Farewell to the Men's Team

By Nathan Kalman-Lamb

Well, I'm sorry to announce that my time leading the Men's Team has drawn to an end. This will be my final post for the Men's Team blog, just as this is my final day working on behalf of the Team.

It has, I believe, been a very productive year. When I began in May 2014, the on-line presence of the Men's Team was practically non-existent. There was a Twitter account with nine followers. There was a Facebook page. There was little else. Based on the premise that in this day-in-age, an on-line presence is at least as important as a physical one, we worked hard to change that. Today (as of the minute I type this), our Twitter account has precisely 1,567 followers.  Even more significantly, we founded this blog, which, as of this moment, has been viewed 4,488 times in less than a year.

Do these numbers matter? I think they do, for reasons beyond self-aggrandizement (although I am proud of them!).

As the year has advanced, it has become more and more clear to me that the Men's Team has a principal purpose above all others. Of course, our mandate has been and continues to be to struggle to redefine masculinity as part of a larger project to end gender-based violence. That is an immense ambition, however, and one that cannot realistically be imminently accomplished. This does not mean that the project of the Men's Team is misguided or even Sisyphean, however. For, the most important role of the Men's Team, I now believe, is symbolic. Not tokenistic, mind you, but symbolic. The symbol of an organization of men who stand alongside women in the feminist struggle against gender-based violence matters.

It matters because, from an ethical standpoint, it is important for men to stand up and model to other men that it is possible to do what is right, even if it is difficult and/or unpopular work.

It matters because it gives feminist women who must waste hours and hours of their time arguing with MRAs (Men's Rights Activists) on-line that their message is getting through to some men, and that there is hope things will get better.

It matters because it tells everyone who has suffered directly or indirectly as a consequence of the ideology of hegemonic masculinity that there is an alternative and that there are people who are committed to it.

The value of our increased on-line presence is that we have been able to disseminate that symbolic presence far more widely than in the past. We have let people know that we exist and that we are here for all of the above-stated reasons.

Of course, for precisely all of the same reasons, it is also important for the Men's Team to have a physical presence. To that end, members spent many a Friday in the past year tabling in Vari Hall at York University in an effort to initiate conversations on gender-based violence and masculinity. We also hosted a (wildly successful, in my humble opinion) workshop on masculinity and advertising.

This is all work that I hope will continue and be built upon in the future under new leadership. For now, I would like to warmly thank the members of the Men's Team who devoted a great deal of time and effort this year: Christopher Ford, E. A., Ernest Velasquez, Tony Barone, and Trevor York.

Thank you also to each of you who took the time to read and comment on what we had to say on the subject of masculinity and gender-based violence, whether that was here on the blog or on Twitter, and to those who stopped to chat in Vari Hall. I found it meaningfully encouraging to see just how many people care deeply about this subject and are unwilling to settle for the status quo.

Finally, please allow me to add this final statement of principle. We live in a patriarchal society -- a society that structurally privileges men at the expense of women. One way in which patriarchy manifests is through the identity category of hegemonic masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity, at its core, operates according to the logic of coercive entitlement. It teaches men that they deserve to have whatever it is they are able to take by force. This is why masculinity is directly connected to gender-based violence. Men are taught that they must aspire to dominate in every sphere of their lives, including their relations with women, and that if they succeed in doing so, they deserve to be rewarded. This is a fundamentally instrumental approach to the other and it is one (in combination with the patriarchal logic that men are inherently more valuable than women) that inevitably leads many men who internalize it to cause harm in myriad ways to the women they encounter in their lives.

As men, we need to acknowledge the privileges that we receive from hegemonic masculinity. We need to own up to our complicity in coercive entitlement. And, most importantly, we need to start working to ensure that future generations of men who follow us will see hegemonic masculinity for what it is: an archaic, bigoted, patently unethical way of being in the world.

I trust that the Men's Team will continue that project after I am gone. I can promise you that I will, regardless of where life takes me.

CUPE 3903, Hegemonic Masculinity, and the York University Strike of 2015

By Nathan Kalman-Lamb

Picketers and flag at Main Gate, York University, March 17, 2015. Credit: Paul Elias

You may have noticed that the Men's Team has been quiet for a while (I hope you have!). That's because the work I do for the Team causes me to be a member of the union CUPE 3903 and CUPE 3903 has been on strike. If you were unaware of that, I am pleased to inform you that the strike is over and we were successful in achieving all of our principal goals.

