Here is a helpful compilation of extremely disgusting comments that Wimbledon Champion Marion Bartoli received on Twitter. That post does a good job of highlighting some of the ways in which these reactions have been sexist, misogynistic, offensive and plain dumb. Go take a look, seriously, I can’t do the vitriol of the commentary justice.
What I thought I would do, however, is follow up with the Twitter accounts of some of the people quoted, not by contacting anyone, simply by looking them up. I wanted to see whether being featured in such a post had any effect on them, and also to get some context. Not surprisingly, several have deleted the quoted tweets from their accounts. It is almost more surprising that some have not. Some have made their Twitter accounts private and others have altogether deleted them.
One of the things that I find fascinating in all this is how many people decided to make such hateful and stupid comments publicly under seemingly their own name. And hey, in some ways that’s a public service. But it does seem to add another layer of crazy. (As someone who studies people’s Internet uses and skills including privacy and reputation issues, I’m not surprised by this, but I do think it’s worthy of mention. It’s also why I’m now working with Brayden King on a book about reputation management in the digital age although in some ways I’d rather have people like this come right out about their ignorance with whatever repercussions follow.)
Another interesting aspect of the inane tweets is that in many cases several people have decided to favorite and retweet them. (I realize favoriting could function as bookmarking for later perusal, but I suspect favoriting in most of these cases means an up-vote.)
So let’s examine the commentators’ Twitter accounts in the order in which they appear in that post a couple of days after the compilation was published. I only had time to transcribe a dozen or so. There’s painfully more where this came from.
Danwatt8’s featured tweet stating “Bartoli looks like she’s a cross between man and ape. #NotAWimbledonBabe” no longer seems to be on his account, but another one is.
Will Showers has decided to protect his tweets. I guess he doesn’t want his name linked to the following comment he made: “Someone as ugly and unattractive as Bartoli doesn’t deserve to win“.
Damian Ristović deleted the featured tweet that stated: “Female tennis is useless, I’ve never seen a disgusting champion like Bartoli.”, but kept this one: “Lisicki should be able to beat this ogre come on“. He also went on to defend his comments and yell at some people who dared send a critical tweet his way.
Max Bateman no longer seems to have the account that stated the following: “I wanted Lisiki to win because Bartoli is ugly & she looks like she’s covered her face & hair in Bertolli, oily faced French bitch.”
Rudi Taylor seems to have decided to get off Twitter as well. I guess he figured being associated with the following quote wouldn’t be beneficial: “Marion Bartoli is a fat ugly smelly little slut“.
London’s Stifler has kept the offensive “Bartoli you fat shit. I don’t want an ugly bitch to win” up on his account and has even pointed people to the Tumblr post where his comment is featured in addition to engaging with responses in the same style as his original post.
Ellis Keddie’s post stating “How is bartoli a professional athelete and fat as fuck” is still available. He’s received some responses and has replied as one might expect.
User Suman under account sumandutta had shared the following: “Feeling for the trophy presenters who had to exchange kisses with the fat ugly sweaty pig Bartoli.” Maybe upon reflection Suman decided this was not an ideal use of Twitter as that account no longer has any tweets on it.
Cameron Shulak had added the following observation: “bartoli is too ugly to win wimbledon“, a tweet no longer on his account. Ironically, however, he seems to have retweeted the following just a day before his insightful observation about sports: “Life’s much more enjoyable when you look for the beauty in everything/everyone rather than the flaws #justsayin”. Go figure!
Kurt Hopkins doesn’t seem to be embarrassed by his tweet stating: “That’s it Bartoli, there’s your plate, now get back in the kitchen and make everyone a sandwich #wimbledon” as it’s still on his account. In fact, he’s engaged in quite a bit of back-and-forth with some responses.
User TallTyrionLannister added this to the conversation: “Fuck off Bartoli you fat greasy bitch” and went on to defend it in a subsequent exchange. He also had additional insightful tweets: “Gwan Lisicki, smash that French bitch.“, “Bartoli is such an ugly twat.“, “Fuck off, Bartoli“, “Lisicki is so lovely, can’t believe this greasy haired twat is battering her. Leave her alone.”
Rhys Quinn’s account no longer has the tweet stating “Bartoli ate 37 tennis balls before playing her tennis match for her source of energy! #whale“, but has some responses that were likely a follow-up such as: “@SeanCaio7 she’s near the same size as you ye fat cunt”.
Alex Wilkie’s account stating “Bartoli stopp fist pumping every time you win a point.. You ugly French fuck. #wimbledon” no longer exists.
Ben Ledger’s deep contribution is no longer on his account: “Wondering what would bounce better the balls or Bartoli #Wimbledon #fatty“.
That’s it for now. I wish I had time to follow up on more of the accounts included in the Tumblr post. If you’re so inclined, please feel free to do so and please share. It’s not reasonable or necessary to rank the level of crazy in these tweets, but note that the above examples only scratch the surface.
{ 89 comments }
P O'Neill 07.10.13 at 7:04 pm
There was some higher end enabling of these neanderthals.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-23214821
Anderson 07.10.13 at 7:10 pm
Woman is the (something or other) of the world. The exact word escapes me … Lennon song …
CJColucci 07.10.13 at 7:16 pm
I will shame-facedly admit that my interest in women’s tennis is about 2/3 prurient, but it would never occur to me even to think, let alone say, such ugly things just because the Wimbeldon winner doesn’t excite me.
Main Street Muse 07.10.13 at 7:18 pm
It is disgusting. But not isolated to sports. Quite frankly, I’m sick of stories about Hillary’s hair, mommy guilt, and woe to all (woman) who cannot have it all…
This article (http://bit.ly/1aqkKss) on Meredith Levien, Forbes’ group publisher is notable for the fact that the “black” referred to in the headline is about the bottom line of a business run by a woman, not her wardrobe. Highly unusual. Hope it’s a trend, not an aberration.
And don’t forget about the Steubenville rape case; high school students had no hesitation about tweeting about raping a comatose girl. People seem not to realize social media is not a private notebook.
Or maybe today we’re fine as a society with publicizing abhorrent sexist thoughts. We have a political party devoted to the idea that rape is a form of birth control. So what’s a little sexist vitriol when speaking of a Wimbledon champion? Proof that “trickle down” works when it comes to sexism?
