Sexism in sport and the issue with so-called ‘apologies’

Last night, the world was given yet another reminder of the prevalence of sexism in sport – as if we needed reminding. In the inaugural women’s Ballon d’Or, Norway forward Ada Hegerberg won the award in a career-making moment, stunted by the remarks of DJ Martin Solveig who asked her to ‘twerk’.

Of course, social media has done its thing and the reaction to this incident has been of disgust and anger. Solveig reached out on Twitter today to give his ‘sincere apologies’, which should have been a good start, until he diverted along the classic route of mansplaining the remark which was actually a funny joke, and which viewers sadly misunderstood. His statement, posted on Twitter, is as follows:

https://twitter.com/martinsolveig

Now, many people will read this and think ‘ah, it’s not as bad as it seems – there was context behind it’. Since when does context constitute justification? If there were no context behind his remarks, I would be equally offended but with the addition of being more confused. I understand his explanation but do not accept it.

Clearly, Solveig has completely misunderstood his error. He even goes so far as to blame viewers who ‘misunderstood’ the joke, claiming that Ada herself ‘understood’ it. He’s practically screaming, ‘She’s on my side I swear! So if you’re on her side, you’re on my side!’ As I said, this shows that he (ironically) does not understand what he did wrong. He thinks this is a matter of contextual omissions that twisted his remarks. On the contrary, it is the full story itself, and the very language he has used – both in the initial remark and his proceeding statement – which are the issue.

If his aim was only to humorously juxtapose the style of dance accompanying ‘Fly Me To The Moon’, why did he not say to dance the robot? Do some breakdancing? Give an abstract performance of mime? ‘Twerk’ is quite clearly, undeniably a word shrouded in sexuality. It is associated most commonly with a woman dancing in a way which has been sexualised. Not only that, he specifically asked Ada to twerk; at no point did he invite both of them to twerk, or say that he might be inclined to twerk. He asked her to perform a dance which epitomises the fantasy of the heteronormative masculine gaze.

So that’s your issue, Solveig, and tragically you don’t even get it. I could rant for years about this problematic entitlement that many men feel, and the ease with which they seem to slip through empty-hearted ‘apologies’. However, I believe it is important to establish why I, and so many others, are angry about this. Firstly, I am angry because this incident has entirely detracted attention from Ada Hegerberg winning the Ballon d’Or. People who had never heard of her before will now remember her for this – a sexist cloak covering her incredible achievement.

Secondly, I am angry because sexism in sport is by no means rare. The industry is crawling with it on a worldwide scale. Besides the inequality of broadcasting, attendance and financing in women’s sports, attitudes and treatments of women in sport are way below the bar. Only four months ago we had Serena Williams branded under the ‘aggressive black woman’ stereotype during the French Open. When athletes show frustration in sport, “for some (read: white men), these emotions are construed as “passion” and “grit,” but in others, they’re derided as “outbursts” and “tantrums””. Like every other strand of existence, discrimination in sport is full of intersections.

Whilst these two instances have been very high-profile, sexism in sport is a daily practice. There are too many examples to even list. From ridicule towards women in sports like rugby and boxing, to the unabashed sexist chanting seen at football matches (namely, ‘get your tits out for the lads’ as Chelsea’s club doctor walked past fans).

I really hope that out of these outlandish instances of sexism in sport comes a greater awareness and anger towards it. Sexism as a whole is a much bigger ball game (pun intended), but us sport fans hold the responsibility of diminishing sexism in sport at every opportunity. The guy next to you at a match made a sexist remark? Call him out.  Women aren’t well broadcasted in your sport? Go find those women and champion them. Watch women’s sports, support women’s sports, just goddam support women. And if you plan on asking a woman to twerk – who you don’t personally know, whilst on a stage, in front of millions of viewers, with literally no reasonable circumstances (would still apply with just one of these conditions) – just go home.

