For the Love of Football

Journal of Sport and Social Issues OnlineFirst, published on May 29, 2008 as doi:10.1177/0193723508319714 For the Love of Football Australian Rules Football and Heterosexual Desire Journal of Sport & Social Issues Volume XX Number X Month XXXX xx-xx © 2008 Sage Publications 10.1177/0193723508319714 http://jss.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com Nikki Wedgwood University of Sydney, Australia The sexual attraction of some women specifically to sportsmen is such a taken-for-granted and commonplace phenomenon in Western society it receives little academic attention. This article first examines the handful of studies that have considered the relationship between heterosexual desire and Australian Rules footballers. Second, it reviews the few sociological studies of the groupies and wives of elite sportsmen. The article concludes that the social construction of sexual desire is an important but neglected element of the reproduction of the gender order. It is suggested that the concept cathexis may provide a useful conceptual framework for illuminating the ways in which women’s heterosexual desires affect the maintenance, reproduction, and/or subversion of the existing gender order. Keywords: Australian Rules football; sport; cathexis; heterosexual desire; gender order F or many years, I have been fascinated by the sexual attraction of some women specifically to men who play Australian Rules football—a full-contact sport that, like gridiron in the United States and ice hockey in Canada, is culturally exalted as epitomizing hegemonic masculinity. I have known women who went to pubs and nightclubs frequented by professional footballers in the hope of meeting and dating them. One young woman, whose father had been an elite footballer, confessed she could not go out with a man unless he played football. After years of trying, she eventually met a semiprofessional player and developed an unsatisfactory relationship in which he made it clear that she came second to football and was not actually his girlfriend because he did not have time for a relationship. A woman in her 50s and married to an ex-footballer told me she finds a man much more sexually attractive, that his cheekbones even look higher, when she knows he is a footballer. Her daughter, now in her 30s, had for many years been unsuccessfully seeking to meet (and hopefully marry) an elite footballer. A university friend in conversation with a group of young women at a social function asked one, “What do you do?” (enquiring after her occupation), and the young woman replied collectively for the group, “We all go out with Panthers” (Panthers is a pseudonym for a team in Australia’s premier football competition). More recently, when studying a high school boys’Australian Rules team, I observed a small number of “groupies” who regularly attended home matches dressed alluringly and taking more interest in the players than the actual games (Wedgwood, 2003, p. 198). Yet the sexual attraction of some women specifically to sportsmen is such a taken-for-granted and commonplace 1 Copyright 2008 by SAGE Publications. 2 Journal of Sport & Social Issues phenomenon in Western society that it has received very little academic attention. This essay first examines the handful of studies that have considered the relationship between heterosexual desire and Australian Rules footballers. Second, it reviews the few sociological studies of the groupies and wives of elite sportsmen. It is argued that the social construction of sexual desire is an important but much-neglected element of the reproduction of the gender order.1 Finally, it is suggested that Connell’s concept “cathexis”— which, following Freud’s libidinöse Besetzung, defines sexual desire as “emotional energy attached to an object” (Connell, 1995, p. 74)—may provide a useful conceptual framework for illuminating the ways in which women’s heterosexual desires affect the maintenance, reproduction, and/or subversion of the existing gender order. In his study of women and Australian Rules football in colonial Melbourne, Hess (1996, p. 359) argued that during the sexually repressive reign of Queen Victoria, sport, particularly football, enabled women to admire male bodies in a socially acceptable way. For instance, he noted that some female spectators were particularly attracted to the aesthetically pleasing university team (p. 366). However, not all women who have an interest in men’s football are (hetero)sexually motivated (Wedgwood, 2005). Even in colonial times, female spectators attended games not simply as “ornamental figures, socialites or voyeurs but also as barrackers and civilisers” (Hess, 1996, pp. 360-366). Thus, Hess wisely warned against women’s interest in football being trivialized and reduced to “a discussion of the delights of male bodies in tight shorts” (p. 357). Indeed, to do