York University has a reputation as a site of social justice activism. It is a place where professors teach about politics, ethics, and equity in the classroom and where many students consider rallies, marches, and protests to be an essential part of their education. Yet, even on such a political campus, CUPE 3903 takes the cake as the most radical of the lot. This is a union that has struck three times in fifteen years -- indeed, that was willing to strike this year after a three month strike in 2008-2009 that culminated in back to work legislation. It is a union that begins every meeting with the reading of an equity statement and one that has mechanisms for interventions against bullying and sexism as part of its regular protocol. It is a union willing to challenge the logic of austerity in a historical moment that has normalized it as common sense.

For four weeks, I walked the picket lines with CUPE 3903 because I shared a belief that we could win better job security for increasingly exploited academic workers and more accessible education for graduate students. (Well, actually, I didn't walk the picket line as much as I directed traffic at Keele St. and Main Blvd. while serving as a human rage depository for the sentiments of aggrieved drivers -- but more on that later.)

Yet, even as I took satisfaction in struggling for a common goal with people who seemed to share a similar commitment to principles of equity and justice, I could not help noticing that even in this most progressive of spaces, hegemonic masculinity continually seemed to rear its ugly head. I am not writing this post because I am interested in besmirching the name of the union on the heels of one of its greatest victories -- to do so would be akin to an attempt to undercut myself, for membership in 3903 is an inextricable part of my own sense of identity. Nevertheless, no organization and no individual is completely immune to criticism and sometimes we must be willing to hold ourselves up to scrutiny in order to better fulfil the principles we aspire to. Indeed, by calling attention to the insidious forms toxic masculinity took during the strike in CUPE 3903, I hope to call intention to just how pervasive this form of identity is and how urgent is the need to combat it.

I should begin by saying that it is not at all surprising that white, hegemonic masculinity emerged to play a significant role over the course of the strike. In fact, given the history of the union movement, it would be far more surprising if the reverse were true. The reality is that since its inception, the union movement in North America has fashioned an identity predicated on a notion of rugged masculinity at the exclusion of women and non-white people. No doubt, this preoccupation is a direct consequence of a sense of emasculation at the hands of a capitalist system that seeks to degrade and exploit at every turn. The union as an institution historically provided men (and only later, for at first they were explicitly excluded in many cases, women) with an opportunity to stand up to this system and the capitalist class and fight for their dignity. Yet, it also provided a vehicle for members to position themselves as superior to other members of the working class (women, non-white people) who faced other structural barriers as well as those posed by capitalism (misogyny and racism, both institutional and otherwise). This is a legacy that continues today and is reproduced in various ways. [Author's note: I failed to mention that during the strike, members of CUPE 3903 formed a Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour Caucus and addressed many of these on-going issues and how they pertain to the local in a statement. That statement can be found here.]

The first example of this I want to touch on during the recent CUPE 3903 strike was the attitude of CUPE National (the parent union for 3903 to whom our local was beholden for strike pay after the first two weeks) to members attempting to participate in the strike. The conventional paradigm for receiving strike pay according to National was participation on the picket line every day. For many people, this was an acceptable arrangement and certainly one important to the strike (it became essential once the university attempted to re-start classes). For others, however, the picket line was not an option. This had to do with accessibility concerns of all types (disability, child care, etc.). The local referred to those members who participated in strike activities outside of the picket lines as the "8th Line" in order to acknowledge the equal significance of these strike-related endeavours to the overall cause, as well it should have.

CUPE National did not see it the same way. How do I know? Because they did not agree to sign off on payments to 8th Line members from the National strike fund even as all other picketers were granted their pay. The message was clear: only picketing constituted legitimate strike-related labour. Or, put differently, only a hyper-masculine willingness and ability to insert one's body between a vehicle and the site of employment could justify strike pay. I don't think I need to elaborate at length on the nature of the problems here. Only a unionist ideology rooted in ableism and hegemonic masculinity could produce such a policy. Only individuals who had fully internalized it could continue to apply it even when confronted with the plight of members who had worked for the strike and yet would literally not be able to pay rent without the cheques that they earned but did not receive.

The second example of hegemonic masculinity during the strike actually pre-dated  it (barely) and was simply brought to the attention of membership during the first ratification vote which occurred after the first week of the strike. I am referring to the revelation that a member of the local was (allegedly) raped by a member of the local's executive just a month before the strike began. The survivor released a letter about what happened to her which can be found here. There is not much for me to say beyond what she herself has articulated. But, what I do feel needs to be underlined is the fact that we can never, under any circumstances, assume that a space is safe from gender-based violence, regardless of its supposed credentials as a site of social justice and equity.

