In 2008, I published my social service doctoral thesis in France. I spent six years understanding the rituals of young, top-level athletic men. The idea came to me in 2001 while reading Howard Becker, who said in his book Underdogs that before understanding the marginalized, one had to understand the normal. In social work, we study the marginalized, the victims, the left behind. So I haven’t had much success in my scholarship applications with my idea of studying straight guys who are doing well and who are the most popular. My sponsors were members of college hockey and football teams, among others.
The majority came from one team in particular, with whom I spent almost two years. The portrait, which seemed very beautiful at first, was however less brilliant. And what did all these guys tell me? What you hear these days! They loved their sport passionately to the point of going through degrading rituals, where their bodies are bruised and injured in their greatest intimacy.
What are rituals for?
Rituals are essential. We all live rituals. They are initiatory when it is necessary to enter a group, at work or elsewhere. They are sometimes so small and often so common that you don’t even notice them. They are tribal, once entered the group, in order to reaffirm our belonging to this group. They are apotropaic, when it takes a certain magic that brings good fortune to itself and wards off bad luck. For example, athletes stick a blade of grass from a field where they have won a match in their helmet, or they always chew the same flavor of gum and of the same brand…
But why do the rituals among sports men go in the direction that we know and that make the headlines?
We must analyze the model of hegemonic masculinity in our society. Masculinity valued in our society, despite nuances, is still and always dominating, stoic and homophobic. What is every teenager’s biggest fear? To pass for (or to be) homosexual. Do not be scarred by words. I co-wrote a book on the suicidal motivations of young men, the title of which was Dead or fif. It’s not for nothing ; respondents would rather be dead than, and these are their words, “fifs.” These were also the words of the respondents of my doctorate.
The sportsmen who gave themselves up to me defined with the greatest difficulty what it is to be a man. And when they finally found answers after long scrambles, they told me that it was to defend his family, his spouse and his children, to feed them, that it was to be hairy, muscular, to smell bad, take out the trash. It was also not to be a woman or a weakling… In their scale of masculinity, they put themselves five or six out of ten no more. This masculinity, which they struggled to define, was defined in the subtraction from the “feminine qualifiers” they possessed.
File a complaint?
It is a mistake to think that a young sportsman can lodge a complaint freely. First, in the model of masculinity they adhere to, a man does not complain. He endures. Filing a complaint has unfortunate consequences, often much worse than the harm. Indeed, it most often means being kicked out of the team. The institution that sets up the abuse cannot also be the one that receives the complaint.
Several parents testified to Josie-Anne Taillon of Radio-Canada that not only was the complaint process they undertook painful, but also that it came to nothing. Remember the McGill scandal in 2005 with “Doctor Broom”. Not only was the young man who filed a complaint for the aggression he suffered during his football initiation traumatized, but he left university in addition to having been held responsible for the expulsion of his attackers from McGill University and the cancellation of the football season. The freedom to complain has a cost.
The solutions exist
I proposed in my thesis (The Test of Masculinity. Sport, rituals and homophobia at Editions H and O) a number of solutions, including inclusive rituals, where everyone’s strengths are valued with respect. A sports environment where friendship and solidarity are in the spotlight.
So these men, who weren’t worth studying because they held the upper hand and in whose lives everything was going well, turned out to be young men lost in outdated and toxic masculine values and without a role model. valid replacement. What we see in sport today is our collective responsibility, and we have failed. Several researchers like me have published their research, but the sports community has preferred to look elsewhere and ignore the science.
The speeches of the leaders of the sports leagues that one can hear these days in the media are rather mediocre and come under the most complete denial, not to say stupidity. This whole story gives me the satisfaction of having been right. However, I would have liked to have been wrong and to have been wrong.