Harvard’s 2012 male soccer team called it a “scouting report,” but they weren’t scouting the female players on their athletic ability, but on how much they wanted to have sex with them.
The author of the report wrote about one woman, “she looks like the kind of girl who both likes to dominate, and likes to be dominated,” according to the Harvard Crimson. The report was written in 2012 but came to light last week.
Women were given a numerical score, a sexual position, a crude nickname and a paragraph-long description assessing them alongside photos taken off the internet. Men from the team declined to comment to the Crimson, refusing to say if the report was an isolated incident or an annual tradition by the team about female freshman players.
A Harvard official called the report “disappointing and disturbing.” The women who were the subject of the report had some stronger language, commenting not only on the report, but also on sexism in general.
In a letter they wrote to the Crimson, titled “Stronger Together,” the women – who all graduated Harvard this year – called the report “careless, disgusting, and appalling” as well as an “aberrant display of misogyny.”
“More than anything, we are frustrated that this is a reality that all women have faced in the past and will continue to face throughout their lives. We feel hopeless because men who are supposed to be our brothers degrade us like this,” they wrote. “We are appalled that female athletes who are told to feel empowered and proud of their abilities are so regularly reduced to a physical appearance.”
The players also referenced recent political news, saying, “‘Locker room talk’ is not an excuse” for that kind of language, given “the whole world is a locker room.” Donald Trump defended a video of him talking about grabbing women’s genitals without their consent by saying it was just “locker room talk.”
The women said they brushed off the comments when they first read the report, because they have “come to expect” those kinds of comments. But they decided to respond to tell the men that even though the rankings wanted to pit them against each other, they know better and would always be teammates there to lift one another up.
The report is reminiscient of Facemash, the widely-known and short-lived website created by Facebook creator Mark Zuckerburg when he attended Harvard. The site had users look at two pictures of students and choose which one was “hotter.”
The letter also called on all women to band together against this behavior, and for all men to join them, to recognize, “we are human beings and we should be treated with dignity.”
“To the men of Harvard Soccer and any future men who may lay claim to our bodies and choose to objectify us as sexual objects, in the words of one of us, we say together: ‘I can offer you my forgiveness, which is—and forever will be—the only part of me that you can ever claim as yours,’” the women concluded together.
Comments