Eszter Hargittai 07.10.13 at 7:20 pm
P O’Neill – Yes, I’m aware of that, but thanks for linking for those who didn’t ahve that info.
Main Street Muse – Absolutely right. It’s just yet one more domain where this happens. In some ways it’s helpful that social media bring some of this out to the fore so that those skeptical that sexism still exists (how one could question that boggles the mind) can see it so clearly.
Jay Livingston 07.10.13 at 7:24 pm
Since back in the days of “flaming,” I’m no longer surprised when, no matter the topic, some people say vile things publicly on the Internet. It’s just such a wonderful vehicle for people who want to be offensive.
Ezster says she was fascinated by “how many people decided to make such hateful and stupid comments.” But how many were there– 500? 1000? As a proportion of Twitter users, or even Twitter users who watched Wimbledon it has to be minuscule.
And are we sure that Cameron Shulak is the man in the photo (like Crowe) and not the woman (like Diaz)?
Eszter Hargittai 07.10.13 at 7:30 pm
Jay, please do not cut off a crucial part of the sentence you’re quoting: “publicly under seemingly their own name”. The sentence reads as such: “One of the things that I find fascinating in all this is how many people decided to make such hateful and stupid comments publicly under seemingly their own name.”
I did follow up for some of the accounts and it seems like people are indeed using their own names as there are other accounts with similar pictures and names out there. While it’s possible that someone would want to pretend to create such an elaborate web of accounts, it’s unlikely.
As to the numbers, give me a break, 500 such comments on Twitter is already 500 too many!
zbs 07.10.13 at 9:18 pm
It’s too bad that the builds of elite tennis players and other athletes don’t seem to serve as much of a corrective against the fashion-magazine conception of the body: In theory, it should be the perfect model for an age of fitness-mania. After all, these bodies are the product of the most intensive training and maintenance (an underweight athlete is going to have problems with injury). To take the example probably most familiar to the above Tweeters, Anna Kournikova could never have been lad-mag thin while she was still in competition.
Of course, the combination of that mania and the impossible-to-achieve magazine ideal is what keeps the fitness products shipping and, presumably, this steady drip of vile commentary …
Doctor Science 07.10.13 at 9:20 pm
I wonder how much of this storm of ordure was in fact inspired or set off by BBC commenter John Iverdale:
This kind of elite modeling or pre-approval has got to have a certain amount of influence. If you find when exactly Iverdale said that and then track the timestamps of misogynistic tweet about her, you may get an interesting pattern.
William Berry 07.10.13 at 9:24 pm
Thanks for this post, Eszter. I wish you (and Belle and Tedra) would post here more.
I don’t know why I continue to be amazed by the kind of behavior you high-light here. I am a sixty-one year-old left/ liberal, labor activist type and have spent more than my share of time in (nearly all male) industrial breakrooms, union halls, etc., and have heard, and yes, called out, some vile crap of every description. I read about stuff like this all the time on P.Z. Myers’s “Pharyngula” blog, as well as the several feminist and rad-fem sites I keep up with. But it still hits me like a fist in the gut.
Like C.J.C., above, I admit I like to watch women’s tennis; but I love the game as well, so I guess my interest in women’s tennis (which, including men’s tennis, is probably the only sport I care to watch anymore) is maybe only 20-25 % “prurient”. Frankly, and not to sound too “retro” here, I don’t remember seeing a woman player I didn’t think was beautiful. I shudder to think what this latest generation of internet misogynists would make of Martina Navratilova (the most decent person in sports I can recall), an out lesbian, and the early Williams sisters (in all their naive, inarticulate, innocent glory).
Ditto, MSM @4.
Perhaps most amazing of all? Why there is always someone like Jay Livingston showing up in these debates to try to minimize the indefensibly vile. A mere 500 to 1,000 indeed.
PatrickinIowa 07.10.13 at 9:29 pm
Weird. What I noticed was that she didn’t seem to be wearing as much makeup as the other women, and way less jewelry. I’m not at all pure with respect to objectifying female athletes, but I try to be mindful about it, and her lack of makeup was enough to make me cheer for her, since I didn’t really have a favorite woman tennis player left in the draw.
How could anyone watch her move and call her ugly? The mind boggles. Sport at that level is beautiful. Read this to get the bad taste out of your mouth: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0.
James Wimberley 07.10.13 at 9:50 pm
Is anybody tweeting that Andy Murray, the other Wimbledon singles champion, is plain-looking?
LFC 07.10.13 at 10:24 pm
@PatrickinIowa
Thank you for the link to the ’06 D.F. Wallace piece, which I don’t think I’d read before (though the title sounded familiar). Reading just a part of it confirms that no one in recent years wrote about tennis better.
PatrickinIowa 07.10.13 at 10:41 pm
@13 That piece is probably the best sports article I’ve ever read. Not just tennis, all sports. I can’t think of anything better really.
I try to spread it around at every opportunity. You’re welcome.
PatrickinIowa 07.10.13 at 10:46 pm
@12 No, but during Question Time, David Cameron congratulated Murray on being the first Briton to win Wimbledon in 77 years. Ed Miliband then reminded him about Virginia Wade in 1977, 36 years ago.
stubydoo 07.10.13 at 10:57 pm
I totally don’t follow tennis (I couldn’t tell you who won Wimbledon last year), but this whole kerfuffle is turning me for one into a massive Marion Bartoli fan. All those h8ters are doing wonders for her public profile.
NOTE TO ANY ADVERTISING EXECUTIVES WHO MAY BE READING:
I would love to be informed of which brand of racquet Bartoli uses, what brand of shoes she wears, which perfume she prefers, and what brand of camera she uses for taking pictures of her dog. I’m sure your powers of marketing imagination can come up with many more ways of using Bartoli’s awesomeness (not just at hitting the fuzzy ball but also at making the British press and the twittersphere lose their senses) to move high-margin product.
Walt 07.10.13 at 10:57 pm
When I was a kid, I would watch Wimbledon (I think it coincided with the beginning of the summer holidays), and then I would go outside with my brother and we would pretend to win. I imagine that Marion Bartoli did the same when she was a kid, but I bet that she neglected to also pretend to be attractive enough to deserve to win.
