Where are the good men?

The actions of Tiger Woods, Ben Roethlisberger, Lawrence Taylor, and George Huguely (the University of Viginia lacrosse player charged with murdering a female student), suggest that we ignore important issues when we focus only on why these individuals do what they do.

Individualism is a celebrated value in U.S. culture, and our explanations of success and failure often focus exclusively on the character of individuals. But in the case of sexual exploitation, abuse, and assault perpetrated by male athletes, we must also focus critical attention on the context in which some men learn that it is acceptable to demean, depersonalize, and dehumanize women.And why do other men permit this learning to occur without actively disrupting it and defining it as unacceptable, if not unthinkable?

Asking this question is difficult because it forces all men to take responsibility for changing the contexts in which they party, drink, and play sports. It’s easy to ask why individuals do what they do, because the answers focus on character rather than context and lead simply to condemnations of the actions of a few bad apples. But as assault cases mount, we can no longer dismiss these actions as representative of a few bad apples.

The evidence now suggests that particular group cultures created and maintained by men are in need of critical assessment. Certain types of all-male groups generally have higher rates of assault against women than the average, and they include certain sports teams, fraternities, military units, and other groups where there is an emphasis on superiority, exclusion, and unquestioned bonding. It is in these groups that women are most often demeaned and portrayed as undeserving the respect accorded to one’s “brothers”—unless those brothers have the good sense and courage to disrupt misogynous discourse and define it as offensive.

What norms keep good men silent or even lead them to passively lionize the exploitive comments and actions of Woods, Roethlisberger, Taylor, and Huguely? Men who do not see or treat women as these men do must disrupt the discourses that demean, depersonalize, and dehumanize women generally or any woman in particular, whether they occur in bars, locker rooms, at parties, or in everyday situations.

The men on the PGA tour saw cuts in their prize money when Woods’s actions forced him off the course. Roethlisberger’s teammates and coaches on the Steelers now are distracted by questions about their quarterback’s suitability as a team leader. The NFL Hall of Fame players now must share their status with a man that pays to have sex with an underage, physically abused woman. And the male lacrosse players at the University of Virginia now face a Duke redux framing them as privileged and perverted. So why do these men not create cultures in which it is clearly offensive to demeane, depersonalize, and dehumanize women? Why didn’t the male coaches and teammates of George Huguely intervene before he destroyed two young lives, and why aren’t they now standing side-by-side with the female lacrosse team to collectively express their grief and outrage?

I was called by a number of male sports journalists and asked to explain the significance of the University of New Mexico hair pulling incident in women’s soccer and the punch thrown by a member of the Baylor University Women’s basketball team. But none of them sought from me an explanation of why there isn’t unified outrage coming from men in the sport cultures where there is passive acceptance, if not lionizing fellow athletes and coaches who dehumanize women. Instead they wanted to know how long it would take the American public and sport fans to forgive Woods and Roelisberger so these men could regain their hero status?

Only Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post (5/8/10, D1) asked questions infering that male coaches, teammates, and even university administrators and team officials must critically assess and transform the group cultures they reaffirm on a daily basis. As she insightfully concludes: “The truth is, women can't do anything about this problem. Men are the only ones who can change it -- by taking responsibility for their locker room culture, and the behavior and language of their teammates. Nothing will change until the biggest stars in the clubhouse are mortally offended, until their grief and remorse over an assault trumps their solidarity.”