November feature: Confrontations with social media

It’s 2018. Social media is everywhere. It is the slipstream through which every part of our life gets filtered, and we’re becoming increasingly unconscious, robotic players in its game.

That may sounds slightly demonic – after all, it’s just a few apps and a platform of communication, right? Yeah. It’s both. Social media is both friend and foe. One thing I have noticed is that the use and abuse of social media has recently become a much more self-aware discussion brought right into the realm of media platforms. This, I think, is the best thing we can do in order to ensure social media stays as a constructive tool. Talk about what it means to us.

I started to think more about the way I consume social media earlier this year when I was having counselling for my anxiety disorder. I realised, primarily, that I felt pressure to maintain completely inauthentic ‘friendships’ with people, via being friends on social media, and made the great decision to cut off toxic friendships and take control over who I connect with. My 13 year old self clinging onto my two-hundred-and-something Facebook friends finally realised that less is more. This was step 1 in taking back control of my social media consumption.

Now, I think that was a fairly delayed lesson for me. I probably should have realised that ‘deleting’ people isn’t a crime years ago. 2018 is filled with much more affecting problems within social media use.  For me personally, as well as for the people I come across on all platforms. For ordinary people and celebrities alike.

A positive trend that I’ve started to notice amongst social media influencers and celebrities, is the circulating message that we should spend more time away from our phones. Some of my favourite influencers have started to put this message out there, particularly tied to the importance of maintaining good mental health. This led me to think ‘well if someone whose entire job is social media is telling me to put my phone down, they really must mean it’. Venetia Falconer, eco-fashion guru and my ultimate vegan inspo, has done several posts with about this. One of her Instagram posts, shown below, caught me on a day when I was sat scrolling for literally no reason. I felt like I had been caught out, like I suddenly couldn’t justify sat on my phone for twenty minutes when I could have been doing something else. I couldn’t remember why I had even gone on my phone in the first place, so I put it away.

Other social media influencers are promoting the same self-aware narrative on their social media platforms. I would call it ironic, but I really don’t think it is. These people aren’t tell us to ditch social media altogether; they’re using their position as professional users of social media to encourage a healthy use of its recourse. I love that.

My newest favourite influencer, Florence Given, posted a piece of art to her Instagram account that had a similar effect. Her work often takes on this message of stepping up to your potential rather than wasting your time in a vacuum of comparison and damaged self-esteem. Whilst Venetia Falconer’s comforting reminders urge me to remember my mental health and put this first, Florence Given reminds me to wake up from my screen and seize the day. Both are essential and compelling voices.

View this post on Instagram

Social media is monitoring our behaviour, modifying it, tracking our insecurities via our google searches, showing us 3rd party adverts selling us products to FILL those insecurities, making us less empathetic, basing our value on numbers, flipping the ‘pack-mentality’ switch on in our brains which essentially brings out our inner troll to make us feel morally superior when we tear people down and…there’s a lot of insidious destruction that it’s causing so please be careful to MINDFULLY CONSUME if it’s part of your job/life and CURATE YOUR FEED! Sean Parker (co-founder of facebook) admitted that they designed these algorithms to be addictive. Addiction is not a byproduct of social media…its PART OF THE DESIGN! Protect your energy 💆🏼‍♀️✨💓#worldmentalhealthday

A post shared by FLOSS (@florencegiven) on

Finally, I want to mention Matt Haig and his recent book ‘Notes on a Nervous Planet’. When this book was first announced, I knew I needed it in my life. I think this is one of the few books that I will return to and read multiple times (I rarely ever reread books) because it taught me so much. From one anxious soul inside a tornado of social media to another, Matt Haig reminded me what social media is. It is a tool. It is something with which I can do good things. But like any tool, like money, power, or influence, it can be abused, and it seems that as consumers we are all being conditioned to abuse social media to the detriment of our own wellbeing. Like most people whose job relies heavily on social media, these three influential people all recognise its value – without it, I wouldn’t be talking about them at all – but they take on the social duty of keeping us aware of the depth at which social media dominates our lives.