My third observation, and it is less painful, but, perhaps, more symptomatic of the pervasiveness of hegemonic masculinity than the previous two, is of the behaviour of certain members of the picket line. I heard frequent reports throughout the strike, and witnessed for myself, white male picketers acting in a confrontational, aggressive, and insolent manner seemingly designed to signify their authority over the picket lines (and other members walking the lines) and their dominance over members of the community crossing those lines. This behaviour was both counter-productive (given that one of the principal purposes of the picket lines was to provide information to those entering the campus and an antagonistic approach was certain to subvert that project) and fundamentally unethical. Although the picket lines produced a type of space and dynamic that has become increasingly unusual in our society due to the paucity of such labour disruptions, there is simply no reason why basic ethical imperatives should have been abandoned (by anyone, and I will get to those crossing the lines in a moment). The choice to use the threat of physical violence to intimidate is another hallmark characteristic of hegemonic masculinity.

The fourth point I wish to make about hegemonic masculinity and the strike pertains to the behaviour of those crossing the picket line rather that of those on strike. This, of course, is not a reflection of the membership of CUPE 3903, but rather of the broader York University community. To put it quite simply -- and I will speak only of experiences at the Main Gate line -- we were confronted with some shocking demonstrations of toxic masculinity expressed as violent temper tantrum. These tantrums came in many forms. The most overt was captured on the video below and circulated widely during the strike.

This was far from the only example, however. Despite our persistent attempts to inform any motorists entering the line of their projected wait times, and to engage them always with an attitude of equanimity and patience, we were treated to all manner of abuse. I can simply catalogue some of the examples I experienced personally.

Early in the strike, as I attempted to direct traffic entering York Blvd. off of Keele (in order to ensure that drivers did not have to endure the stressful experience of feeling like their vehicle was protruding into the heavy traffic on Keele St), one driver decided to ignore my instructions (delivered verbally and through hand signals) and instead drove directly over my foot. That's right, with no provocation whatsoever, a man deliberately drove his (sports) car over my foot. Fortunately, I was wearing steel-toed boots at the time and was unharmed (or perhaps you would have heard about this sooner on a news report).

This was not the last time my body was placed at risk by aggressive men in vehicles who seemed to feel the need to assert their dominance over me (to be fair, I was causing them a mild inconvenience). On a later occasion, as I stood in the right turn lane on Keele into York Blvd., I indicated to a driver that he needed to stop and allow another vehicle to turn around out of the lane he meant to enter (again, this was a service I was providing another individual -- we could just as easily have allowed them to sort themselves out anarchically and heaven help them if we had). Instead of slowing down to honour my request, he accelerated directly at me, forcing me to leap out of the way. When I asked him what he thought he was doing and told him that he had almost hit me, his response pretty much said everything you need to know about toxic masculinity: "I wish I had."

Masculine violence comes in many forms, not simply the threat of vehicular manslaughter that we came to so dearly know and love. It also comes in the form of verbal abuse, sometimes strangely coded through the threatening spectre of an exotic bogeyman. I will explain. First, I was told by a man that the fact that I was forcing him to wait in a line in order to enter the university was "highway robbery." Don't worry, I didn't follow this logic either. That wasn't all, though. For this atrocity, I apparently warranted the harshest of punishments: "If we were in Syria, you would be executed for this." Yes, a death threat. In a similar vein, I was informed by another man that "If we were in Russia, they would punch you in the fucking face for this every single day."

Despite all of this abusive masculine posturing, I am proud to say that I never once raised my voice at a person attempting to cross the picket line. Well, not until the very last day. At that point, the strike was effectively over and we were simply holding a symbolic picket while waiting to vote for ratification. We were holding all cars in the line for a total of less than one minute at a time maximum. A man in a Porsche drove up to the gate, approximately two metres away from it, revving ominously. I was disconcerted. A member of our picket line had her back to him, her body between the car and the gate. Suddenly, he revved again and accelerated forward.

That was it for me. A month of toxic masculinity culminated in that moment and I screamed at him, asking him to account for what he had done, the harm he had nearly inflicted. He told me that I sounded like his wife. No doubt, for a man invested in hegemonic masculinity, this was the worst insult he could conjure. It was a windy day, tears streamed down his face. He rushed to assure me (and others who had gathered) that he wasn't crying.

If only he had been. It would have been the most human thing about him (as one of my fellow picketers pointed out).

