dekedangle_rpfanon | #29 – Lay, Lie, or Laine?

#29 – Lay, Lie, or Laine?

This is the twenty-ninth post of Deke Dangle RPF Anon, a community for all your ice hockey anon meme needs.

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Someone I follow on tumblr posted about the double standard of denouncing Shaw or Getzlaf's homophobic language but not saying anything about Crosby's use of gendered slurs. (For the record, he called Bobby Ryan a pussy, and possibly other things too - lipreading is difficult.)

My immediate reaction was to reject this out of hand, so I'm trying to think about why that was my reaction. I think they have a point that people are upset differently by different words or -isms, and not always by a logical metric. I'm not too impressed by their idea that no one is talking about it because it's Crosby - sure, that might keep his fans from saying anything, but it's not like he doesn't have a hatedom too. I sure am not a fan. But why was I so ready to shrug off "pussy" as just how hockey players talk but got angry about homophobic language?

I think to a certain extent there's a saturation effect. I don't want to say everyone does it so it's okay, but everyone does it so I'm used to it. Calling each other pussies or bitches is the level of misogyny I expect from guys I know personally, even the nice ones who wouldn't use homophobic language. (Not that I'd call him a "nice one," but Ryan called Crosby a bitch right before Crosby called him a pussy and I don't think anyone blinked.)

IDK. I think it's interesting, and necessary, to talk about how misogyny is so integral to professional male sports. But I don't think it's necessarily a double standard that people react differently to it than they do to homophobia.

It's interesting, because I've been thinking about this too. As a gay woman, I actively had to work on removing misogynistic slurs from my vocabulary. Homophobic ones? Not so much.

I think it's a little bit of saturation, but I also think there's a level of... terror associated with homophobia and hypermasculinity. This is NOT me trying to play oppression olympics or claim that women aren't violently harmed by misogyny. But sports players talking about bitches and pussies don't strike me in the heart as an imminent danger. Hearing straight men say cocksucker and faggot triggers an immediate fear for me; they view gay men with contempt, they see them as a threat to their masculinity, what would they do if someone close to them came out? What would they do if a gay kid hit on them? And with group beatings of LGBT+ folks being pretty common, hearing that sort of sentiment in a hypermasculine environment, surrounded by men who likely think the same way, frightens me.

It might not be rational or reasonable, but a guy saying "pussy" makes me think he's immature; a guy saying "fag" or "cocksucker" is an indicator of potential violence.

AYRT

I agree with basically everything you said, honestly. There is a much greater degree of terror associated with homophobia for me than there is with misogyny, even though I'm a target of both, and I'm more directly the target of misogynistic language than I am of the type of homophobic language that is derogatory specifically to gay men. Which is kind of weird when I think about it, because men devaluing and dehumanizing women are probably just as much if not more of a direct threat to me. (Though of course there's the intersection - a lot of homophobia has roots in misogyny.) So I think to an extent it does go back to saturation - not just words, but types of violence. A guy saying "fag" or "cocksucker" is an indicator of potential violence to me no matter where it happens or who it's directed at; a guy saying "bitch" is only an indicator of potential violence to me if he's saying it to or about a woman.

Personally, I don't really consider gendered slurs to be real slurs. Generally, being called a bitch doesn't have a fraction of the impact or intent of any other slur that could be used against me. Vile, frequently violent sexism exists in professional sports, but saying bitch or pussy isn't immediately indicative of that culture. Calling Crosby "Cindy" bothers me more than calling him a bitch.

na

For me, I agree with calling "bitch" a gendered slur depending on the context in which it's used, because it absolutely is a word that men use to demean women for being women (although I agree with you too that it doesn't have the fraction of the impact and suggestion of violence of other kinds of slurs, and I'd add that white women get a lot of traction out of claiming that it DOES especially when POC use it against them). "Pussy" is... misogynistic and immature, but not a slur imo -- is it ever used against women?

I think one of the problems about arguing the saturation effect is that that's how the guys using the homophobic slurs see it in their world. To [i]them[/i], everyone does it so it's ok.

I think one of the differences for why gendered slurs feel less threatening is that male hockey players generally aren't members of the group being targeted by the slur, whereas with homophobic slurs, they might be. (Though I would be interested to hear the perspective of trans women who have had to deal with gendered slurs whilst incorrectly presumed to be men.)

I think in both cases it's a failure of education. Penalties on homophobic language don't seem to do shit, and I think this is because that's how the guys using them see it. The penalties are useless without an awareness of why it's bad to say that thing, which clearly at least some players are lacking and disinterested in figuring out themselves.

SA

Also I think there's a difference between "I personally don't feel so threatened by this slur so I'm not going to base my decisions on who I stop liking on who uses it" vs "I personally don't feel so threatened by this slur so it's not bad."

ayrt Yeah, Getzlaf's nonapology implied the problem was he used a swear word, not that he used a slur. I'm not sure he realized the difference.

