psyche of young boys can be illustrated if we reverse the situation. Imagine girls from age six on involved in an activity so highly respected, like football, that the women who are most proficient at this activity are regularly invited to the White House for celebrations and serve as role models for other children throughout the country. When they are involved in this activity, little girls and later women constantly use terms and expressions like dyke, mock (combination of man and cock similar to wuss), or You wear a jockstrap, to embarrass and insult each other. Imagine a respected and admired female leader of these activities putting a jockstrap in a girls closet or locker in order to insult her.We are so accustomed to women and homosexuals being denigrated that we must do this reversal in order to appreciate fully how much such attitudes encourage disrespect and contempt for women and homosexual men. How many fathers would allow their daughters talking like this? But many mothers accept their sons denigration of women as part of being a real boy. Surely it is no accident that Bobby Knight, who puts sanitary napkins in basketball players lockers in order to insult them, has also commented on TV that if a woman cant do anything about rape, she may as well lay back and enjoy it. Fortunately, Bobby Knights career has come to an abrupt end recently due to excessive violence.As we have seen, it starts much earlier, but from high school on, the concern with dominance, winning, and manhood rather than just enjoying the sport becomes all to apparent. Football in particular affords boys a legitimate opportunity to deal with the self-doubts and insecurities of adolescence by asserting their physical dominance over others. If once combines this early reinforcement of physical dominance with the ongoing expression of contempt for girls and women, it is easy to see how the end product, for some of the more angry or disturbed players, m...
