyard, being given building blocks, toy trains or cars, only being given clothes of certain colours. And it only gets more and more inculcated as we move through adolescence. Especially when it comes to sport.
Sport can be a wonderful thing. In the 25 years that I have been playing organised sport and following professional sport, I have met many wonderful people, shared moments of truly transcendent joy with complete strangers, and generally felt myself part of something bigger than myself - an ideal that belongs to us all, collectively. But once you start listing the elements of toxic masculinity, you can see every single one of them manifest in sport - and especially in football.
Football not only promotes the culture of toxic masculinity, it idealises it. Those characteristics are not just desirable in football, they are demanded. And they are demanded of young men who have spent significant periods of their adolescence in a single-sex environment where your allegiance the group can never be allowed to waver. By necessity you build a club culture’ that defines you as against all the other clubs, and you fight to preserve and protect it against all outsiders.
No better example of this exists than the recent scandal involving the Essendon Football Club. In the face of allegations of serial drug cheating the players and administrators circled the wagons - protecting their coach, lying to (or at least omitting crucial information from) the authorities investigating the case - and cried that they were the real victims in all this. But you couldn’t ignore that Essendon’s club motto for the 2013 season, when this story first broke, was ‘Whatever It Takes’.
Source: AAP
Another high-profile case involves former AFL player Stephen Milne, who was accused of rape in 2004. A Victorian Police investigation took place, and the Director of Public Prosecutions decided not to lay charges, saying there was insufficient evidence. But then in 2011 the Office of Police Integrity decided to review the case after claims that a senior detective had been pressured to drop the case against Milne, and it emerged that tapes of interviews with two St. Kilda players were stolen from the investigating detective’s desk and the alleged victim’s statement was leaked to the club during the six-week . Following that review, Milne was charged with four counts of rape. By itself the story of the investigation influenced by the cosy relationship between the police and the football club would be a perfect illustration of how the notion of “boys will be boys” has a far greater impact than on the field, but the most toxic aspect of this episode is that, despite his suspension from the club following the charges being laid, several of St. Kilda’s highest-profile players approached sponsors and wealthy supporters to fund Milne’s legal costs. Even in the face of criminal charges, The Clan stays strong.
Sam Fischer chats to Milne the day after Victoria Police charged the Saints star with four counts of rape over an alleged incident in 2004. Source: AAP
How can we change?
First we have to acknowledge that this is bigger than sport - although football clubs offer some of the worst examples of toxic masculinity, they merely present the rawest form of the behaviour that all of society demands from men. You see this sort of behaviour anytime men gather together in institutions that glorify aggressive, ‘male’ behaviour - the army, certain types of corporations (ANZ stripper guys), hell, even in our parliaments. But really, almost anytime you get more than four men together in one space a pack mentality takes over - if Mitchell Pearce’s behaviour was even in the Top 10 Worst Things Done by 26 Year-Old Men on Australia Day, I will ‘bubbler’ myself. But it should be noted how rarely female athletes get caught up in these kind of scandals, which suggest it is more to do with masculinity than sport - although the recent arrests of two high-profile American female athletes (Hope Solo and Brittney Griner) might suggest that sport (or money, or celebrity) isn’t blameless as a broader culture.
"If Mitchell Pearce’s behaviour was even in the Top 10 Worst Things Done by 26 Year-Old Men on Australia Day, I will ‘bubbler’ myself"
Second, we also need to acknowledge that sport creates many opportunities for doing good. Those qualities that sport teaches - determination, strength, single-mindedness, the importance of collective success over individual accolades - are not bad things in and of themselves. In fact those qualities are highly desirable in many situations, and are excellent life skills to have - a fact demonstrated by the number of charities that use sport as the framework to change the world. There’s , which uses participation in sport to encourage greater involvement in education, and in only 15 years has grown to involve about 3,700 boys in 68 schools across Western Australia, Northern Territory, Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland. Or the , established by indigenous AFL footballers Adam Goodes and Michael O’Loughlin, which uses its founders sporting celebrity to raise funds to provide Indigenous children with scholarships to quality schools, and to meet expenses for students attending these schools. These are just two of countless examples.
Athletes need balance
So maybe the answer is simply to balance sport, and that particular form of male behaviour, with other perspectives on the world. Perhaps we should be demanding that talented teenage athletes also spend time engaged in fine arts, or learning another language, or playing an instrument - anything to reinforce the idea that chasing a bit of leather around a park isn’t the be-all and end-all.
Another issue is the relative youth of so many of these elite footballers - many thrust into the national spotlight while still teenagers, and given boatloads of money at an age when most of us are trying to make a 5-pack of instant mi goreng stretch for an entire week. Paul Roos, current coach of the Melbourne Demons AFL club, has long advocated for raising the age at which players can join senior AFL lists, arguing that football clubs are not the best place for teenagers to continue their emotional and personal development. Roos often compares Australia to the US, where college sports are an enormous feature - and although college sport isn’t immune from scandal, and the existence of that college tier hasn’t prevented scandal in the American professional sphere, it is a proposal worth considering as a way of creating more rounded athletes, and ensuring these young men have more than just football in their lives. College sports are also closely tied with fraternity culture, effectively substituting one hypermasculinised environment for another.
But, ultimately, this is something that falls on all of us to change. And we can contribute from the comfort of our living rooms. When an athlete takes a break from the game due to their mental health, don’t call them a “sook”. When an athlete talks about there being more to life than sport, don’t abuse them for not being committed. When one of your male friends is having a tough time, don’t tell him to “man up”, or have a go at him for being “soft”. It takes tremendous amounts of strength to open up and talk about your feelings - just because it’s not the sort of strength that results in a goal doesn’t mean it isn’t worth cheering for.