David S. 07.10.13 at 11:03 pm
As an Australian having just witnessed a years-long campaign of incredible insults and misogyny directed against our first (and I suspect last for many decades) female Prime Minister, in every form of media from radio and newspapers to Twitter and Facbook, I’m not terribly surprised by these tweets. (Perhaps even a little relieved to see that we’re not the only ones with such gender problems in fact.) But mostly horrified and sad that after all these years we’ve apparently made so little progress.
There’s always been something about posting online, from the very earliest BBS in the 80s to YouTube and Twitter today that seems to bring out the most dickheaded side of many. A lot of people seem to never edit their thoughts, never stop to consider the potential ramifications, their worldwide audience, etc. It’s just impulse typing with no thought involved. Why they feel so free to post things online they would (in most cases anyway) never say in public is certainly fascinating. Years ago I thought it was simply a phase that wouldn’t last long, once we all got used to the wide and instantaneous reach of the net we’d learn to be more careful with our online thoughts, but I was clearly wrong about that. Things seem to be getting worse.
Eszter Hargittai 07.10.13 at 11:34 pm
Thanks for the supportive comments and for understanding why it is important to document such phenomena.
@11 I’ve naively wondered why athletes wear make-up (other than for sweat-control, I guess) and jewelry during games as that would seem unsafe. (Every gym teacher I ever had always required that we remove all jewelry.)
To address David S.’s comment and our general confusion over why people would post such nasty material publicly with their names attached, I point you to an article by a graduate student of mine, Eden Litt, on the imagined audience. In Knock, Knock. Who’s There? The Imagined Audience she discusses the changing nature of audiences and how with social media people have less and less of a sense of who’s the audience of their comments. We discuss some related issues in a joint empirical paper on whether young adults change their privacy settings and content in light of potential employment-related audiences. Some do, some don’t. (If you can’t access that copy, here’s a pre-print.)
Jay Livingston 07.10.13 at 11:42 pm
Ezster (@7), I wanted to focus on the “how many” question. My point was that it’s a large universe, and if even an infinitesimal fraction posts vile stuff, it’s enough to fill a couple of screens. If you want your hackles raised, Twitter’s as good a place as any. Wait till Mandela dies. Or any other prominent figure.
This also might be an example of people forgetting that whatever they put out there can become available to the world, not just their followers or friends, like those Facebook photos that come back to bite you in the ass when you’re looking for a job, etc.
Tom Slee 07.10.13 at 11:43 pm
This reminds of a touching 3-minute interview with Dustin Hoffmann suddenly realizing what damage judging women on the basis of attractiveness does.
Joshua Cottle 07.10.13 at 11:43 pm
I like Crooked Timber, but this post is essentially the equivalent of the sarcastic “image-cap commentary” the Gawker-style tumblr linked at the outset of this piece, except this piece takes notice of guilty reactions.
Pick your controversial moment of any week and you’ll find some disgusting commentary, as some other posters here have noted. I don’t think this is what Crooked Timber is for. Ranking crazy? Seeing who had a pang of social shaming or defiance? Come on, CT editors. This is Jezebel stuff.
John Quiggin 07.11.13 at 12:02 am
What’s truly bizarre about Inverdale is that he presumably was referring to something he’d heard with reference to Bartoli’s not being “5’11 and long-legged”, and interpreted this as an observation on her looks rather than the challenges it would pose for her as a tennis player.
John Quiggin 07.11.13 at 12:07 am
@Eszter: Material for a separate post, but as a blogger, I’m aware that my imagined audience over-represents active commenters (and CT co-bloggers). I’m sure the same thing is going on in newer social media – until these guys drew the attention of the world, they were probably saying similar stuff and getting either no reaction or Likes/Favorites from likeminded FB Friends/Followers.
Salient 07.11.13 at 12:15 am
One of the things that I find fascinating in all this is how many people decided to make such hateful and stupid comments publicly under seemingly their own name.
Agreed that it’s fascinating and bewildering and feels important to tease out. My line of teasing goes a different way, though. I’m not sure it’s a publicity/privacy issue so much as an outmoded sense of what is temporary/lasting, or what ‘conversational’ means.
In conversation temporality grants a sort of privacy that we presume and take into account when speaking. Like, if I try to imagine how I would adapt my speech and mannerisms if I knew I were being recorded, there’s a whole list of things I can come up with, and it’s kinda strange just how few of these adaptations (if any) appear in anything I type out online… why?
It’s not that the things I have in mind are all particularly private or unprivate; their only common characteristic is that they’re all speech/speaking quirks. I think these modes of writing have replicated the experience of talking so well that we regularly write things we’d like to say but would never think to put in something that feels written, like a letter (or even a personal diary). Even though I’m actually going back and adding this sentence in as the last thing I add before I post this, it feels like I’m talking, feels like I’m following up on saying the previous sentence in fact, and I added the italics tags without even thinking about it because of a change in pitch that I can hear (and can encode). And decode: I read everybody’s comments (punctuation and all) in some approximation of speaking-voices (my own parentheticals sound very flat and dry but not Main Street Muse’s, and this flavoring is especially weird because the text-to-speech function literally reads everything in the same computer voice, with no recognition of parentheses whatsoever and with very entertainingly overemphasized pauses at each comma). This whole conversationalization of the stuff people write here happens in a way that hardly ever emerges in my mind even when reading characters’ speech in a book.
Anyway. Even completely setting aside all the things I would be or am embarrassed about or regretful of, most of the stuff I write here is stuff I would never ever write down, and it’s nonetheless written because it’s being written in forums that don’t feel like written forums. There’s some overlap with privacy as a stand in for embarrassment — the stuff I’ve written that would provokes embarrassment/regret in memory corresponds pretty exactly to when and where I might sort of yell at somebody and then feel peevish for the rest of my life about having done so. Again, though, not so much private/public so much as formal/conversational. (Formality is like the opposite of conversational-temporality in that formally we’re restricting our self-expression in a permissive/restricted way, where we’re only presenting aspects of our identity and personality that our audience anticipates and expects we’ll present. So there’s audience awareness and a vague awareness that there might be an aware audience we’re unaware of.)