Solidarity on the Main Gate picket line (often in the face of hyper-masculine violence and abuse). Credit: Paul Elias

The Myths of Manhood — A Series

By Christopher Ford

Beginning today and continuing into next year, I will be writing periodically as a part of a new series of blog posts here at The Men’s Team Blog that I would like to call The Myths of Manhood. It’s something a little bit different from our regular posts discussing violence against women, since the focus of this series is, as you can probably tell, men and masculinity.

But that does not mean it will be disconnected from the subject. Many folks often forget that violence and violence against women is by and large a men’s issue — according to Statistics Canada, approximately 8 out of 10 cases completed in adult criminal courts in Canada (2012) involved a male accused, and approximately 97% and 91% of persons accused of sexual offences and weapons offences respectively were men.

Furthermore, the largest age group of criminal offenders in Canada is men between the ages of 18 and 24, with the second largest being men between 25 and 34.

And so I affirm: we need to stop talking about violence against women as if it is a women’s issue. We need to recognize the massive role that socialization has on the behaviour of men (and the way others view men) if we ever want to put a stop to violence against women (and violence in general).

This is where the idea for this new series came from. I thought that I could investigate some of the ideas about manhood that derive from the patriarchal society in which we live, and to try and refute them. I will start with one for today, and then pick up next time with three more.

Myth: ’Masculinity’ is natural/innate in men

This will be a good myth to start off with, since many other myths about manhood are contained within (and we will be able to talk more about them later on!). But, basically, one of the fundamental myths of manhood is that every man is endowed naturally with ‘masculine’ characteristics and behaviours — you may have heard this myth phrased in different ways, such as “boys will be boys” or “it’s in our nature to be XYZ (sexually aggressive, tough, etc).”

Let’s try to unpack this a little bit. First of all, what do we mean when we say ‘masculine?’ The term masculinity for us — and indeed for our society — means the equation of manhood with violence, dominance, lack of emotion, physical strength and toughness, an insatiable drive for sex (with women), and other similar characteristics.

Now, some folks are of the belief that these characteristics of manhood are genetically inherited by all men, or, to put it another way, that to be a man (read ‘to have a penis’) somehow means that you are predetermined to have character traits like those listed above. And at some level, yes, genes may play a role in the way we behave. However, behaviours that our society ascribes to ‘masculinity’ are very often the products of the socialization of men through culture — and very often the sheer power of socializing forces is altogether ignored.

I know — some of you may be shaking your head in disagreement. But consider the following study performed by Margaret Mead, one of the most influential anthropologists of our time.

In her book, entitled Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies (1935), Mead studied three tribes in the region of modern-day Papua New Guinea. Although residing not too far away from one another, she found considerable differences in the ways men behaved, as well as the gender norms and roles for both men and women, between the tribes.

For the first tribe, the Arapesh people, she said that “both men and women were peaceful in temperament and neither men nor women made war” (although she does say that war did sometimes happen, but not very often). She also said that the Arapesh showed a considerable amount of egalitarianism, placing particular importance on egalitarian child-rearing.

Regarding the second, called the Mundugumor people, she said that “both men and women were warlike in temperament” — that is, violence was not something attributed to manhood or the nature of men, but it was a large part of the way their society functioned.

And, lastly, the third tribe, the Tchambuli, she said “were different from both. The men 'primped' and spent their time decorating themselves while the women worked and were the practical ones – the opposite of how it seemed in early 20th century America.” The Tchambuli men displayed many characteristics that we would associate with ‘femininity’ here in the West.

Yet, for all three of these tribes, men were not considered as any less masculine by the standards of any society but our own.

And so, in closing, I would like to say the following: we live in a culture that teaches men that they must be independent (i.e. like the protaganist in any American Western film, to not rely on anyone but themselves); that they have natural desires such as desires for sex and for violence that are insatiable (i.e. boys will be boys, or the myth that men think about sex every seven seconds); and that, in order to be a ‘real man,’ they have to be successful.

However, ‘to be successful’ as a man in our society often comes at the expense of others. According to our culture, the idea of success for a man living within it becomes conflated with the achievement of dominance over others, often either through physically overpowering another person or, as said by educator and entrepreneur Hamza Khan at White Ribbon’s What Makes a Man conference this November, through “having things.”

I will continue to unravel and overturn this myth and many others in later posts.

Stay tuned for the next Myth of Manhood — coming soon!