so (see McAsey, 1997) is to undermine their ability to understand football and to take it seriously in the same way that men do, thus dismissing female involvement in the game. It also homogenizes women by denying that, like their male counterparts, they may also have ethnic, racial, familial, class, geographic, or other loyalties or motivations for investing emotions in a team. Nevertheless, as Lindley (1995, 1997, 2002)—a feminist historian and Australian Rules football commentator—has pointed out, some female Australian Rules fans are sexually attracted to footballers, as well as being interested in the game itself, and regularly talk about the good looks and great bodies of various players. Thus, she argued, the homoerotic element of the game deserves academic attention. Yet to date, Poynton and Hartley (1990) are the only other researchers to have addressed (or rather skirted around) this issue. In their chapter “Male Gazing: Australian Rules Football, Gender and Television,” Poynton and Hartley (1990) astutely noted that the way in which Australian Rules is televised with “barely clad, eyeable Aussie male bodies in top anatomical nick” is “flagrantly masculine, and erotic” (p. 150). However, they then went on to argue that in displaying their physical prowess and being gazed on in the process, male football bodies are objectified but that, despite this objectification, men retain their subjective dominance because they, not women, are the spectators and audience (p. 150). This was based on their assertion that televised football is not designed for the gratification of voyeuristic women because beer commercials during televised games are pitched at a male audience (p. 145). Undeniably, the marketing of beer during football matches does Wedgwood / Australian Rules Football and Heterosexual Desire 3 “illustrate the alliance between sport, media, capital and a specifically Australian representation of masculinity.” Nevertheless, it is a leap of faith to conclude therefore that promoters primarily pitch football at a male audience. Up to 46% of the crowd (Sheedy & Brown, 1998, p. 286) and around 44% of television audiences (A C Nielsen, 2000) are female, and we can rest assured that those who promote and televise the game are well aware of such an enormous “market” (Richardson, 1999; Sexton, 1999). Not only did Poynton and Hartley (1990) misjudge the gender demographics of football viewers, they also confused sexual objectification with sexual attraction. As Lindley (1997) eloquently argued, watching, admiring, or even desiring male footballers is not the same as objectifying them: A footballer is not a stationary object, and not being stationary is actually very important. . . . A moving object that is powerful, that is surging, and that moreover is moving not for the sake of the observers—none of those players are moving for our sake, for our pleasure, they are doing something for their own, their team’s purposes. And to some degree they are completely oblivious of us. They may hear us, but they’re not performing for us in some sense. Now if you take the kind of strip show: a woman or a man in a strip show is a posed object, even when they move. Every move is designed not to express themselves, their energy, their goals, their motives, but simply to—“I think you will be pleased if I move in this way.” . . . You can’t objectify a footballer. . . . You can watch, you can be privileged to watch their activity, but they’re nobody’s object. To say that “sex and sport just do not mix, except in jest” (Poynton & Hartley, 1990, p. 152) is to dismiss a very important gendered element of the game. When Poynton and Hartley argued that elite Aboriginal footballers provide a symbolic “show of strength” for the whole indigenous population and that football is represented as “the locus of essentialized Australian masculinity” (p. 155), they narrowly missed the point that football is also a celebration of male physical superiority (Bryson, 1987; Burton Nelson, 1994) and that what football has to say about men and the male body is a message intended for both a male and female audience: “The sporting body is a metaphor for male power, and a form of collateral which can be disciplined against opponents for the gaze of spectators, male and female” (Giulianotti & Armstrong, 1997, p. 7). My point is that it is this show of male power that sexually attracts some Australian women specifically to elite Australian Rules footballers. In other words, to take up the Freudian concept of sexual desire, their emotional energy has been attached to those men in their community who embody hegemonic masculinity, and this is experienced at the embodied level as sexual attraction. To quote one female supporter in the video documentary Game Girls about what attracts her to the game, “I just love the macho atmosphere. I love the men. I love their oily