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I watched the NFL on CBS this Sunday because I knew that they had no choice but to talk about Antonio Brown. Brown was sued earlier this week by a former coach, Britney Taylor, who claimed that Brown had assaulted and raped her sexually while she was working for him. The day before, Brown had been signed by the New England Patriots, an AFC team, and the Patriots had to face the Miami Dolphins, another AFC team, and Brown would start. This meant that CBS, the network that broadcasts AFC games, should say something, even if it made them uncomfortable.
In minutes, studio host James Brown has arrived at the inevitable. He looked into the camera and said, "Meanwhile, in Miami, Antonio Brown will suit for his new team, while the defending champion, the Patriots, will face the Dolphins today. The culmination of another tumultuous week in the life of the broad mercurial receiver. "
Mercurial, I thought, was not the word I would have used.
From there, the diffusion went through a simple conclusion of the week's events, showed a agent of Brown's agent, Drew Rosenhaus, claiming that "these allegations are false, he denies them all", and then was referred to the NFL reporter, Jason La Canfora , who released the news The NFL survey "just started". A brief and valueless interview with Patriots head coach Bill Belichick then returned to James Brown, who said, "As Jason said earlier, there is nothing new to report about the trial, so there is no doubt that it will be totally inappropriate for us to comment on anything other than Antonio on the ground.
"That's why it's time to welcome my colleagues, Phil Simms, Coach Bill Cowher, Nate Burleson and Boomer Esiason. The Antonio Brown era with the Patriots has now begun. "
Just like that, the case is done. We heard a group of analysts ready to talk about Brown through the lens of football. Would he have good chemistry with Tom Brady? How many clichés would it play? Would it be a happy homecoming for Brown in his hometown of South Florida?
Sports media are not motivated by journalists. That's what analysts analyze, because that's what fills the airwaves, the newspaper columns and the Internet, and because there's usually not much to tell. In its current form, the analyst has two ways of talking about players accused of violence: a brief summary of the facts, before returning to football, or debating whether this player should play. None of these are well suited to enlightening or meaningful conversation, as they do not concern the person who says they have been hurt, in this case Taylor. There is no discussion about what she needs, how it affected her, or what it means to her. The discussion will always focus on Brown.
Taylor, in one or the other of these conversations, is not even a person. It's a name on a piece of paper, an "accuser", a "situation" or a "distraction", a person so devoid of all humanity that if you were listening to a conversation about it and the Brown trial, you could never know what Brown is accused of.
There is a third type of conversation and I do not know how it ends. That's one of the reasons the sport could, put next to Brown, Taylor's history, then think about how it would certainly make us feel uncomfortable.
It can be difficult to talk about athletes in a power context, as they constitute an exploited labor market in America. They are not paid in high school. They are not paid in college, despite their work that brings billions to sports departments and the NCAA. Even as professionals, with the exception of a handful of superstars, their careers are short, their bodies left alive, and their job security is, at best, tenuous. Especially in the NFL, where contracts are not guaranteed.
But when a person accuses a player of violence, it is the player who suddenly has power because the owners of the billionaire team and the multimillion leaders will support them, and then filter their support to selected journalists, the time that hordes of fans do the same. loyalty. On Sunday, Brown did not say anything to the reporters. He does not have to do it. There were experts and advertisers, praising his talent for football. There were fans, cheering for joy. After the match, clip packs, scans, and columns weighed on Brown's performance in the field. They all did the job of telling Brown's story for Brown. All he had to do was introduce himself.
In Who is this story? Old conflicts, new chapters, essayist Rebecca Solnit opens a paragraph with the following observation: "Who is the subject of history is an immensely political question" and she concludes by noting: "we are still struggling to know who is the story , who counts and This compassion is preceded by various examples that Solnit gives about how sympathy in America goes almost immediately to man. His last example is the good worn Onion title: "The star of university basketball heroically overcomes the tragic rape that he committed"
On Sunday, as I watched football, I wondered why Solnit was looking for this title to make himself understood. I was looking to see if we heard Taylor's story, knowing that I was asking a question that I already knew the answer to (no). Part of this was due to the timing; Taylor could not meet the NFL last week. This is partly due to the functioning of the American courts. no good lawyer advises a client to speak to the press after filing a complaint, just let the complaint speak for itself. This was partly due to the old rules of the information: to talk about Taylor's story, it would have to review the complaint, since that is his only statement about it, but no journalist wants to be accused of repetition or repetition. deliver old news.