The lesson of 2014: Why we must believe women, always

By Nathan Kalman-Lamb

Well, it's December of a year that feels like it has been dominated by stories of gender-based violence. Of course, gender-based violence was no more prevalent in 2014 than any other year, it just feels that way because stories of domestic and sexual violence that are typically ignored or suppressed have achieved notoriety due to the celebrity of the figures involved.

We have attempted to engage with many of these stories in the inaugural year of the Men's Team blog, from  Isla Vista to Ray Rice. In these pieces we have tried to unpack from a structural standpoint how masculinity, particularly in its more extreme or toxic forms, invites men to perform acts of violence. This is an important project and one we remain fundamentally committed to. Indeed, one might say that spreading awareness about this reality is the reason why the Men's Team exists.

Yet, as the year comes to a close, I want to touch on a different dimension of gender-based violence, one that we have yet to engage and one that relates to perhaps the two highest-profile cases of the year (at least in Canada): Jian Ghomeshi and Bill Cosby. Of course, we could examine the violence performed by these two men over the years through the lens of toxic masculinity and coercive entitlement and it would certainly shed some light on their actions. That, however, is a project for a different day.

Jian Ghomeshi hosting a live taping of his radio show Q in Vancouver, 26 Mar 2009.  Image via Penmachine and has been distributed under the terms of this license. It has not been modified.

I want to end 2014 by focusing not on those who perpetrate gender-based violence, but those who are subjected to its horrors. The most resounding lesson to be gleaned from both the Ghomeshi and Cosby sagas is how remarkably difficult it is for a woman who has experienced sexual violence to speak about it and be believed.

Let us focus on the Ghomeshi case, for it is the most relevant to us here in Canada (indeed, it is particularly relevant to us here on the Men's Team given that Ghomeshi is a former York graduate who once led the York Federation of Students). When the news that the CBC had fired its most prominent radio host first emerged, Ghomeshi released a statement on Facebook exonerating himself of responsibility for any wrong-doing and instead cast aspersion on unnamed women he claimed were about to accuse him of significant sexual misconduct.

Within a day, those accusations emerged in the form of a report by the Toronto Star citing four anonymous women who all stated they had been subjected to sexual violence by Ghomeshi. This is the moment I want to dwell on, for it is the one that says everything about what women who experience this form of violence must endure.

The seemingly-overwhelming reaction online in the press and through social networking platforms was the call to reserve judgement. Let the legal process play itself out, we were told. This was a case of he said-she said. It would be wrong to make any assumptions about what actually happened.

Now, of course, hindsight makes it easy to suggest that this was not the most appropriate or rational response. And, it should be added, there is something deeply damning and disturbing that the word of one man was taken as commensurate with that of four women. Certainly, it speaks to the level of internalized misogyny that remains pervasive in our ostensibly post-feminist society.

But, that's not what I want to focus on either. No, rather, the point that I believe must be underlined repeatedly is this, and it is really very simple: we have an ethical obligation to believe women who say that they have experienced sexual violence. This moral imperative has nothing to do with the particular contingencies of the case in question. Instead, it is predicated on the fact that in the context of a patriarchal society - a society that systematically privileges and empowers men over women -  it is inherently unsafe for women to publicly articulate the harm they have experienced at the hands of men. If we are interested in building a world that is genuinely equitable from the standpoint of gender, we need to begin by acknowledging the systematic nature of women's oppression and the violence men perform against women. We need to believe women when they say that they have experienced sexual violence. Every single time.

Now, don't get me wrong, I am not suggesting that we abandon the legal system or the safeguards that exist to protect the innocent from being falsely proclaimed guilty. (I do reject the insidious and pervasive myth of the false rape accusation, one of Hollywood's favourite tropes most recently seen in the film Gone Girl, a myth that distorts the reality that the rates of false rape accusations are no different than those of false accusations of other crimes.) Men deserve a day in court, just like anybody else.

But, when it comes to the court of opinion, impartiality is no longer a legitimate option. Those who are genuinely concerned about the prevalence of gender-based violence need to stand by those who make accusations whenever they make accusations. We need to start believing women systematically in order to counter the systemic barriers to being believed that women face.

So, the next time that there is a Jian Ghomeshi, don't say you don't know who to believe. In 2015, when the time comes, believe every woman who has the remarkable courage required to say what happened to her.

I promise that there will be plenty of opportunities.

Violence, survivor-blaming, and sex work in Newfoundland

By E. A.