Anyway, I think it’s easy to overemphasize the shame/embarrassment component when puzzling through why people write the things they write online, and it seems like a good place to apply/discover ideas about how people adapt to the formality of their environments. Because of the changes in media, our sense of formality doesn’t seem to match up well with our sense of publicity any longer.
In some ways it’s helpful that social media bring some of this out to the fore so that those skeptical that sexism still exists (how one could question that boggles the mind) can see it so clearly.
Yes. Though, like reductio ad absurdum arguments directed at a libertarian, it doesn’t work the way it should, because the audience isn’t cowed by framing them into a position of obtuse implausibility. (Which is really, really intensely frustrating.) What I hear in response is usually something like: These people were just kidding around, etc. What they mean is, yes this would be an example, except it doesn’t count as an example, because it’s not real. They’d like to cordon off an area where people can safely pretend to be vile, with an agreed-upon presumption that everyone, or at least anyone in particular, is just pretending.
But if this doesn’t count… what conceivably does? Whenever someone who offers this line of defense is willing to sit down and describe behavior that would legitimately qualify as Evidence Of Sexism, they produce a description that actually looks like a more legitimately comic caricature of sexism than the comments they’re defending.
Joking is not the same thing as being entertaining, and there are quite a lot of vile ways of being entertaining — including the twitter comments we’re talking about — that are legitimately revealing about the speaker’s character flaws and ought to be admissible evidence of that person’s deserved reputation. … But. … I’m also saying this as someone who would probably completely take it all back the moment pseudonymity becomes compromised or even threatened. So… well, fuck. How can that reconcile? I dunno.
Untangling this ‘just joking’ thing, in a way that refutes the notion of a universal presumption of pretending yet preserves the dignity and feasibility of adopting a separable identity, is incredibly hard but also incredibly important.
Jay Livingston 07.11.13 at 12:22 am
William Berry (@10): If we’re talking about whether something is “minimized” (or overblown) then it’s useful to have an idea of how much of it there is, even if it’s something we all agree is vile. Given that this blog is inhabited by many social scientists, I don’t find the “how much” question at all “amazing.”
Salient 07.11.13 at 12:22 am
#shorter me, I think a lot of these comments are things the person would freely say in conversation with a friend but not in a recorded interview being conducted by that same friend, even without any presumptions/awareness of the interview’s audience. And now I see #19 for the first time and gotta go read the Eden Litt paper because it looks like the whole idea is usefully swept up into imagined audience. Sweet.
LFC 07.11.13 at 12:39 am
JQ @22
It’s not clear that Inverdale was repeating something he’d heard. It could have been an ‘original’ remark, and perhaps Inverdale himself didn’t know exactly what he meant to say (he subsequently apologized, calling the remarks “ham-fisted”). The problem, of course, is “you are never going to be, you know, a looker.” If you take that out, the rest of the quote could read as a comment on the potential disadvantages of not being 5’11” purely from a tennis standpoint. Though it must be said that there have been quite a few excellent tennis players who were not tall.
Main Street Muse 07.11.13 at 2:22 am
To Jay Livingston – the precise count of tweets is less relevant than the fact that the numbers were such (“hundreds and hundreds of tweets” per the article linked to in the OP) that they garnered the attention of the media – such as the Christian Science Monitor (http://bit.ly/18Osseu). There were enough tweets to determine a trend of abuse and vileness focused on this champion. Perhaps not enough tweets for your standards.
These tweets were accompanied by a nitwit of an announcer wondering if Bartoli’s father ever told her she wasn’t a “looker” with long legs, so of course she would have to be a “scrapper.” (In the quote I read, Inverdale owned this nonsense – not quoting someone else.)
This hate-filled twitter stream follows Brett Musberger’s public drool over that quarterback’s pretty girlfriend in the last football season.
And it follows the “hate-her-hair” tweets focused on the Olympic champion Gabby Douglas in the 2012 Olympics.
It is simultaneous with a Vanity Fair story on the soft waviness of Hillary Clinton’s hair (because we care so much!)
The noise about the looks of successful women (or pretty girlfriends of successful men) is quite deafening these days.
Women, like men, are far more than their looks. But one would not know that from a cursory glance at popular culture today.
Bloix 07.11.13 at 2:43 am
See a discussion of the social media treatment of Rachel Jeantel, http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=5161#more-5161
Eszter Hargittai 07.11.13 at 2:47 am
Thank you, MSM, that’s very helpful. You’d think a sociologist (JL) would not need this level of handholding to understand the issues at hand. I’m quite certain, actually, that he’s just trolling this post so is best ignored.
JQ, yes, I think a separate post, but great point about active commenters likely being overrepresented. It’s easier to imagine the more visible ones.
Salient, funny, as I read your post I kept thinking: did he not see the pointer to Eden’s piece? I think you’d find it interesting with all this contemplation.:) (I don’t recall if she takes on this issue of what is and to what extent it is conversational/imagined as ephemeral or not, but addresses related questions.) I think I’ll blog about the empirical paper I mention above at some point as it touches on some related issues (although it’s main contribution is from a different angle).
Substance McGravitas 07.11.13 at 3:21 am
As an alternative, here’s a link to Simon Mayo and Mark Kermode’s film podcast. There’s a really wonderful and sweet interview with Billie Jean King regarding her new documentary called Battle of the Sexes. It’s about an hour in and jeez she seems like a great person.
http://downloads.bbc.co.uk/podcasts/fivelive/kermode/kermode_20130621-1600a.mp3
Will Boisvert 07.11.13 at 3:30 am
I think Marion Bartoli is kind of hot.
Just saying.
Dr. Hilarius 07.11.13 at 3:51 am
I don’t follow tennis much beyond the headlines and confess I had no idea what Marion Bartoli looked like until all the nastiness on Twitter erupted. So I google images of Ms. Bartoli. And am left baffled. My standards are mine alone but I see a woman of above-average beauty and well above average if you like fit women with muscles (I do). Perhaps all of the misogynists on Twitter exclusively date international super models but I’m doubtful. And I also doubt that many of these twits have any athletic ability beyond speed-eating junk food.
Iverdale’s comment (as apology for earlier remarks?) : “She is an incredible role model for people who aren’t born with all the attributes of natural athletes” is beyond stupid. You don’t win Wimbledon unless you have natural athletic ability. Playing at that level defines athletic ability. Wait, I get it, she’s not Iverdale’s ideal blond princess and that’s what defines natural athletic ability. How do people like this get to cover sports at all?
