‘Harder, Harder, Cuthbert, Harder’? Not banter and not funny

Last week, The Sun’s headline and ‘story’ about Chelsea’s Erin Cuthbert and Pernille Harder’s goals – when listed as they were scored – sounds like ‘posh people having sex’. ‘Harder, Harder, Cuthbert, Harder’ was the headline.

Does it? Does it really?

Only if you work for the Sun and your cultural hinterland stops with the Carry On films of the late 1950s. And even if it does, why are you putting it in a newspaper alongside some comments that people have made on Twitter and pretending it is news? The reason? There’s a market for it.

State of that. ‘Exclusive’ pic.twitter.com/IPYpstlVYK

— Adam Millington (@AdamGMillington) January 21, 2022

Criticism of this will be dismissed as just a joke, quite possibly as banter, probably by Piers Morgan. And those of us who are sick of it are really just pretending to be sick of it to appear PC but underneath we’re a latter-day Sid James or Benny f*cking Hill.

Just when you think women’s football is becoming more visible, more mainstream, more ‘normal’, stuff like this happens. This isn’t a joke that can be made without it having a negative effect. It is disrespecting the sport and the sportswomen. It’s a way of sexualising women playing a sport. Just wait until they discover Jordan Nobbs.

Do men playing sports get sexualised like this? Has the Sun run a Mason, Mount! story sounding like posh people having sex? Does Kane, Kane, Kane, Son sound like a Soho S & M session?

If you think it’s harmless fun, just looks at what Erin Cuthbert herself said about it:

“To actually run with a story like this is extremely disturbing and embarrassing. Wish people reported on the actual match reports and women’s football with the same level of enthusiasm.”

We don’t live in an equal society. Women have been discriminated against on a macro, micro and granular level for the whole of time by men. Women’s sports – in this case football – are routinely disregarded, disrespected and insulted, their participants likewise, in a way that simply does not happen to men. This is a sport that they were actually banned from playing for almost half a century.

This isn’t punching-up humour, it is punching down. But of course there’s an audience for this sort of dreck. A bigger audience than many of us would prefer to believe.

Just last week the Guardian reported on research done by Durham University which revealed only 24% of men expressed strong support for equal media coverage of women’s sport.

The rest?

Nah.

Many thought women shouldn’t even be playing sport! And if they were, it certainly shouldn’t be on their TV or radio.

Yes, really.

They uncovered deeply misogynistic attitudes in all age groups of men. ‘Media reporting of women’s sports – a sphere regarded as intrinsically inferior – was seen as ‘positive discrimination’ or ‘PC nonsense”.

Interestingly, only 8% were progressive in public but reactionary in private, which rather contradicts the assumption many express on social media that any man batting for feminism is just putting on an act to try and look good, but underneath lies good old Sid The Sexist.

That 76% are the Sun’s audience for this stuff. Of course they are; it is disrespecting women’s football and by extension women per se. It puts women down for the sake of a puerile joke. That’s why misogynists love it. Anything which upholds the patriarchal dominance, is anti-feminist, is a brick put back in the wall that women and their allies keep tearing down, is applauded and defended at every turn. This is just one more battle in the ongoing war for something so simple and honest it beggars belief that we all have to shout so long and hard about it: fairness and equality. That’s all. It isn’t any more complicated than that.

Many men have realised we are the problem, the problem with pretty much every bloody thing on earth. We embarrass, harass, rape, beat and kill men and we embarrass, harass, rape, beat and kill women. We start wars. We lead dishonest governments and we lie in public office. All over the world in huge numbers. We are utter bastards and not to be trusted, rightly assumed guilty until proven innocent. That’s why women are walking home with pepper spray in their bag and their keys in their hand and we’re not. It’s why some people stay away from football, from town centres at night, from going in the wrong place, at the wrong time, looking the wrong way. Doing the wrong thing. We all fear the wrath of other men. We want a different future where this is not the case.

But it’s a fruitless task for me or anyone else to try and argue against the degree of misogyny revealed in this report or in the Sun reporting of a game of football played by women. You just end up preaching to the converted. It is so deeply ingrained in some and others rely on it as a defence against a sense of their own inadequacy, or it is part of an inner confusion over what it even means to be masculine in 2022. Logic and argument make no dent on that kind of armour. So what do we do? Do we just try to neutralise them by ignoring them where possible? By not buying the Sun or going to its website?

If we’re hoping for a younger generation to be different, this report suggests these regressive, stupid attitudes exist in all age groups. Change is needed but people tend not to want to change, seeing change as proof they’ve been wrong for so long, and no-one wants to think they’ve been so wrong for so long.

It’s easy to think such attitudes have largely gone when you get your own worldview reflected back to you by social media algorithms, so to see it is still so rife will make 24% of us despair, but what do we do about the other 76%?