Reports of gang rapes and sexual assaults have been reported by sex workers in St John's, Newfoundland since October. As early as October 2, there have been reports of sex workers being called into and then abducted in hotel rooms with as many as 20 men. Although there have been multiple reports, it is feared that there could be a much greater rate of violent incidents that have not been reported because sex trade workers face a high degree of stigma.  The alarmingly large number of these attacks has created controversy, not just from the repulsion of such vicious acts, but also from the lack of legal retribution. The reports of, and subsequent warnings against, the sexual assaults stem from an outreach group (S.H.O.P) that provides social assistance to the sex work community. As of now, there is nothing more than word of mouth and personal warnings that protect the community in St John’s from these incidents.  

Worth noting is the lack of response from law enforcement. They defend their inactivity by stating that no incidents have been reported to them by survivors. It has been reported that the rift of communication between the two parties is based on social stigma. In a small community like St John's, workers find themselves open to exposure and shame. The problem is compounded by the common misconception (stemming from both law enforcement and common discourse) that sees the issue as the fault of the survivors.  Workers complain that when they do go to police to report incidents of this nature (assaults or robberies) they are often seen as responsible for the assaults, creating understandable tension and mistrust. 

Although the survivors include both women and men, we can see that there is a strong objectification of femininity at the cause of these issues. Firstly, those who engage in the horrific acts against sex workers may see it as a thrill or an act of violence. Regardless, sex trade workers are targeted due to the perceived stigma that they are beneath attackers either socially, economically, or both. This reinforces the archaic dichotomy that sees women as objects, a conception furthered by the socio-economic conditions surrounding sex work. Women (and men) who are engaged in prostitution or other fields of sex work are stigmatized; there is a stereotype that sees them as destitute, wayward, poor, or unable to assimilate into society. These conceptions are dehumanizing and are furthered by patriarchal notions that define women as disposable tools for the gratification of male selfish desires (whether they be violent, sexual, or anything else). The women who engage in sex work, through no fault of their own, become a vehicle for the reinforcement of dominant, masculine ideology.

Secondly, the reaction from law enforcement reflects broader social attitudes: victim-blaming and a lack of response point to a belief that such crimes are to some degree justified. The insidious "she was asking for it" motif underlines these conceptions. There is still an institutional acceptance that the appearance and attire of an individual (specifically women) can create a legitimate justification for the sordid violence perpetrated by predatory individuals (typically men). 

The issues outlined in St John's are as complex as they are disconcerting and speak to broader social attitudes that simultaneously legitimize the objectification of women and blame survivors of sexual violence for its perpetration. In order to create a society that is safe for women of all occupations, we need to acknowledge just how deeply-rooted these patriarchal beliefs are. Sexual violence is not a problem instigated by women ever, regardless of appearance or occupation. It is a problem endemic to a society that tacitly legitimizes the objectification and dehumanization of women.

Four thoughts on Ray Rice: 4. Are athletes the problem?

Nathan Kalman-Lamb

Ray Rice is now one of the most notorious people in the world. I will not explain why, but if it is possible that you are unaware, I invite you to click here. (The link takes you to the story, NOT the video.) In the past few weeks, I have been providing four reasons why we need to stop demonizing Ray Rice as an individual, and start examining his behaviour as a product of some powerful cultural forces. For reason number one, click here; or two, click here; or three, click here. Today, I conclude with reason number four.

4. The last reason I want to share for why we should stop vilifying Ray Rice is that fact that doing so feeds into a notion that all athletes are essentially violent. Certainly, our earlier discussion of coercive entitlement and masculinity could understandably leave readers with this impression. After all, if athletes are socialized to treat their bodies as instruments of violence, and, further, are taught to wield them against opponents on the field of play in an effort to win not only games, but the financial rewards that accrue to them, doesn't it follow that they will carry that violence with them off the field? Well, yes, and no. We have covered the former answer in post number one in this series, but what of the latter?

It is easy in a discussion of structure (that is, the systems and institutions that pre-exist us and within which we live, for example, hierarchies of class, race, gender, sexual, and ability) to sweep the concept of agency (the ability of the individual person to determine her own fate) away entirely. This is not altogether fair, however. As difficult and seemingly immoveable as structural obstacles may seem (and, indeed, often are), this does not mean that they are impossible to scale. For instance, although it is more difficult for a non-white woman to become a top executive in a corporate hierarchy than a white man due to the systemic discrimination that exists along lines of gender and race, it is not impossible.

What does this mean in the context of athletes and violence? Well, as much as athletes may be conditioned to use violence in their everyday lives, and as difficult as it may be to figure out how to switch it off, many nevertheless succeed in doing so. These individuals deserve to be applauded for that fact, not simply tarred by the Ray Rice brush.