Kiwanda 07.11.13 at 4:18 am
I agree that part of this is just that somebody who’s a dumb enough jerk to make such a vile comment is also dumb enough not to realize that the world sees it.
Another possible aspect (explaining but not excusing): people expect female entertainers to be especially good looking, because (in our sexist society) many female entertainers *are* especially good looking, even relative to male entertainers. So someone might think that some female entertainer is “ugly”, even if that entertainer is good-looking by everyday standards. And this is so even though the fame of the entertainer is due to their athletic ability, not their looks. (It’s worth acknowledging that professional athletes are entertainers, by the way: just as at least some musicians and actors owe some of their success to their looks, so too this may be so for some professional athletes. To be clear: such looksism is unfortunate, should be completely absent outside of entertainment, and *no one* deserves the vile comments that were made.)
shah8 07.11.13 at 6:11 am
/me shakes head…
This is mild compared to the things that get written about black athletes. Aside from kinda cool twitter wars like the one between Sloane Stevens and Serena Williams, comments on newspaper articles can be horrifying. Just check out any of the articles featuring Michael Vick at a charged time. Not talking about name-calling, but effectively death threats with brutal imagery.
This stuff? It’s par for the course in a mild comment forum about whatever Serena Williams is doing. And I’m not sure when it came to women’s tennis, that it was ever anything but deeply nasty, internet or no. There were some really constant nastiness towards women like Martina Navratilova and Steffi Graf. It’s due to how men’s tennis actually has to compete with women’s tennis for eyeballs.
Beyond that, prettiness is a key preference for people who market sports. In American Football, weaker teams often will start prettier quarterbacks in preference to someone who’s only marginally better. There’s only about 12-18 real QBs in a 32 team league, so that sort of thing happens, and since qb stats typically reflects the effectiveness of the overall offense as much or more than the qb’s ability, people tend to not understand how good or bad one is.
Sidlawman 07.11.13 at 6:33 am
The knuckle dragging apes were also giving Murray grief #fuckmurray #scottishprick
anon/portly 07.11.13 at 6:58 am
In American Football, weaker teams often will start prettier quarterbacks in preference to someone who’s only marginally better. There’s only about 12-18 real QBs in a 32 team league, so that sort of thing happens, and since qb stats typically reflects the effectiveness of the overall offense as much or more than the qb’s ability, people tend to not understand how good or bad one is.
And sites like Football Outsiders claim a sophisticated analysis of the sport, yet have not the teeniest inkling that this is happening. The rot is deep.
Hidari 07.11.13 at 7:02 am
“@12 No, but during Question Time, David Cameron congratulated Murray on being the first Briton to win Wimbledon in 77 years. Ed Miliband then reminded him about Virginia Wade in 1977, 36 years ago.”
Cameron of course renowned in British public life for being an opportunistic ignoramus, but he is not alone. Murray was almost constantly, in all sectors of the media, referred to as Britain’s first Wimbledon champion in 77 years. Needless to say this fits in well with the relentless misogyny and sexism of contemporary British political discourse.
Hidari 07.11.13 at 7:59 am
As another example of which, see this: “The Conservatives risk becoming embroiled in another misogyny row after William Hague was seen to mutter “stupid woman†at a female Labour MP during Prime Minister’s Questions.”
Only a few days after Boris Johnson suggested that women go to University to get rich husbands. As the Russian saying has it ‘the fish rots from the head’.
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/william-hague-calls-labour-mp-cathy-jamieson-a-stupid-woman-during-prime-ministers-questions-8700578.html
Alex 07.11.13 at 10:38 am
Regarding Murray, the media also forgot that a Briton, Jonathan Marray, won the Wimbledon doubles championship last year (with his Danish partner Fredrik Nielsen), and that Jelena Jankovic (with her British partner, Andy Murray’s *brother*) won the mixed-doubles championship in 2007, so perhaps it’s just that you’re lucky if the media can report the score without getting it wrong. /pedant
Much more seriously, the “imagined audience” is an interesting idea and I think a blog post would be great. It’s one of the odd things about the Internet that your audience can change beyond recognition at any moment; sometimes it’s just two of your closest friends and then it’s a Tahrir Square-sized mass meeting, and you only find out after the event.
Meanwhile, Inverdale can go to hell.
nitwit 07.11.13 at 12:13 pm
Same boat as Dr Hilarius – googled for images and saw her pictures for first time after reading this. What a joyous smile. She is not beautiful?
P O'Neill 07.11.13 at 12:44 pm
#35 note that one of the clowns was comparing Bartoli to Mario Balotelli … when these guys have issues, it’s usually more than one issue.
Tom Phillips 07.11.13 at 12:56 pm
It always amazes me that people have stereotypes of tennis champions, leaders, artists etc and that if someone doesn’t conform to these stereotypes then they “don’t deserve” to win..or lead…or paint great art..
I suppose the baseball players in Moneyball are the classic reference to people with a huge amount of talent who didn’t conform to the average baseball coaches idea of what an athlete is.
It sets me wondering whether I can make a living by betting on talented sportwomen who don’t conform to someones idea of what they should look like.
FRauncher 07.11.13 at 1:26 pm
I have always thought Marion was and still think she is pretty cute. I’m fed up with those tall slim blonds who probably spend as much time at the hair dressers as on the courts. They rarely have the staying power. And by the time they muscle up, they lose that mythical Nordic image. It’s curious all those guys whose sex drive has been so channeled by the media that they can’t get it up for any but the Nordic ideal.
Or is it franco-phobic holdover from the Iraq war?
Substance McGravitas 07.11.13 at 1:31 pm
Perhaps the nature of female beauty is not the issue in a game of tennis.
Witt 07.11.13 at 1:49 pm
Eszter, thank you so much for this post and for the links in 19. I look forward to reading them.
It seems to me that people making hateful or bigoted remarks often seem to get angry precisely over this idea of audience. They are furious that some previously invisible-to-them audience members have the power to “censor”* them, and they tend to react as though a piece of furniture has had the temerity to answer back.
*In quotes because this is a term that they use over and over, though the censorship in question is never government-mandated, and is generally not censorship at all — more like social disapproval.