After my worst year of anxiety in 2017, I have worked extremely hard this year to become conscious of everything I dedicate my time and emotion towards in order to make my environment less mentally damaging. I have been using my Instagram account for over a year to document my mental health journey, and in that time it has transitioned into a books/reading account (when I first started to regain my sense of self), then into a fitness account (when I discovered endorphins and confidence through exercise), and more recently into a more general mental health/feminist/bookish/general thinking account. I think by this point, my Instagram is no longer committed to the purpose of recovery or clinging onto single topics; it’s returned to just me being me. This is great, but I realised recently that I followed nearly a thousand people and, besides literally not having the time to consume all of their content, it gave a literally inexhaustible quota of lives to compare to my own. It became overwhelming.

So then came my most recent lesson in social media use – the importance of reminding ourselves of why we use it. I asked myself why I use Instagram, and concluded: to find new fitness routines, to learn recipes, to discover books, to follow a few influencers I love, to keep up to date on friends’ lives. That probably accounted for approximately 200 of the people I followed, so I (with a lot of guilt, but no regret) unfollowed any account that didn’t suit those purposes.

Much like an eye test or a routine doctors appointment, it’s so important that we periodically check ourselves on our social media use. Social media is both a blessing and a curse, and whilst we are conditioned to seek out its endless content, we have to take on the individual responsibility of ensuring this is not done to the detriment of our mental health. I plan on checking up on my social media use again in the near future, and I’m sure at that time I’ll unfollow a couple of new accounts who were triggering me or not serving my best interests, or even delete an app from my phone because it takes up too much of my time. Like an MOT, but far less expensive.

To fellow social media users, young and old, I encourage you to do the same. Have a routine check-up with your social media use. Ask, is this benefiting me? Is it adhering to the fundamental objectives of my social media consumption? Is it contributing to my life and happiness? If not, cut it.

Now close your browser and please, for the love of David Beckham, go and get some fresh air.

@foodgymbooks

Self-love and friendship: Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love

One of the first books to bless us in 2018, Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love had been on my to-read list for the entire year until I finally picked it up a few weeks ago. Like many readers, I expected this book to primarily discuss romantic love. That certainly was a prominent theme of the memoir, but much more compelling was its discussions of female friendships and the timelessness of our platonic relationships.

Non-fiction is the genre that I have most enjoyed in 2018. It feels shameful saying that, because I often find there’s a sense of superiority in our perception of fiction over non-fiction. On Dolly Alderton and Pandora Syke’s The High Low podcast, they talk about the misconception that non-fiction writing is easier because you don’t have to ‘create’ the content from nothing; in many ways, non-fiction can me more complex and challenging as there is no freedom to bend reality without being disingenuous. You have to work with exactly what you have, simply writing and presenting it in the most captivating way possible.

Dolly Alderton does exactly that. Her beautiful memoir comforted me in the many ways her feelings resonated with my own life. If fiction provides us with an escape, non-fiction reminds us that our confusing and stressful reality is normal and experienced by everyone. Non-fiction can very often be a way to feel less alone. In Alderton’s heartfelt testaments to her closest friends, she reminded me of my own friends and made me feel closer to them. She reminded me, in my original misjudgement of the book’s eponymous ‘love’, that love is not just romantic, not even just platonic, but personal and best used self-inflicted. One of my favourite passages is in the chapter ”, in which Alderton experiences an epiphany during her visit to the Orkney Islands. She declares:’

I walked under the stars and along the cobbled streets and an idea crep all over me like arresting, vibrant blooms of wisteria. I don’t need a dazzlingly charismatic musician to write a line about me in a song. I don’t need a guru to tell me things about myself I don’t know. I don’t need to cut all my hair off because a boy told me it would suit me. I don’t need to change my shape to make myself worthy of someone’s love. […]

Because I am enough. My heart is enough. The stories and the sentences twisting around my mind are enough. I am fizzing and frothing and buzzing and exploding. […] I am my own universe; a galaxy; a solar system. I am the warm-up act, the main event and the backing singers.

