Sexual assault and sports: Reframing the Derrick Rose conversation

The sports arena, particularly men’s sports, is a great container to discuss many social issues as it relates to masculinity and gender-based violence with men. The “off the field” situations that professional athletes constantly bring onto themselves is magnified by the incredible cultural and capitalistic machine of sports media. This gives us many opportunities to discuss important issues like men’s violence against women. The Derrick Rose situation is no different.

In short, a woman has anonymously come forward with a lawsuit stating that Rose and 2 of his friends drugged and raped her in August of 2013. More details can be found by simply googling Derrick Rose. (More details here, here, and here.)

This isn’t the first (and unfortunately, won’t be the last) time that a high profile male athlete is accused of rape. We have some evidence of what conversations around these stories are like, so I would like to take a moment to respond to some of the common responses that I hear.

Man Spreading: What is it and what’s the big deal?

When we use the phrase Rape Supportive Culture, it can sometimes be difficult to know exactly what this means and what it looks like. Sometimes, men will get defensive because it implicates us as part of the problem (and we are part of the problem in a lot of ways and are trying to work against this. Either way, men benefit from Rape Supportive Culture. But that’s a discussion for another day…). Sometimes we can feel helpless when we gain a better understanding of Rape Supportive Culture. Because it’s a lot. And it can be difficult to know where to start. Ultimately, if we want to reduce rates of rape and sexual assault in our culture, particularly against women, children and trans-identified people,

New Year's Resolutions for Men in the Movement

Find meaningful ways to impact campus
We resolve to get more involved on campus. For us, this means challenging ourselves to attend open events to increase our perspectives, to bring feminist philosophies into current student organizations we're involved in, and seek opportunities (employment and volunteer) where we can align our perspectives with others to help foster positive change.

Strive for growth
There are many different ways to grow. For us, we resolve to continue our education about gender, intersectionality, and social justice as a whole as a focus for self growth. We resolve to actively engage in conversations about masculinity and gender with our peers. We resolve to keep noticing oppression around us and hold ourselves accountable for our own oppressive actions. Through this self and community growth, we hope to increase participation in Men in the Movement overall.

Practice, practice, practice
In Men in the Movement, we talk a lot about expressing empathy, allowing ourselves to be vulnerable, and holding each other and ourselves accountable to our actions. We think that doing these things will bring us closer together as a community. We also want to honor that empathy, vulnerability, and accountability can be hard. So we resolve to practice being empathetic, practice being vulnerable, and practice being accountable, and support each other in these actions.

Let us know what you think! We invite feedback because feedback is love.

And here is some Calvin and Hobbes! Let's resolve to not take on his attitude...