(Confidential to the gentlemen in this thread who are affirming the attractiveness of ___: While your sincerity is not in question, your comments rather miss the point that the problem is at least as much constantly having your looks evaluated, as it is whether the evaluation is positive or negative.)
Alex 07.11.13 at 1:56 pm
Note: the article on the imagined audience is available as a preprint at the link. Sent to Kindle.
MPAVictoria 07.11.13 at 2:55 pm
“Perhaps the nature of female beauty is not the issue in a game of tennis.”
Indeed. It shouldn’t matter what she looks like. It does of course, but it shouldn’t.
It still amazes me how cruel people can be to someone who has never wronged them. You think I would have learned by now.
Trader Joe 07.11.13 at 4:03 pm
There’s no possible defense for any of these comments.
I find the controversy interesting relative to a similar controversey in NASCAR Racing where a high profile commentor (Kyle Petty, son of racing legend Richard Petty and clearly a guy who knows a thing or two about riding coat-tails) suggested that the sports leading female driver Danica Patrick lacked racing skill, but was a “marketing machine.” A comment that basically suggested it was only her good looks that earned her a spot in the sport .
Looking at the two cases we have an athlete in tennis who was chided for being skilled, but unattractive and in NASCAR an athlete chided for being attractive, but unskilled…it seems the misogeny of sport can only reward the female athlete who is both skilled and attractive.
As someone noted up thread – no one ever said gee this Boris Becker guy looks like a dork but can sure sling a tennis ball, they simply said he was a great tennis player and made no mention of looks positive or negative.
Katherine 07.11.13 at 4:21 pm
I don’t think this is what Crooked Timber is for.
Man, there’s always someone who turns up to remind us all that the vile sexism that affects half the world’s population is just not that important.
JanieM 07.11.13 at 4:26 pm
Also, of course, to tell the owners of Crooked Timber why they have a blog, because any ideas the owners themselves have on that subject are obviously irrelevant.
H 07.11.13 at 4:30 pm
It’s so easy to see what’s going on. (1) Misogyny is transgressive–bold, oppositional, shows you’re not cowed by conventional schoolmarm pieties. You’re a brave Lad. (2) Trashing people for low-prestige characteristics, e.g being ‘fat’ (she’s fat???) proves that you must be speaking from a high-prestige position. Remember the college dorm game of ‘she’s fat.’ If you could call someone else fat that showed you weren’t.
So of course they want to post in their own names. Trashing others shows affirms their own status–as cool, transgressive, and not fat.
Witt 07.11.13 at 4:35 pm
The video in 21 is quite remarkable. Thank you for sharing.
Further to 51, 52: Note that that the most recent post at the linked blog of 22’s author is “concerned with the subjective expectation of privacy,” though apparently not in the context of athletes who might expect some respite from judgment of their physical attributes.
Ronnie Pudding 07.11.13 at 5:16 pm
In American Football, weaker teams often will start prettier quarterbacks in preference to someone who’s only marginally better. There’s only about 12-18 real QBs in a 32 team league, so that sort of thing happens, and since qb stats typically reflects the effectiveness of the overall offense as much or more than the qb’s ability, people tend to not understand how good or bad one is.
This is just completely wrong for several reasons and serves to trivialize the issue with women in sports. And which QBs are given jobs because they are prettier than their counterparts? You said it happens “often.”
sc 07.11.13 at 5:42 pm
In American Football, weaker teams often will start prettier quarterbacks in preference to someone who’s only marginally better. There’s only about 12-18 real QBs in a 32 team league, so that sort of thing happens, and since qb stats typically reflects the effectiveness of the overall offense as much or more than the qb’s ability, people tend to not understand how good or bad one is.
do you have actual examples of this? i follow american football pretty closely, and i’m not sure i can think of a team starting a quarterback based on looks over a more qualified backup.
Eszter Hargittai 07.11.13 at 6:00 pm
Katherine, JanieM – Thanks! It’s precious to have such a comment especially on a post about sexism. But I do appreciate the compliment regarding Jezebel.:)
Joshua Cottle, you may have missed Chris Bertram’s recent note about how things work around here, fyi.
Tom Slee, thanks for sharing that interview. I love that movie and this was a nice background to have on it.
MPAVictoria, indeed regarding people’s level of meanness for no reason, not sure you read this far, but this example was especially curious on the point you note: Cameron Shulak had retweeted the following just a day before his tweet about Bartoli: “Life’s much more enjoyable when you look for the beauty in everything/everyone rather than the flaws #justsayinâ€. Hah.
MPAVictoria 07.11.13 at 6:07 pm
“MPAVictoria, indeed regarding people’s level of meanness for no reason, not sure you read this far, but this example was especially curious on the point you note: Cameron Shulak had retweeted the following just a day before his tweet about Bartoli: “Life’s much more enjoyable when you look for the beauty in everything/everyone rather than the flaws #justsayinâ€. Hah.”
Oh Fucking hell.
The cognitive dissonance! It stings!
Fu Ko 07.11.13 at 8:58 pm
On that recommendation, I read the piece. It’s quite good, but I still think the best sports article I have ever read is another piece — by the same author:
http://www.esquire.com/features/sports/the-string-theory-0796
(Some of the best parts are in the footnotes, which unfortunately don’t seem to work too well with the javascript hover-over, at least on my browser.)
shah8 07.11.13 at 9:28 pm
sc, we’re basically talking about backup-level quality starters ahead of other backups. Also, it’s usually very hard to convince anyone whether QB A is better than QB B, particularly when both are marginally talented. I suppose the clearest example of this in recent times would be in 2011, where Colt McCoy started over Seneca Wallace, Christian Ponder over Donovan McNabb and Joe Webb. As you can see, race tends to figure in the more supportable examples. Another thing that tends to figure is draft status. Tim Tebow over Kyle Orton, Shaun Hill being overshadowed by every Johnny-come-lately savior, probably Blaine Gabbert over Chad Henne, but that’s debateable. Of course, there’s the classic Heath Schuler taking as long as he did to be unseated by Gus Ferrotte. Of course, one might say that of course, high draft picks ought to have fast transition to starterdom, but the vast majority of these situations involve clearly overdrafted QB like Ponder or Gabbert, where you can’t tell me marketing wasn’t a big factor in drafting them, given their college achievements. Others, like Tebow, Weinke, Leinart, were big college heroes that the pros wanted to ride the big name of.