Everything I Know About Love, p. 305

I had to resist transcribing this entire chapter because it’s just so gorgeous. The language is stunning and it rippled through me in waves. Good writing is contagious and these words filled me with love for books, for life, for myself, and certainly for Dolly Alderton. This kind of self-affirming work is exactly what I needed to escape my reading drought.

My favourite segments of writing from this book come when Dolly describes her friends. She writes about her friends with the sincerity of wedding vows, reminding me of the invaluable privilege of having the friends I have in my life. Much like the above epiphany, Dolly Alderton ties up many of her insecurities and uncertainties throughout the book in its closing chapters, including a testament to her wonderful friends in the chapter ‘Homecoming’:

I know what it is to enthusiastically strap on an oxygen tank and dive deep into a person’s eccentricities and fallibilities and enjoy every fascinating moment of discovery. Like the fact that Farly has always slept in a skirt for as long as I’ve known her. Why does she do that? What is the point of it? Or that Belle rips her flesh-coloured tights off on a Friday nights when she gets home from the office – is it a mark of her quiet rage against the corporate system or just a ritual she’s grown fond of?

 Everything I Know About Love, p. 315

I love this passage endlessly. What I love most is how it embodies the deep abyss of knowledge Dolly holds for her friends, alongside the lingering curiosity of questioning this knowledge. We can love our friends and know everything about them, and inquisitively pick apart their habits in a loving curiosity; a desire to know more. This the language of love that I often presumed only applicable to family relationships. Now I’m left with an urge to learn more about my friends and subsequently love them more too.

The image of a single woman who chooses to embrace the love she finds in friendship is one often faced with scepticism. The narrative of the ‘independent woman who don’t need no man’ is judged not as independent but as a loner. I firmly support independence in any individual, but many judge that an independent person is not independent by choice. Firmly and obstinately, Dolly Alderton does not conform to this conception of the single woman. By the end of her memoir, she is: happy; fulfilled by the relationships in her life; a successful writer; stable and powerfully independent. She flips the narrative of the involuntary-single-woman into the narrative of the emancipated, self-loving and caring, compassionate woman of the world. God, I love her.

I’m in a relationship, but that doesn’t stop Dolly’s message from resonating with me. Like her, I experience love, and am on a journey to give more of that love to myself. That alone was enough to feel a close connection to her story. I have struggled with body image and disordered eating, and I have catered to the interests of other people rather than to my own identity. I’d like to think that I am past this now, and that I am in a stage of self-love and recovery much like that epiphany under the starry sky of the Orkneys.

Navigating intersectional feminism as a cis-gendered white woman

Relinquishing guilt means opening up a new space for learning; we’re all learning, and that’s okay. It’s the best thing we can do.

Before I begin this post, I want to clarify that I am no professional in feminist thinking. In the words of my absolute favourite podcast, I’m a guilty feminist. I’m okay with this, because accepting guilt, and accepting my privilege, has been quintessential to my exploration of intersectional feminisms. Relinquishing guilt means opening up a new space for learning; we’re all learning, and that’s okay. It’s the best thing we can do.

One of the first books I read in 2018 was Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race. What an endlessly important book. This book taught me the lesson that I needed to hear, but didn’t want to ask because it is not black people’s responsibility to make me woke. Most significantly, I unlearned vital prejudices which I had been conditioned to believe, and my mind felt blown at the realisation. I confess I was someone who would say ‘I don’t see colour’, thinking it meant I don’t discriminate. Now, I know how wildly ignorant, exclusionary and privileged that is. To “not see colour” is to be at the ultimate level of privilege. Realising this, I felt ashamed.

Reni Eddo-Lodge

Colour-blindness does not accept the legitimacy of structural racism or a history of white racial dominance.

