Anti-female abuse and Football

I remember my first Jets game, in 1968. A grateful patient had given my father tickets for the game against the Cincinnati Bengals at Shea Stadium. The crowd was animated and boisterous, and I was thrilled to be part of that Super Bowl season. Today I ask myself if I would even consider taking my son to a Jets game.

Vicious harassment of women seems to be a regular halftime feature at Gate D of Giants Stadium. Instead of shouting “Let’s go Jets,” unruly male fans scream angrily and insistently at women to lift their shirts and show their breasts. If they don’t comply, they’re pelted with abuse or, worse, empty beer bottles.

I don’t think this ugly, degrading chanting is something that my son needs to see on his way to becoming a man.

According to news reports, it is so institutionalized that everyone around the stadium seems to know about it and security guards, charged with maintaining public safety, look the other way.

How did Gate D become such a gauntlet?

Make no mistake: The goons are not motivated by sexual attraction to the women they target. They’re filled with contempt and anger.

Screaming at women to reveal their breasts is not supposed to attract women but to repel them, to send them scurrying back to their seats. It’s a public humiliation that is designed to put women back in their place, to remind them that they may be on our turf, but it’s still our turf, and that they are still “just women.”

Which begs the question: Why are these Jets fans so angry that they’d want to make women feel so vulnerable? Here’s a clue: This doesn’t happen to all women. Not to the wives or mothers or daughters walking past with their husbands or fathers. Not to the women who prepare and serve the food and beer at the concessions. Not to the women who sell or take your tickets, or those who lead the cheers, or those who hand out the promotional giveaways. It happens to the women who have the temerity to believe that they have just as much right to watch a football game as a man does.

All across our society, women have entered every public space once thought inappropriate: from the corporate boardroom to the trading floor, from the operating theater to the theater of military operations, from the firehouse to the factory, and from the soccer pitch to the hockey rink. Women are in the house — and the Senate.

One of my favorite book titles in recent years is The Stronger Women Get the More Men Love Football by Mariah Burton Nelson. A former Stanford basketball star, Nelson shows that football has become another “cave” into which men have angrily and defensively retreated as women have, in their eyes, “invaded” the sports world. The football stadium is one of the last treehouses, one of the last all-male clubhouses. Maybe what the Goons of Gate D are really showing us is: The more women love football, the angrier men get.

What lies underneath these guys’ rage is not the presence of women, but the presence of women as equals — as fans who are equally entitled to enjoy a game at Giants Stadium. It’s not women who get these guys so agitated. It’s equality. And they need to be told, clearly and unequivocally, that being a fan at a football game is a privilege to be enjoyed by anyone.

These guys act like a pack of predatory animals because they know they can get away with it, because other guys don’t stop them. The journalist who broke the story observed security guards watching the proceedings, having a smoke and doing nothing to stop it. In fact, when he asked about it, the guards threatened him with arrest.

When Patrick Aramini, New Jersey Sports & Exposition Authority vice president for security, parking and traffic, asks, “What do we do, arrest everybody that starts chanting?” You can tell he doesn’t take this problem seriously. What if the men were all white and screaming racist epithets at blacks? Or yelling Nazi slogans to a bunch of Orthodox Jews? Would he be so passive?

Not likely. The Jets’ management, security forces, and fans all need to learn the simplest of lessons: The gridiron knows no gender — anyone can enjoy football. The Jets’ season is over, but next year Aramini needs to station enough security guards at Gate D to stop the chanting immediately. And to arrest those who continue. Do it once, and you shouldn’t have to do it again.

When they look the other way, at the orders of their supervisors, the security guards cease to be security guards. They’re just guys, bonding with the drunken goons, enjoying the free halftime show. In doing so, they do more than collude, more than just enable and encourage. They stop doing their jobs. They become “insecurity” guards — fostering a lack of safety for some fans for the warped pleasure of others.

Of course, there are thousands upon thousands of male fans at every football stadium in the country who treat women with respect. And, of course, any rational person wouldn’t be caught dead taunting women like that.

Let’s hope that the Jets’ management and the authority act quickly and decisively to penalize all the participants — the fans, the complicitous security guards, and their supervisors — for unsportsmanlike conduct.

VOICE MALE advisory board member Michael Kimmel is a professor of sociology at Stony Brook University, and the author of the forthcoming Guyland: The Social World of Young Men, 16–26. This article originally appeared in Newsday. Used by permission.