Random Lurker 07.11.13 at 9:41 pm
“Perhaps the nature of female beauty is not the issue in a game of tennis.â€
Indeed. It shouldn’t matter what she looks like. It does of course, but it shouldn’t.
Substance & MPAVictoria
[concurring for the role of misoginist of the day]
Tennis is a media show, economically speaking (obviously people who pratice it for fun see tennis as a sport, but people who partecipate in high level tournaments are professionals, whose pay comes from advertising in the end).
From this point of view, the “issue” of tennis is “whatever the audience thinks is the issue”.
Part of the audience is, apparently, stupid males who are not interested in the game of tennis but very interested in looking at nice young women who run left and right on the field.
Being interested in nice young women is obviously quite natural for males, stupid or not – this isn’t in itself “sexist”, just “sexual” (and maybe a bit vulgar).
So let me mansplain this to you: sexism begins where males believe that women are just sexual objects, not where males believe women are also sexual objects.
Collin Street 07.11.13 at 9:43 pm
“There’s no possible defense for any of these comments.”
Irresistable impulse/insanity/diminished responsibility acct being a crazy.
Collin Street 07.11.13 at 9:44 pm
Also, being under the age of criminal responsibility.
Suzanne 07.11.13 at 10:08 pm
@12: I’d never take to Twitter to insult the fellow, but the thought has crossed my mind more than once that it’s highly unlikely Andy pulls the pretty bird who currently cheers for him in his box without being a tennis champion. The boy is no oil painting.
Substance McGravitas 07.11.13 at 10:24 pm
I think your comment is about being a stupid asshole.
novakant 07.11.13 at 11:05 pm
Disgusting – but what did you expect?
A majority of the US/UK population thinks it’s fine to kill civilians with drone strikes, the option of invading this or that country passes for civilized dinner party conversation and op-ed topic, filtering down into the internet comment sections as genocidal, racist rants.
I’m neither surprised. nor shocked.
Random Lurker 07.11.13 at 11:10 pm
My comment is about the fact that being a stupid asshole is not in itself the same thing of being sexist (though the two things often go together ).
rea 07.11.13 at 11:47 pm
I was prepared to ask who the heck cares what one of the world’s best atheletes looks like, but first I did a Bing image search on her name, and now I’m left wondering how on earth anyone could think her less than beautiful
Main Street Muse 07.11.13 at 11:50 pm
“So let me mansplain this to you: sexism begins where males believe that women are just sexual objects, not where males believe women are also sexual objects.”
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a champion misogynist in this thread! A mansplaining man who seem oblivious to the fact that tweet-slamming a champion for not being pretty (and those words are far kinder than the words used in the offensive tweets) is not at all the same as watching pretty women play a sport.
zbs 07.12.13 at 12:22 am
People really seemed taken aback shah8’s first comment (perhaps because of the appearance of of the apparently-trivializing adjective “mild”? which nonetheless appeared in an emphasis of the historical depth of this phenomenon) but I thought it was pretty nuanced from the start. I, for one, tend to favor prettiness, though in sports it usually seems to boil down to gracefulness (e.g., my original preference for Federer over Nadal—now I like them both though: backstory also plays an outsized role).
Saurs 07.12.13 at 12:35 am
Random Lurker, your definition of sexism doesn’t wash, and the notion that finding “nice young women” “interesting” is “natural” for “males” (male what?) sort of erases quite a few actual men in the process of defending that definition. Probably best not to generalize from your own experiences, you know?
dr ngo 07.12.13 at 1:38 am
It seems to me that there are two different kind of “looks” that may be relevant in this discussion. One – the more obvious, and less forgivable – is that of conventional beauty. We expect (require?) public figures to be attractive, and condemn them when they fall short of our standards. This is silly, and usually offensive.
The other has to do with what top athletes in a particular sport typically look like – their body type, if you will. And here is where it may be permissible to notice how someone varies from the event stereotype. When I saw Marion Bartoli, I was struck by how “unathletic” she appeared, and mentioned it to my wife. I was instantly reminded of the new US javelin champion Riley Dolezal, who looks like some out-of-shape frat boy who just stumbled onto the field and happened to pick up a spear and heave it in the right direction.
In both cases, I should say, my basic reaction was pleasure, rather than dismay. I enjoy it when someone who doesn’t look “right” for a particular job is in fact excellent at that job. More power to him/her; less power to the mental images we have of what a “champion” looks like. Hollywood would never cast either Bartoli or Dolezal – not even as the losing finalist, much less the winner – but that just goes to show. In my judgment this kind of thing is a legitimate observation: Did You See Who Just Won!
But of course most of the OP and subsequent commentary are about much less germane, much more offensive, comments, and whatever I say here should not be understood as defending them in any way.
Alan 07.12.13 at 1:40 am
(I posted this on the Fem Phi blog; thought it might be relevant here as well.)
My current role-model for under-appreciated athletic excellence is Inbee Park in women’s golf (still called the Ladies PGA; how eye-rolling; but since we still have a world-known team called Redskins why should I be surprised?). What’s she done? Just won six tournaments thus far this season, all three women’s majors thus far, #1 in the world, poised to win the women’s grand slam if she wins the British Open.
I love her very unorthodox swing. It truly looks like she swings in slo-mo, until she strikes the ball. Awesome.
But why is she not getting Tiger Woods-type hype?
More of the same.
Substance McGravitas 07.12.13 at 3:01 am
My comment is about having beer and snacks and waiting for the competition to out-dumb you. Suspense!
Philip 07.12.13 at 7:19 am
Suzanne @64, surely that would also be an insult to his girlfriend. When footballer (soccer player), Peter Crouch was asked what he would be if he were not a footballer he replied ‘ a virgin’. I’m sure that made Abbey Clancy feel great.
Novakant @66, I don’t think anyone is surprised by the comments more the fact they were written under the author’s own name in a public forum. In internet comments sections you can be fairly anonymous.
I think there’s either one of three things going on. 1. People are continuing with norms of internet discussion without considering the issue of anonymity. 2. They are carrying on the kind of discussions they would normally have in private and not considering twitter as being in the public domain. 3. They want people to know that they hold obnoxious views.
