Los Angeles
by Andrea Scarpino
A few weeks ago, I wrote about my support of Syracuse in the Men’s NCAA basketball tournament—they were my dad’s team, and it felt important to me in some strange way to support them. Well, they’re out of the tournament now, after a pretty embarrassing loss to Oklahoma in the Sweet 16. More upsetting than their loss, however, is some of the commentary I’ve heard while watching the tournament. Granted, this may be old news to everyone else, but I usually don’t follow sports—I didn’t even watch the Olympics last summer—so listening to the announcers this past couple of weekends has been a pretty eye opening experience.
Although I’ve been offended by a bounty of subtly offensive statements, the worst I’ve heard so far happened last weekend when an announcer said a player was “raped from behind” when his shot was blocked from behind by another player. Now I’m no genius, but I’m pretty confident that what I saw happening on the court does NOT constitute rape.
I would have higher hopes for the Women’s NCAA tournament except that a couple of friends just attended the BNP Paribas Open Tennis Tournament, and they reported that some pretty stupid things were announced while the women were playing their tennis games, including multiple comments on their beauty. Apparently at one point, the announcers thanked the “ladies” for coming to play and asked everyone in the audience to give them a hand just for showing up with their rackets. Suffice it to say, none of the men were congratulated for being attractive and for showing up to play.
Why does it matter that sports announcers use sexist or otherwise problematic language? To me, it matters because language helps shape and form our understanding of the world. When I heard a woman at a writing conference dismiss a question about her use of the term “autistics” instead of “people with autism” as a choice of “mere semantics” and nothing we should worry about, I bristled. Language is never mere semantics; it’s how we make sense of society, how we make sense of ourselves and those around us. Writing about a person who has autism references just one of that person’s character traits, which is very different from discussing an autistic—that language makes autism his defining attribute, as if there could be nothing else interesting to say about him.
Similarly, when a national TV announcer describes a meaningless basketball block as being “raped from behind,” that makes actual instances of rape seem much less serious, much less dangerous. I would go so far as to say it legitimizes rape as an acceptable means of interacting with other people. Which of course, it isn’t. And when women are still being congratulated more for their appearance than for their ability to play a sport well or be a successful politician or argue a case successfully, well, it means we haven’t come all that far after all. So with Syracuse out of the men’s tournament and a general discontent with the announcing I’ve heard so far, I think I’m done with sports for a while. March really is full of madness; just not the fun kind I had hoped for.
Andrea Scarpino is the West coast Bureau Chief of POTB and you can visit her at:
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