bodies. I love watching them run around, it’s just they look fantastic” (Cannell, 1997). Unlike sociological theories, popular theories as to why people sexually desire and/or fall in love with some people and not others abound. These include physical attraction, “chemistry,” fate, and other mystical or biological forces. A common thread in most popular explanations is that we are unable to control or determine whom we 4 Journal of Sport & Social Issues desire and/or with whom fall in love. At the lived, embodied level, it certainly feels that way, but, as Connell (1995) pointed out, this is because the relationship between the body and the social is two way and simultaneous (p. 231). Practice itself forms and is formed by the structures within which bodies are appropriated and defined (p. 61). Thus, “the social relations of gender are experienced in the body (as sexual arousals and turn-offs, as muscular tensions and posture . . .) and are themselves constituted in bodily action (in sexuality, in sport, in labour, etc)” (p. 231). As Connell argued, “The practices that shape and realize desire are . . . an aspect of the gender order” (p. 74). Indeed, Connell (2002) included cathexis, or “the construction of emotionally charged social relations with other people,” as one of the four structures of gender relations, along with labor, power, and production. It is this socially constructed element of sexual desire that has been overlooked by sports sociologists and historians because, even though it is widely understood that sexuality is socially constructed, “sexual desire is so often seen as natural that it is commonly excluded from social theory” (Connell, 1995, p. 74). Since the mid-1980s, sociologists have paid increasing attention to the intersection of sport and masculinity, mainly focusing on the role of sport in reproducing the maledominated gender order (Buysse & Sheridan Embser-Herbert, 2004; Schacht, 1996). Only a handful of these studies have considered the part played by the heterosexual attraction of some women specifically to sportsmen. They fall into two categories: those that look at the wives and those that look at the groupies of elite sportsmen. A major focus of sociological research on sports groupies is whether their assertive sexual behavior challenges or reproduces traditional gender power relations. For instance, Oriard (1993, p. 250) showed that although the “football groupie,” who emerged in the United States in the late 19th century, challenged the Victorian insistence that women do not experience sexual desire, as spectators and admirers of male prowess they nevertheless reaffirmed a traditional gender relationship. Likewise, in their study of rodeo groupies in America, Gauthier and Forsyth (2000, p. 364) argued that the “predatory sexual behavior” of rodeo groupies is deviant and “a twist on traditional sex roles” but that it does little to challenge traditional gender power relations, and men remain dominant in the rodeo subculture. Similarly, Gmelch and San Antonio (1998) concluded from their interviews with American baseball groupies that “baseball plays out on a small stage the larger gender roles in the American society” (p. 43). Another major theme in the literature on groupies is the motivations of such women for pursuing elite sportsmen. For instance, Gmelch and San Antonio (1998) asserted that desirability is “defined largely by money and fame for men and by attractiveness for women” (p. 43). However, this is contradicted by their own evidence that some of the baseball groupies in their study had motivations other than money and fame for pursuing ballplayers, such as having a good time, living it up, casual sex, the hope of “marrying up,” or sexual attraction either to the “exotic element” or “great physical shape” of the young men. Likewise, Gauthier and Forsyth (2000) argued that the rodeo groupies in their study “are seeking money, attention, and status, from being associated with high-profile athletes” (p. 351). Yet they also presented evidence for other motivations, such as looking for love, a husband, or just Wedgwood / Australian Rules Football and Heterosexual Desire 5 casual sex; seeking excitement; and/or being physically attracted to successful cowboys and “big tough macho men.” In arguing that fame and money are the primary motivations for groupies to have what are primarily sexual encounters with elite sportsmen, they failed to explain how sexual desire—that is, being sexually attracted specifically to “big tough macho men,” “cowboys,” or men in “great physical shape”—enters into the equation. The marriages of elite sportsmen have also been studied, primarily as a way in which male domination is reproduced and maintained through sport. Though even nonelite sportsmen (and boys) heavily rely on the domestic labor of women to participate in sport (Saltzman Chafetz & Kotarba, 