Random Lurker 07.12.13 at 9:17 am
@Substance McGravitas 74
My comment is about having beer and snacks and waiting for the competition to out-dumb you. Suspense!
Hah! Bring ’em on! Now I’m going to use the “women do it too” argument.
@Main Street Muse 69
Ding! Ding! Ding! We have a champion misogynist in this thread! […] tweet-slamming a champion for not being pretty […] is not at all the same as watching pretty women play a sport.
First of all, I thank you for declaring me a champion, though I fear I’m not attractive enough for this honour.
On the substance of the claim, I agree that the tweet slamming is bad, I just disagree that this should be classified as “sexism” as opposed to general vulgarity.
I’ll try to explain my point with an opposite example: I’ve been told various times by various girls/women that they liked this or that football player because he was handsome/sexy. I think that the most appreciated sexy football player is Fabio Cannavaro, one of the main players of the italian football team the year it won the world championship.
In fact the sexiness of the players was apparently obvious to marketing people, who launched many spots based on the player’s sexiness (for example, here it is a sexy picure of Cannavaro:
http://cdn.calciopro.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/destro-alto.jpg
if you google for Cannavaro pictures you’ll see there are various others).
The fact that some women like this or that sports personality because of his sexiness isn’t in itself “sexist”, obviously. The big difference is that women usually don’t tweet-slam males for being unattractive; but this depends on the fact that women are in general more polite and less vulgar than men, and also from the fact that women are also expected to hide their sexuality.
The fact that women are expected to hide their sexuality is, obviously, very sexist. But then we should hope for more sexual freedom for women (more naked Cannavaro pictures), not for more sexual repression for men (BUT we can hope for less vulgarity from men).
@Saurs 71
Mi definition of “sexism” is when one discriminate people because of their sex in contexts where sex shouldn’t be an issue (such as, for example, in hiring or promoting employees). It seems to me that something like 50% of media entertainment is based directly or indirectly on sex, so the clause doesn’t apply here.
That said, “A revolution without [sex] is not a revolution worth having”.
Random Lurker 07.12.13 at 9:29 am
Shorter me:
We could diminish sexism in our society either by repress men as much as women, or by accepting the same explicit sexual behaviour from women that we accept from men. The OP imho goes in the direction of option 1, that I think is wrong.
CJColucci 07.12.13 at 4:34 pm
As the resident dirty old man, I don’t think anyone here is saying you can’t enjoy the physical beauty of athletic women in competition — or men, whatever floats your boat. Just don’t be a jerk about it, or insult successful athletes who do not happen to be beautiful for their lack of beauty.
Substance McGravitas 07.12.13 at 6:22 pm
Further, the athlete under discussion got where she was by winning tennis matches. That was The Thing required of her. If tennis was “whatever the audience thinks is the issue” maybe it would be played naked on a platform surrounded by a shark-filled moat. Somehow, in some drastic refusal of all concerned to cash in pots of money, it is not that.
Mao Cheng Ji 07.12.13 at 6:52 pm
Here’s my analysis of this controversial issue: some people are jerks.
Shatterface 07.12.13 at 7:42 pm
So let me mansplain this to you: sexism begins where males believe that women are just sexual objects, not where males believe women are also sexual objects.
Treating people as just objects, sexual or otherwise, is generally where -isms end rather than begin.
As John Brunner once said, if there’s such a phenomenon as absolute evil it is in treating another human being as a thing.
PatrickinIowa 07.12.13 at 7:56 pm
@59 Yes, that’s an excellent one too. I’m glad I’ve read both: I feel as though I understand sports better, and DFW could turn a phrase with the very, very best of them.
lemmy caution 07.12.13 at 8:31 pm
The sexualization of female professional surfers is out of hand. At least, tennis has an objective scoring system that can’t be influenced by how attractive you are.
Ogden Wernstrom 07.13.13 at 12:06 am
Did you get a peek at this Fall’s new television lineup?
Oh, and part of Wimbledon tradition is the strict dress code. They would have to be white sharks.
Suxanne 07.13.13 at 1:45 am
Philip @ 75: Point taken, but Ms. Clancy was probably amused. No doubt Crouch is being modest, but I actually think it speaks well for him that he realizes his outsized appeal to the ladies may not entirely be due to his magnificent animal magnetism.
Philip @ 75: Ms. Clancy was probably amused. No doubt Crouch is being modest, but I actually think it speaks well for him that he realizes his outsized appeal to the ladies may not entirely be due to his awesome animal magnetism.
@77: Re: women taking the same liberties as men. I can’t say I really care for it when men enjoy their greater freedom of sexual expression by muttering “I’d like to eat your pussy,†and “Nice tits†as I pass by. I’m not interested in muttering “I’d like to suck your cock†and “Nice abs†at passing men, either. Doubtless you would regard this as evidence of my cultural need to repress my sexuality, but I see it as regard for the humanity of the opposite sex, not to mention good manners.
Random Lurker 07.13.13 at 7:03 am
@Substance 79
But that is because most of the audience is intersted in tennis (plus, some part of the audience is presumably eterosexual females) .
The problem from my point of view is that you (and imho the op ) are making a moral case against men that, in some occasions, look at women, so to speak, at breast level instead than at eye level. I don’t think this is immoral in general , though there are clearly some occasions where this is inappropriate (understatement of the day).
It makes me think of that scene in the movie “goodbye Lenin” where, when the wall falls, the first thing that many east berlinese do is going in a porn shop (forbidden in the east).
For clarity I repeat that I agree that the tweet above are ultra jerky (I used the term vulgar previously .
Katherine 07.13.13 at 7:39 am
Dude, there’s a difference between finding someone sexually attractive and objectifying them. Doing the latter involves removing, forgetting or just plain not caring that there’s a human person attached to the smoking hot abs or the fantastic rack.
Appreciating the attractiveness of a sports star, because they are an attractive sports star, is miles away from leering at Page 3 or a random lad mag, where the women portrayed are just there for the mammaries.
Fu Ko 07.14.13 at 10:50 am
Uh oh, someone’s getting erased.
Chris Finocchio 07.14.13 at 10:41 pm
Would women’s tennis be commercially successful if it weren’t sexualized to some extent?
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