When I first read Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s We Should All Be Feminists, I immediately declared it amongst my favourite reads and felt positively about the fact that I was championing the work of a WOC. For a brief, naive, ignorant moment, I thought that was my role as a white ‘intersectional feminist’ – simply to celebrate both black and white women. If We Should All Be Feminists was launched me through a canon of self-empowerment, Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race was the brick wall I quickly crashed into; bringing me back down to the ground. I felt affronted, guilty, defensive. I thought I’d always been doing things right. My conception of feminism radically and suddenly turned from a well-intended (albeit shallowly educated) passion for equality, to a conscious lesson of the structural discriminations that intersect with feminism. It’s not all girl power, it’s recognising the social, economic and political disadvantage that POC face every day.

In the weeks and months after I read Eddo-Lodge’s book, I thought a lot about how to be a good intersectional feminist. I realised I didn’t want my feminism to inflate my ego to allow me to fly through that canon – I wanted to look at the people around me every day and march this fight with them. (That isn’t in any way a negation of the importance of Adichie’s text for me; it fills me with uncontainable passion on my darkest days and emotionally equips me to fight for the feminist agenda). As part of this desire, I decided first to look at what information I take in. Or, who do I follow on social media? The answer was at least 99% white women (not an exaggeration). I didn’t even mean for this to happen. How could I only be following white women? Why didn’t I follow more WOC? Well, that’s a whole different discussion. Social media, like every other industry, rewards white people who present the same skills as POC. White and black influencers with the same skills appear to have a vastly different following, and I simply hadn’t come across many influences who were WOC. There – another moment of me trying to excuse myself. It’s not my fault, I try and tell myself. No, it’s not my fault that industries structurally discriminate against POC, but it is certainly my responsibility as an intersectional feminist to seek out and listen to black voices.

So that’s what I did. I discovered the wondrous Shona Virtue to fuel my fitness motivation, the hilarious Receipts Podcast to listen to as they chat all things life, and the informative and stimulating Mostly Lit podcast to satisfy my bookish needs. POC are in every industry. They simply aren’t afforded the same opportunity, exposure or privilege that white people inherently receive.

Six months into the year and there I was; conscious of my place and privilege, and pleased with myself for making the effort to seek out more influence from POC. (Part of me is worrying that that sentence is not appropriate, and now I feel stressed). I started thinking more and more about race, and how I could be an ally to POC. Should I promote these wonderful influencers who I love so much? Or does that make me some kind of attempted “white saviour” talking over POC? How much can I talk about how much I love these POC? Or should I only be listening? But then how can I be an ally if I’m not spreading their work? These questions still haunt me. I’m still navigating this complex space and learning as I go. Sometimes, it stresses me out, and I’m terrified of saying or doing the wrong thing, because I only mean well (ref. back to previous brackets – still stressing if this sounds like I’m making championing POC an entitled form of self-gratification). Then I realised – again, like a brick wall right in my face – is this really the summary of my problems? Worrying if I’m saying the right thing? Having to think about my language? Reminding myself of the cases described in Why I’m No Longer Talking To White People About Race, I realised how laughably small this ‘dilemma’ is. To worry about the language I use and be ever-conscious of this is, much like many other parts of my life, a privilege.

It’s nearly the end of 2018 and I’m still learning. I’ll always be learning, because intersectional feminism is not one textbook that you can read front to back; it is an inexhaustible topic. Immediately, I’m asking myself, ‘why does this post only talk about race as an intersection with feminism? what about queerness, transgender, disability, etc.?’ In reality, I’m talking about race in this post because it relates to my person experience, i.e. I read a compelling book about race and therefore wanted to discuss race. It makes sense. I will not reprimand this post for discussing race alone as an intersection. Instead, I will remind myself of this and use it to fuel more learning. I will use it when thinking of future blog post ideas, and when finding new people to follow. I will continue to try my best, and hopefully for now that is enough.

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