But even if these factors could change, they would not change the fact that American athletics is designed to tell men's stories. Sunday pre-game panels are dominated by men. Advertisers are dominated by men. The post match analysis is mainly done by men. Columns and game stories are mainly written by men. Leagues are mainly led by men. The team owners are almost all men. They are men who tell stories of men for other men. And if adding a few women to the band was the easy fix, the WNBA players would not continue to advertise, the women's national football team would not sue for a salary equal, and I would not receive e-mails containing topics such as "Deadspin needs fewer women writers." Institutions do not like to change.
Then add that each league is designed to generate positive content around it. There are networks to fill, websites to populate and Twitter feeds requiring a tweet. So, they are filled with Brown's highlights, updates on his stats, analysis of what Brown stands for for fantasy football teams, an analysis of what Brown stands for for his real the football team, all that Brown has said recently on social media, or what one of the many people working for Brown, his agent, has to say in defense of his client.
If the female media is a scam, how come nobody calls them sports media?
At any time of the day, I can turn on my television and at the click of a button, I only have sport …
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It is hard to think of a better-designed American institution than sport to drive a woman aside from her own story. Sunday, Taylor was a reason why Brown could not play football. She was a reaction subject for the experts. And the favorite question of the experts, in 2019, is Should this player play?
In her suit, filed in federal court in South Florida, Taylor explains how her life has changed since the night she says Brown has raped her. At first, Taylor was worried about getting pregnant or contracting a sexually transmitted disease. According to the court document, she later became depressed, began having anxiety attacks and had difficulty going to work. When Taylor told her fiancee what had happened, it put their relationship of tenderness.
"Brown devastated her sense of self, made her ask the question as a woman and a human being," said her complaint, "and led her to wonder who she could trust."
She finally told a church official, according to her trial, who had recommended her to start a therapy and get a lawyer.
(In his complaint, Taylor asks for damages.) Brown's camp is already providing information to the media to portray Taylor as another woman seeking money – but that means ignoring the interest of the civil court. is to recognize a wrong, then to compensate the money is, in America, the way people are made healthy and this is largely understood as fine and normal, unless the person who asks for it Money is not a woman.That is only while the person who files a civil suit becomes a researcher of gold.)
At no time of his complaint, Taylor asks Brown to stop playing football. She does not ask for it in the statement issued by her lawyer. This did not stop analysts from talking about it anyway. Should Brown play? Should Brown sit down? Should Brown be on the commissioner's exempt list, a device that allows players to become a league player does not want you to think of a magical disappearance, with pay? I can talk about the merits of the sitting or playing in my head, but they always sound the same way: a duel between what would be the best public relations for the Patriots (the sit down) and the best legal movement for the Patriots (play him)
The whole debate on suspension is a performance centered not only on Brown, but also on the cabal composed mostly of old, always rich, mostly white, and almost always men who have done nothing to win or deserve our attention , not to mention power over issues such as: sexual assault, rape and domestic violence. Yes, the US criminal justice system is down, leaving us with the largest population of incarcerated in the world. But the solution is not to look at Jerry Jones, Stephen Ross and Dan Snyder to decide that they are the men with the answers. And certainly not Robert Kraft, the owner of the Patriots, who has the president accused by more than a dozen women of sexual assault among his longtime friends.
Talking about suspensions and punishments and reducing players serve only one purpose. He stops all the more uncomfortable conversations.
The # MeToo movement has never really touched the sport. Yes, there were stories of sexual harassment and domestic violence as we worked for different leagues and teams. But this critical point, as with Hollywood and entertainment, where the immensity of the problem was beginning to emerge – the feeling that every day, more stories of women would be told and that they would implicate another man that you had idolized , and perhaps the daily The pain of reading these stories was only a drop of the pain felt by women every day – never materialized. In one way or another, in sport, misogyny is still something to contain, something that can be handled with enough public relations, donations and suspensions.
Fans come to the sport to feel good, but to engage in talking about violence against women, is to realize that you will feel bad. The numbers are horrible. The problem is so vast that it almost surely includes someone you love and maybe even you. Talking about sexual assault, sexual harassment, and domestic violence in sport means realizing how impossible the game is to oppose anyone who comes forward. They will not get any reward for their honesty and will almost certainly be destroyed, every detail of their life will have been filtered, then turned against them, their sense of privacy wiped out. It's about the role the media plays, but also about the fans – knowing that every star has millions of people ready to encourage and defend it, whatever it is, like Brown did, Sunday. You have to think about the role you play, and the one I play too. I have no idea how this conversation in the sport would end. I only know that it has not started yet.
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