What I'm trying to say is that Ray Rice's actions cannot be read metonymically to stand for the actions of football players in general. How do I know? Because football players explicitly said so on  Twitter shortly after the extended elevator video was released. For instance, Terrance Knighton of the Denver Broncos commented,

"As players we must speak up. Stand up for what's right. I don't give a damn who u are or how much money you make. No place for this," and then, "If there's anyway to open that case up and give this guy the punishment he deserves, it NEEDS to be done," and, finally, "That man should be thrown out the the nfl and thrown into jail. Shame on those deciding his punishment. Smh."

TJ Lang of the Green Bay Packers said simply, "2 games. Disturbing." Likewise, Duke Ihenacho of the Washington professional football team said,

"No I don't care how you slice it, it's wrong. They gotta open the case back up and come down hard on this one..." and then, "& being a fan of someone that's a good player is one thing, but this is way bigger than football. Don't be blind to what's really important."

Chris Harris of the Denver Broncos added, "The NFL should have zero tolerance for domestic violence. There is never a reason for any man to be violent towards any woman." The list goes on.

The point is that players had the courage to speak publicly about the issue and confront their own peers even before the NFL reversed course and extended Rice's suspension to the whole season.

This stands in contrast to the actions of NFL commissioner Roger Goodell and the league's various owners, who continue to implausibly deny that they had viewed footage of what Rice did when they handed down his original two game suspension. It is easy (and just) for people to decry the violence of football, especially when it leaks off the field. What we seem to be less inclined to condemn, however, are the economic forces that propel the violence in the game, and our complicity in them as fans and consumers of the NFL. There is relatively little criticism of the fact that the NFL is an industry that is worth billions of dollars (the most valuable team, the Dallas Cowboys, is worth over $3 billion alone) and that players are taught to hit hard precisely because fans love to see them do so. If fans want to watch, then owners get paid. If they didn't then the NFL wouldn't exist. It's a simple equation, really.

It is very likely that Ray Rice was initially handed only a two game suspension because the NFL wanted to see him, one of its stars, on the field generating revenue for the league more than it cared about the implications of gender-based violence. Although players are often accused of greed (an argument that is particularly hard to defend in the NFL, in which contracts are not guaranteed) it is, in fact, ownership that is inherently motivated by a thirst for capital. After all, how many owners spoke out to denounce the two game suspension for Rice? Not one, of course.

There are a couple of lessons here. First, it is a mistake to assume that all athletes are conditioned in them same ways to the same degrees by the prevailing ideologies of sport. While those ideologies are seductive, and thus difficult to resist, there are individuals who are able to do so, and they are worthy of our admiration. Second, although they are not the ones performing violence on the field or, typically, off, owners bear far more responsibility for the culture of coercive entitlement than we are usually willing to admit. The inherent violence of the NFL has been fostered and marketed in large part because it is a remarkably lucrative source of revenue for them.

The implication of this second point is crucial. If we are really serious about challenging the culture of coercive entitlement in sport, we cannot just look to players to change their behaviour. We need to start asking more fundamental questions about violent sports like football, such as whether the pleasure that fans receive and the money that owners (and players to a much lesser extent) generate from these games are worth the frequently devastating consequences to players on the field and the people around them off of it. For, gender-based violence is not simply the purview of deviant individuals; it is an all-too-frequent consequence of activities that teach men to use violence as a necessary tool for getting what they want and need.

Activities like football.

Four thoughts on Ray Rice: 3. Race and violence

Nathan Kalman-Lamb

Ray Rice is now one of the most notorious people in the world. I will not explain why, but if it is possible that you are unaware, I invite you to click here. (The link takes you to the story, NOT the video.) In the next few days, I will provide four reasons why we need to stop demonizing Ray Rice as an individual, and start examining his behaviour as a product of some powerful cultural forces. For reason number one, click here or two, click here. Today, reason number three.

3. Chuck Knoblauch. Josh Lueke. Brett Myers. Patrick Roy. Semyon Varlamov. Ray Rice.

The people on this list have two things in common: they are all athletes and they are all alleged perpetrators of gender-based violence. However, only one member of this group has become the centre of a popular culture and media fire-storm. Can you guess who that is?

Oh, yeah, and there is also this: only one is black.

That one, of course, is the now infamous Ray Rice. In this post I will attempt to explain why the vilification of Rice as an individual has deflected attention away from the persistent racialization of black masculinity as inherently violent and criminal.

