My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fan-tasy
Two weeks ago I wrote about body shaming in the WNBA. I followed the article up by posting this Liz Cambage quote on my Instagram page:
Within minutes creepy men flooded my comment section, apparently immune to the other feminist-heavy content surrounding the post. Cambage fans jumped at the chance to remind her how hot they think she is.
Here's a quick snapshot:
Admittedly that last one was a sincere (albeit strange) thank you for shouting out Mercedes Benz... Otherwise this is a tiny glimmer of what it’s like to be a woman in the public eye.
Men popping into my comment section like....
Fanboys Will Be Fanboys
Famous athletes are revered by their fans, but reverence can easily become dangerous. Many female sports stars have been stalked or injured by obsessive admirers.
Serena Williams, for example, had a fan that would incessantly scream “I love you” during her matches. An entirely different stalker was arrested outside of her home in 2011.
One major creep swam nude across Biscayne Bay to look for Anna Kournikova’s house.
Another tried to woo golf star Laura Davies by sending her his divorce papers and proposing seven times.
Gymnast Shannon Miller’s stalker crashed his car into her boyfriend’s truck. He was eventually arrested with 16 videotapes he had recorded of her training and 115 newspaper clippings of her in his home. That’s some straight up horror movie shit….
And it only gets worse....
In 2015 Armando Montalvo was shot by police while hunting for his favourite wrestler at WWE Performance Centre. Gunter Parche famously stabbed Monica Seles with a boning knife during a tennis match in 1993.
Deranged behaviour isn’t limited to the ultra-famous. One man served five years in prison for stalking Olympian Sheila Taormina only to be arrested a year after his release for harassing an Indiana State University basketball player.
My grade 7 teacher was recently charged with multiple counts of harassment and assault for minors under the age of 14. Presumably his victims came from the girls basketball team he coached for over 20 years.
Online the harassment can be even worse. For instance, a 43 year-old man was arrested in 2018 for posting photos of the University of Colorado cross country team alongside porn stars he thought they resembled. He would include their full names, contact information, and then send emails where he disclosed his ultimate fantasy to “rape, torture, and kill” them.
These are only criminal cases, but smaller methods of harassment exist daily. The amount of online berating athletes receive is immeasurable. It may seem like a few sexually-charged Instagram comments are minor, but they are a drop in the bucket of a much larger experience.
They are also evidence that the sagest wisdom of our time is "don't read the comments."
Just a girl and her DMs
That’s Showbiz Baby!
.It’s not only the athletes in the line of fire. Sports media comes from the golden age of boys clubs, and female faces aren't always taken to kindly.
In 1990 reporter Lisa Olson was harassed by a gaggle of New England Patriots players. She set out to interview Maurice Hurst, and he insisted on doing the interview in the locker room. While there, other players surrounded her, made vulgar comments, and began gesturing with their genitals.
Ugh.
Of course the attack was just the beginning. Once the news broke Olson started receiving death threats, her tires were slashed, and her apartment was burglarized. Fans evens tossed blow-up dolls in the stands labelled “Lisa”. The abuse got so bad that she moved to Australia to start fresh.
With the rise of social media came more avenues for hostility. In 2016 sports journalists Sarah Spain and Julie DiCaro sat down to have men read the worst comments on their social media accounts:
Of the many read, here were my personal favourites:
“One of the players should beat you to death with their hockey stick like the whore you are. C**nT”
“That’s why we don’t hire any females unless we need our cocks sucked or our food cooked”
“I hope you get raped again”
Woof.
5 years later, and I’m not sure that the experience is much better. In January The GM of the New York Mets was outed for harassing a female reporter. In September Dan McNeil (from 680 The Score) tweeted that a female sportscaster looked like she belonged at the Adult Video News awards. Lisa Cornwell (from the Golf Channel) recently filed a complaint claiming that she had been berated by male bosses.
It doesn't help that only 11.5% of sports reporters in North America are women. The cost of entry to this tiny club, it seems, is being reminded constantly that you don't belong.