1999; S. Thompson, 1990, 1992), this is even more pronounced at the elite levels. Studies of the wives of professional sportsmen are full of evidence of the marginal, supportive, decorative, nurturing, and second-class role they play in their husbands’ careers. For instance, Gmelch and San Antonio (2001) looked at the married lives of 25 wives of professional American baseball players and concluded that the drudgery of such marriages far outweighs the glamor. They revealed that the wives must endure moving house numerous times a year, the frequent absences of their husbands, a lack of social networks, and the precariousness of baseball careers. In the book aptly entitled Football’s Women (Sheedy & Brown, 1998), interviews with the wives and girlfriends of professional Australian Rules footballers revealed, albeit unintentionally (Wedgwood, 1999), very similar dynamics in the heterosexual relationships of elite Australian Rules players. Similarly, an essay by a woman who was married to a professional Australian Rules footballer for 21 years bemoans that wives of elite footballers become mere appendages to the game; their role in football is to be passive, supportive, and decorative (Brady, 1981). W. Thompson’s (1999) interviews with wives and partners of American National Hockey League players showed that their lives are almost completely incorporated into their husbands’ careers, to the point that establishing or maintaining their own identities is difficult and having their own career almost impossible. She reported that some even have their babies induced to fit into their husbands’ hockey schedules to ensure their husbands are present at the births of their own children. Some wives of elite sportsmen are also expected to accommodate their husbands’ adultery. In his study of the wives of Major League Baseball players, Ortiz (1997) observed an unwritten code of conduct that is socially constructed and enforced by men. The code (and female conformity to it) helps to preserve male privileges, such as institutionalized adultery, and gender inequity within both professional baseball and the marriages of professional baseball players. For instance, even when wives are allowed to accompany their husbands on road trips, they are not allowed in the bar of the hotel at which they are staying, as that is where groupies congregate to meet Major League ballplayers and where married players meet women. Similarly, during flights to and from away games, the back of the plane where the team sits is out of bounds to wives because that is where players often flirt with flight attendants. None of these studies explored why women fall in love with or marry elite sportsmen in the first place, particularly given the enormous personal sacrifices involved. That they would want to do so is taken for granted, but, as Messner (1996) has warned, “the idea of an unmediated ‘free flow of erotic energy’ is not only impossible, it is an idea 6 Journal of Sport & Social Issues that may mask the very relations of power it is embedded within rather than illuminating and subverting them” (p. 230). As Holland, Ramazanoglu, Sharpe, and Thomson (1998, p. 164) pointed out, the attraction of some women to men who treat them badly is neglected even in the field of sexualities. They flagged the need for more research on the development of women’s sexuality within the broader context of a sexist society, particularly the collusion by many females with their male sexual partners in the reproduction of male power “through desiring the bastards (i.e., the empowered man directly accessing hegemonic masculinity) and not the disempowered ‘wimp’” (p. 164). I suggest that the heterosexual relations of sportsmen—particularly those who play at elite levels and/or who play hyper-masculine sports such as Australian Rules football— provide a potentially fruitful site for the exploration of the role of cathexis in the reproduction of male power. These days, an increasing number of sports historians and sociologists are becoming aware that an “understanding of sexuality is central to any analysis of gender and sport” (Lenskyj, Hemphill, & Symons, 2002, p. 1). However, they have yet to take up the study of cathexis as a way of illuminating the ways in which women’s heterosexual desires affect the maintenance, reproduction, and/or subversion of the existing gender order. Note 1. 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Melbourne, Australia: Pluto. Wedgwood, N. (2005). Doin’ it for themselves! A socio-historical case study of the development of a women’s Australian Rules football competition. International Journal of History of Sport, 22(3), 396-414. Nikki Wedgwood, PhD, is a research fellow in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Sydney, Australia. Her research interests include gender, embodiment, sport sociology, disability studies, and life history research.