Well… that didn’t take long.
Here I was just saying to someone the other day that women’s sports—cycling, in particular, during my conversation—seemed to be getting a lot more attention lately. Taking bigger steps to close the gap to parity with men’s. That’s not to say it’s close, mind you, we’ve got a long way to go for that. But commentators, at least, seemed to me to be taking it much more seriously.
Two steps forward, one step back, I guess. The Independent is reporting that Eurosport have removed commentator Bob Ballard from their coverage of the Olympics after he made a sexist remark about the Australian women’s swimmers. The quote was: “Well, the women just finishing up. You know what women are like… hanging around, doing their make-up.” So, small mercies, nothing graphic or whatever. Just. Yeah.
When I read that, my brain went a lot of places in quick succession. First was a certain amount of astonishment that Eurosport would take such a “harmless” comment so seriously. Second was preemptive exhaustion at the tidal wave of rancid “iT wAs JuSt A jOkE” takes that we’re about to hear for the next week. Third was to Ballard’s mental state—I have to imagine he’s a little thunderstruck, with how quickly everything changed for him today.
And that’s where I got stuck. Because here’s the thing. I don’t know Bob Ballard, but I bet I could write the apology that’s going to come out before long. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have made such an insensitive joke. Those who know me know that it doesn’t represent my values, who I am. I am going to take time to listen and learn and improve. And I suspect, because most people aren’t actually irredeemably terrible, that he will mean it.
We live inside our own heads, and because of that, we like to think we have a clear understanding of our own intentions. That leads many of us—especially those of us with privilege, who don’t often get confronted with the externalities of our behavior—to think that we are somehow inherently good people, which means that nothing we do can ever be wrong. How could it be? It’s always done with our hearts in the right place.
There’s a switch that flips in these kind of discussions. It flips for different people at different times and for different reasons, and for some people it never flips at all (and those people don’t get invited to the good parties). It’s the switch from “everyone knows I don’t mean it Like That, so I can say whatever I want” to “uh-oh, people are mad at me, maybe this is serious.”
I’m really interested in the idea of that switch-flip. I’ve been on both sides of it myself, and I’ve seen it happen in other people, too. And I think it interests me so much because I can see both sides of Ballard’s statement. It’s 2024, for God’s sake—I’ll be charitable, and assume he said it because he thought everyone would be in on the joke. And then, very abruptly, they weren’t. And they weren’t so hard that he is now off of what I can only assume was a professional project of enormous significance, and the implications will reverberate through his future career for a while. The man’s head is probably spinning.
This probably sounds like I have sympathy for Ballard. I don’t, really. I may have sprained something rolling my eyes as hard as I did when I read about his comments. If he’s going to be that careless about something as precariously ascendant as women’s sports, he shouldn’t be commentating them, full stop.
No, my interest in his case is a little more clinical, i.e.: how do we make that switch flip before someone puts a foot in their mouth? What makes that switch flip genuinely, and not just in a “I don’t want people mad at me/to feel guilty anymore/to get fired” kind of way? How do we make that switch flip for all the people who are going to comment on or respond to this news absolutely flabbergasted that this man was fired for a “harmless joke”?
Because that’s the real problem, isn’t it? People who don’t understand why this matters are now angry. They’re angry because they’re scared, because they suddenly feel like they’re standing in the middle of a minefield. They’ve realized they have no idea when something they say might go from innocent to life-ruining. And instead of accepting it—listening, trying to be better, cultivating a little humility and assuming they’re going to have to say “I’m sorry” once in a while—they’re taking it as an assault on the idea of themselves as that good person. If intentions are all that matter, well, then, these people are unassailable. But if suddenly good intentions aren’t enough, then that means they’re vulnerable to the feelings of others. It means their actions have consequences.
You could understand why that would be terrifying. And we’re about to see a whole bunch of people barf that terror all over the public square as they freak out about Ballard’s removal. And honestly, I wish it were as easy as flipping a switch, to get them to realize that yeah, what he said meant something, in a bad way. Because goddamn, I’m tired, and it’s all just so fucking predictable.
I was thinking just the other day about one of Mozart’s great comedic operas, Così fan tutte. I’ve seen it translated as “So do they all,” or more colloquially, “Women are like that.” But the more I think about it, the more I think the closest modern translation would just be: “Bitches, man.”
I wasn’t going to spend a lot of time on why what Ballard said was sexist, but I guess we’re here, and so I’m gonna spend at least a little time on it. It’s not because he implied that the Australian women swimmers were doing their makeup (maybe they were! there’s nothing wrong with that!). It’s not that he implied women care more about their appearance than their sport, or that caring about your appearance is both frivolous and a uniquely feminine trait. We could debate the truth of any of those things until we’re blue in the face, and it wouldn’t change the fact that the most sexist thing Ballard did was imply that all women share any given trait.
Like Mozart’s opera. Bitches, man.