The starting point for this discussion is the simple fact that we all know who Ray Rice is and what he did. This is noteworthy because what he did is so disturbingly common, including amongst  athletes in all the major sports. I contend that one of the primary reasons why we have all been so quick to indict Rice is because of his identity as an African-American. Again, as I have said before, I do not in any way condone what Rice did -- I consider it fundamentally abhorrent. However, what I want to remain attentive to is why it is Rice we are up in arms about and not the other names on the above list.

In order to answer this question, I believe we must make a brief examination of the role of race as a socially-constructed form of identity in American history. By stating that race is socially-constructed, I mean that there is nothing biological that separates human beings into discrete racial categories. Rather, race is an inconsistent and unsound idea developed by humans to explain superficial physical differences. Yet, the fundamental insufficiency of race as an explanatory concept has done little to inhibit the radical impact it has had on modern history. This is another way of saying that although race itself is not real, the idea of race is, and that idea has come to shape the social organization of the world we live in in profound ways.

The history of the United States bears this out. Prior to the mid-19th century, the defining feature of American society was the institution of slavery, an institution ideologically-predicated on the idea of race. African-Americans were understood to be less human than whites by the dominant white society and were sold as slaves who were compelled to labour for the material gain of their owners. Part of this dehumanization was the notion that black people were naturally better-suited for physical labour, that they were, in a sense, more animal than whites.

The U.S. Civil War abolished slavery, but it did not abolish the idea of race, nor of racial hierarchy. What it did was create insecurity among whites who had previously felt comfortable in their status as the dominant group in society (note: this is an obvious generalization, as significant class differences existed among whites). The end of slavery ushered in the spectre of class mobility and the possibility of competition. So, in order to enforce a new racial order -- the order of Jim Crow segregation -- the practice of lynching was developed. Lynching involved the false accusation that a black man had raped a white woman. The consequence of this accusation was the murder of the black man by a white lynch mob, a form of terrorism designed to enforce a racial order. The consequence of this practice for the idea of race was to instil in the popular imagination the notion that blackness was associated with dangerous, aggressive, violent sexuality (the myth of the black rapist).

What emerges out of this history is a popular notion of black masculinity closely associated with animal violence and sexuality. This is an idea that is reproduced today through the notion of the black criminal who must be policed through racial profiling and deadly violence (think Trayvon Martin, Ferguson, etc.), a paradigm that Ray Rice fits neatly into. It is easy for America to accept that Ray Rice is a deviant criminal because that is the pathology of the black man. The public excoriation of Rice is a convenient way for a society that continues to be governed by hegemonic whiteness to wipe its hands of responsibility for gender-based violence. After all, it is simply a black problem. Meanwhile, Knoblauch, Lueke, Myers, Roy, and an entire society marked by coercive entitlement and rape culture deftly evade accountability.

There is another side to the issue of race, Ray Rice, and gender-based violence, as well, and that is the question of why the NFL's original suspension (two games) was so short. The unfortunate reality is that the length of the suspension may have had some correlation with the race of the survivor of the assault, Rice's partner. The reality is that we live in a society in which non-white women are subjected to much higher rates of violence than their white counterparts. In the United States, 29% of black women report having experienced intimate partner violence, and, although they comprise only 8% of the U.S. population, black women make up 22% person of intimate partner homicide victims. In Canada, indigenous women are three times more likely than non-indigenous women to experience violent crime.

In this context, the mere fact of violence against a black woman was apparently not enough to warrant more than a token punishment for Rice. Sadly, this is all too representative of the fact that violence against non-white women does little to raise eyebrows in our society. Indeed, even in the rare situation in which a story of the murder of a black woman is sensationalized -- the murder of Renisha McBride, for example, who was killed for seeking assistance at the home of a white man in the Detroit area after an auto-mobile accident -- media coverage sought to blame McBride for the violence (the Associated Press, for instance, tweeted: "Suburban Detroit homeowner convicted of second-degree murder for killing woman who showed up drunk on porch."

For all these reasons, then, it is impossible to divorce the Ray Rice saga from the broader context of structural racism. Rice fits all too neatly into the mould of the criminal, animal, violent black man, just as his wife can be carelessly discarded as just another non-white woman subject to violence. Black men are always already criminal, while black women are never truly victims of crime. The Ray Rice story manages to reproduce both of these narratives. This is why it is essential that we make the connection between race and Rice; the failure to do so too often results in a form or representational racial violence.