I get this impression from r/hockey as well. There's so many threads where people are like 'hey snowflakes, here's a video of your fave saying fuck'. Like, that's not the problem.

NA

Going against the grain here it seems, but I see absolutely no difference. It's a complete double standard, but one at a societal level that goes beyond just Pen's fans being defensive Pens fans.

The fact that we're used to hearing "pussy" and "bitch" and even use them ourselves (ie bitch as a verb is really commonly used even by women) is just indicative of society's complete devaluation and hatred of females. We shrug it off because we've (everyone) internalized that female is inherently less than male. No one here consciously thinks that, and I'm sure most guys don't either. But on some level, we've collectively accepted that being female, being called female, doing female things, is degrading. It's why the baseline is set that allows "nice" guys to use misogynistic slurs and still be considered nice.

Homophobia is completely rooted in this kind of misogyny so I don't understand why they're not given the same weight. "Pussy" and "bitch" are used to degrade in the same way "cocksucker" and "fag" are. They're all calling the target less than the pinnacle of "maleness" either by virtue of calling them a women (pussy and bitch) or gay (fag and cocksucker) which is less "manly" (regardless of how masculine he may be) because gay men are attracted to men, like (straight) women are.

I think you have some really good points here. You're right that homophobic slurs and gendered slurs are the same in the terms of the logic that fuels the use of the word as an insult, which like you said, is devaluing a group of people based on perceived lacking of "maleness." But that doesn't give all slurs the same power and violence, even the ones that work according to the same logic, so I wouldn't agree with you that it's "complete" double standard. I think it's quite clear that some slurs are worse than others, because of each particular word's history and connotation of violence. I don't think it's crazy to contemplate that particular homophobic slurs do carry more violence with them than particular gendered slurs (not because misogyny isn't as bad or isn't as violent, but because that violence might manifest itself most strongly through a different avenue).

The flip side is that people won't universally agree on the power and violence that each particular slur has, so maybe we can have a conversation like this on meme, but when it comes to evaluating (and potentially disciplining) slur use by hockey players, we shouldn't be using a "sliding scale" of acceptability (just like people were saying about Getzlaf and Shaw). I'm kind of resistant to the thought that every use of "bitch" by a woman is internalized misogyny (which is sort of what I'm gathering from your comment?), especially having seen lots white women accusing WOC who have called them "bitches" of sexism in a pretty obvious deflection of a conversation about their racism (I have a lot of thoughts and feelings about why WOC might deliberately choose to use gendered insults for reasons that aren't misogyny and lack of enlightenment). But at the end of the day that doesn't have anything to do with male hockey players using these words, so maybe our conversation about the particular power the these words have (for us as individuals and in our communities) should be separate from what should be done about straight men using these words.

DA I agree with you 100%.

DA

Agree 100%.

What surprise me is that I can think of many other occasion where Crosby (and other player) said "pussy" and "bitch" and the reaction was either "lol" or "um, I'd not a fan of him saying it" without much uproar. There's a gifset on tumblr where Crosby mouthing "pussy" is overlayed by a cat emoji (wich was amusing to me). I remember this year the first game Oilers/Flyers I think, when the camera zoomed on McDavid insulting Manning (who broke his clavicle last year) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CrmuW3ZY0OQ at 0.09 - 0.12 "Fuck you you fucking pussy"

Just sometimes fandom takes a thing and just decide that it's time to be pissed off. Why now ? Also I saw a few people on tweeter, reddit and tumblr who seems so happy to just take a side and gleefully explain why other should feel bad. I may have an Internet burn-out but I'm just tired of having to always hear people wanking about their high moral ground.

It makes sense that it'd get more attention now because the Sens/Pens game was the only one going on that day (and the only ongoing series at the moment). Sure, you can always point to individual reactions as being suspicious: there are Crosby fans who even this time around have basically just said, "um, I'm not a fan of him saying it," at least one Crosby hater who seems to be trying to jump on the moment (to deflect from their own childishness, no less), and then you have the fuckery that is Julia Hass. (By the same token, there are also Crosby fans who have been critical of him for this very thing in the past.) But generally, none of the negative reaction has been unfair. It hasn't even been that harshly critical of him as an individual. If it gets more attention than when others do it (Bobby Ryan saying "bitch" for example), that's proportional to the stature that Crosby has in the sport and proportional to the amount of positive press he gets for his accomplishments/good attributes, which seems right.

I actually didn't see much outrage in my part of twitter until people started defending it, though then most of the outrage I saw was directed at gerbil girl, so it might have been more about her. People really fucking hate her lol.

I think this was an easy one to shrug off with "eh, he shouldn't say that, it's gross" without torches and pitchforks, but then the obnoxious way people defended it (against very little backlash that I saw before then) drew more ire.

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#29 – Lay, Lie, or Laine?

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