Indira Neill Hoch

“What makes the grass grow? Blood, blood, bright red blood!” (Dowell, 2008, p. 220).

I’ve heard a similar chant dozens, maybe hundreds of times. I’ve said it myself, “Blood makes the grass grow, kill (team name), kill!” One of my former teammates screams full on at the top of her lungs “Kill them, crush them, fuck them up!” before every kickoff. Dowell uses these chants to solidify the sexism, racism, homophobia, arrogance, and perceived superiority encouraged in the military. As she puts it, “these hatreds permeate military culture” (p. 220). Much of her argument centers around sexual assault but she is interested in patterns of violence against women more broadly. In citing cases of military recruiters sexually assaulting girls, she emphasizes that violence begins prior to women’s admission into the military. This violence is also encouraged even prior to boys’ admission into the military. The militarization of sport and the sportification of the military mutually reinforce one another and offer and sport, and maybe competition more generally as well, may normalize military culture outside of the military proper. In thinking on the overlap between athletic talk, gamer talk, and military talk, similar structures are at work.

The young athlete is certainly encouraged to think of themselves as exceptional, superior. Female athletes are encouraged to think of themselves as “not like other girls.” Women’s rugby is anything but homophobic, (if anything, I was teased in college for dating men), but chants, songs, and coaches’ encouragement are filled with misogynistic content towards other women (“If you’re going to lose, go home and paint your nails,” “cry to your girlfriends later,” rugby songs that are sung together with the opposing team after playing are often very lewd in nature). Likewise, gaming trash talk uses femininity as an insult and female gamers may be on the receiving end of sexist remarks (“go to the kitchen and make me a sandwich,” “take off your (avatar’s) clothes”). These contexts, like the military, mix sexism and violence. Not all rugby players are out to unleash unmitigated violence against their opponents, but it is a contact sport that results in broken noses and black eyes. At least once a year I watch a woman get stretchered off. I’ve had teammates who go for a tackle with the intent to hurt someone else. Video game contexts are diverse, but many include some aspect of killing or destroying something. First-person shooters get most of the flak, but even in games where I can spend hours crafting furniture and pairs of shoes, I spend most of my time killing fantasy themed monsters and the occasional person from a competing faction. In these spaces littered with violence, sexism is always in the mix. These spaces provide women with the opportunity to develop skills and friendships, to have fun and explore identity, but they certainly participate in a system that is already promoting oppression.

Like the women of LAM, I do feel uneasy about “externally” expressing my unease with the mix of sex and violence in sport and game “cultures.” There are plenty of people researching violence in video games and they stand on both sides of the argument. Some design experiments that show video games make participants more violent, some design experiments that show video games do not effect violent attitudes. I’m not convinced this is such an interesting question because it’s not as if violent thoughts or actions originate with the game-product. A violent, sexist society made the violent, sexist game. I cringe a little bit, like I did when reading Shigematsu, Bhagwati, and PaintedCrow, when video games (television, film, any media product really can go here) are brought up as if they are a single monolithic thing. I want to jump up in the defense of video games because gamer culture doesn’t have to be sexist. Athletic culture doesn’t have to be sexist. But does it have to be violent? Aggressive? If athletic talk, gamer talk, and military talk use the same patterns of derogating women and femininity and glorifying violence, does dismantling the institutions of war mean we must also give up competition in game and sport? Can we not take pride in winning in contexts where no one is dying? It is odd to think of a competitive culture detached from the specter of war, since right now the metaphors of war and sport are so closely intertwined. I’m not sure what this would look like.