And, of course, these are only the cases that have been reported. How many more comments exist that are being ignored? How many more young women are letting behaviour slide make their way up in the biz?
On a positive note, there has been some change in regards to consequence. Most of the men in the latter examples were fired. The Patriots players in the 90s were celebrated. That's a small victory and a step forward to grow that 11.5%.
Just Another Follower
Stalking and harassment are realities of being a woman, full stop. In fact, most women are stalked by people they know. The obsessive fans are a special breed reserved for women in the public eye.
the rest of us get the run-of-the-mill scorned exes and heart-broken suitors.
The 2014 General Social Survey (GSS) on Canadian’s Safety found that 1.9 million Canadians had been stalked within the previous five years. That number rose to 2.5 million when asked about cyberstalking Unsurprisingly, women aged 15-34 were the most common victims.
In 2015 the National Intimate Partner and Violence Survey reported that nearly 1 in 6 women (or 19.1 million) in the U.S. were victims of stalking at some point in their lifetime.
Like any vulnerable crime, reporting rates for stalking are relatively low. Of the 1.9 million found in the GSS, only 21% of those respondents had reported the incident. Most deemed the harassment minor or not worth the effort, which is a fair assessment considering that charges are laid in less than a quarter of stalking cases in Canada.
In the US stalking is a crime in every state; however, less than a third of them consider it a felony on the the first offence. As a result, many victims are left without protection from their harassers.
In university I had a friend who was stalked by another student all over campus. She would occasionally ask a group of us to trail her home and make sure he wasn’t following. She was horrified that he’d find out where she lived.
Multiple videos, photos, and messages were reported to security, but there wasn’t anything they could do until he escalated. She was advised to keep adding damning pieces of evidence to the file, stock piling her fear in the hopes she could get a conviction if he ever lashed out.
Not an ideal solution, especially because obsessive behaviour tends to escalate.
Physical violence and threats are often linked to stalking. 334,000 of the victims in the GSS had experienced physical attacks associated with their stalking. The women who were stalked were also ten times more likely to become victims of sexual assault. Even more glaring, 76% of women murdered by a past partner were stalked first.
Social media has created more spaces for abuse. In 2018 18% of Canadian women said the had experienced online harassment, and 28% had blocked users for their own protection. Many of you reading have likely had persistent DMers or incessant calls from an ex.
I once went on two dates with a man who lived a 45 minute drive away from my apartment. When I didn’t schedule another date, he started sending me shirtless photos every month for the better part of a year.
Once he sent me a photo of the outside of my house.
At least twice he showed up at my work.
None of his actions were criminal, nor would they make a good legal case. That said, it was still concerning. Just like women deserve to walk outside without fear, we should also be able to exist in online spaces without being harassed. Our presence on social media, in sports, or in general is not permission to be contacted, commented on, or followed.
Whose Man Is This?
Obsessive fans and stalkers are not unique to the female experience. Many men and male celebrities have dealt with their fair share of unwanted attention. Statistically, though, it's not nearly as many.
Sports reporter Sarah Spain put it best in her interview with the New York Times:
“Men get mean comments, too, but I think the context of it is quite different for women. It’s not just, like, ‘You’re an idiot, and I’m mad at you for your opinion.’ It’s: ‘I hate you because you are in a space that I don’t want you in. I come to sports to get away from women. Why don’t you take your top off and just make me lunch?’
In sexual assault cases we often we hear the expression ‘"she was somebody’s mother, daughter, sister, friend.” By now we’ve learnt to flip it slightly to "she was a somebody."
Since today is Father's Day, I’d like to edit the phrase even more: "He is somebody’s father, son, brother, friend."
The vast majority of stalkers are men, so who is holding them accountable? Imagine seeing your dad's handle in comment section of my Liz Cambage post. What would you do? What would his friends do?
The reality is that harassment has nothing to do with the woman involved. They aren't the ones doing the action. In all of my examples the women were doing their jobs - as reporters, athletes, or students. It's the men who went out of their way to make them unsafe.
In the wise words of Lizzo:
"Somebody come get this man. I think He got lost in my DMs"
