Let us tell you a little story of boy meets girl…
Girl is on a night out looking beaut and hoping someone will notice. Boy comes along and offers to buy her a drink. He is pretty fit so, of course, she accepts. He asks her about her course, her hobbies, if she’s enjoying her night – he’s genuinely interested in what she has to say. Girl finds out boy plays rugby. ‘Ooh’, she thinks, ‘Sporty. Athletic. I like it’. Girl is secretly swooning and is over the moon when he leans in for a kiss. He goes back to her place, and totally understands when she doesn’t want to sleep with him so they fall asleep in front of Frozen. In the morning, he takes her number and immediately after he leaves, he texts. Girl is loving life right now – she’s finally found a good one.
That is, until girl sees boy on a night out in Wednesday timepiece when he is with all the boys from his sports social. Boy isn’t allowed to speak to girl, but instead chants ‘SLUT’ at her with his fellow apes…oops, I mean, friends. When he is finally allowed to talk to her after midnight (what is all that about?) he laughs over her shoulder at his team mates who are making inappropriate gestures and then forcefully kisses her. Girl pushes him away and concludes boy is an asshole.
Girl is right; he has royally f**ked her over. But is it his fault? Or just the culture in which he surrounds himself? Or a bit of both?
We’re all familiar with the infamous ‘lad culture’, turning nice boys into idiots since 2k10 (“LADS, LADS, LADS”). But it seems that this attitude is the most noticeable and extreme amongst sports-related groupings. For example, when you see the lads out on sports socials on a Wednesday night, they are particularly rowdy and abusive in their herds, getting massively smashed and competing for the hottest girls. Even the nicest guys seem to engage with this atmosphere of masculine energy, chanting offensive language at girls, rating their sexual exploits to their friends the morning after (*a certain sports society was associated with this last year*) and even sometimes being sexually abusive.
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But why does sport seem to have this impact? When you look at it in simple terms, sport is a fantastic way for guys to revel in their primal masculinity – it expresses their physical strength, speed and general ‘manly’ ability, as well as enforces ideas of pride, honour and victory. If we roll back a few thousand years to the age of cavemen, these ideas were strongly intertwined with sexual desire, aggression and dominating women.
So it’s no big surprise that many guys (though we have to stress not all!) return to thinking this is appropriate when they are being influenced by this hugely masculine energy and are faced with the battle of being alpha-male. This is likely to explain why you might get wolf-whistled by a group of men, but rarely by somebody on their own…
Even the nicest guys get sucked into it. It seems a shame, when the best potential boyfriends may be hiding away behind a façade of sport, drink and laddish behaviour.
So guys, we understand you are great sportsmen, and we applaud you. But does sport really have to return you to your primitive ways – travelling in herds, intimidating women and just generally being right assholes?
When you decide to reject these masculine pressures and release your inner nice, attentive, cheeky, Frozen-watching self, EVEN in front of all your sports clan, make sure you give us a call.
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