Written by Marion Lieutaud, Sociology (PhD) and Eponine Howarth, Law (ug)
[Editor’s Note: This article was edited from the original one that Marion and Eponine sent to us. As a result, some key information that has since been re-inserted was left out due to errors on our part.]
2018-2019 has been an incredibly successful season for women playing football and futsal (indoor 5-aside version of football) at the London School of Economics. The first ever LSE female futsal team finished 2nd in the League and reached the Cup Final – only to be defeated in extra time. The women’s football team currently sits 3rd in BUCS with two games in hand. Despite these achievements, women in the world of LSE football are hardly dealt an easy hand. The LSE Athletics Union supports initiatives such as the “This Girl Can” week and the “Inspirational Sportswomen” award which give visibility to women and their accomplishment, in the stated aim of thriving towards an “AU for all”. Yet as far as football is concerned, sexist attitudes and gender discrimination are far from extinct.
In 2014, the LSE Men’s Rugby Team was suspended from playing for the rest of the academic year for publishing an outright sexist and homophobic leaflet distributed at the Fresher’s fair. The experience of women in football is one that highlights pervasive sexism and insidious discrimination. It is only made harder to spot and to denounce by the fact that it is actually rarely associated with such blatant misogyny as that displayed by the 2014 rugby club. More often than not, the undermining of women in sport comes from people who would simultaneously claim to support gender equality in the abstract. These rather more subtle yet still ubiquitous expressions of gender hierarchies in a brand of sexism that doesn’t say its name is what this article chooses to focus on.
Covering a period of several years, we analyse a series of events that illustrate this sexism, alongside the collective responses that were designed to challenge them within the realm of LSE sports. This story is told from our perspective, that of (white and privileged) women playing football and futsal at the LSE. For us, this is an occasion to return on these experiences, expanding on the structures in place that seem neutral and invariable but in fact maintain the status quo, and on the seemingly little things which, together, weave and uphold women’s marginalisation or inclusion. As the football and futsal season come to a close and the international women’s day is just passed, we take this opportunity to (re)assess the place and treatment of women in these sports, at the LSE.
Sit like a lady
Up until this academic year, the LSE Athletics Union displayed the photos of all the LSE sports clubs in their office on the first floor of the Student Union building. Invariably, women would have their legs tightly held together and their hands on their lap. Invariably, men would be sitting knees apart and their hands on their knees, in a strong stance sharply contrasting with the women’s constrained pose. [see picture below]
This year, during the official picture for the Futsal Club, the newly mixed context made the gender disciplining unmistakable. ‘Ladies! Heels together, knees together, hands on your lap. Guys! Feet apart, knees apart, hands on knees’. With hasty justifications of height, the women’s team was split and positioned on the edges of the picture, on each side. Even the women’s captain, one of the five committee members, was sat as far off-centre as possible. “The women at the margins? Really?” one of the girls said out-loud. As the instructions were given, some of us laughed, not all complied. While some were visibly uncomfortable, none of the guys reacted.
After the photos were taken, we had a chat with the male photographer.
“Why the gendered instructions?” we asked.
“There are guidelines.”
“From the university?”
“For university pictures in general,” he answered.
“And what purpose do they serve?”
“Well”, the photographer said, “sometimes it is because of the clothing. Like when women wear skirts”, he explained further, pointing at the netball players lining up for the next photos. He probably was not aware that netball players wear shorts underneath their dress. Either way, that did not answer the question as to why female futsal players ought to sit with their legs together, since we wear the very same clothing as the men: our jerseys and shorts are even men’s cuts, which is incidentally another issue. In the history of football and futsal at the LSE, there is not a single recorded instance of women getting a kit that actually fits. Either they wear “unisex” (aka male) kits, or so-called “female cuts” which means that the shorts barely cover their bums. “But”, the photographer continued, “it’s not meant to be offensive. If you’re offended, don’t be”; and besides, he added, the guidelines are not compulsory. If people really do not want to follow them, they are not forced to do so. “But then, why give them at all?” we remarked. The word “traditions” ended the conversation. We just didn’t expect that the upholding of traditions included explicit gendered choreography in 2018, in England, at the LSE. It turns out that here we are not just taught the ‘causes of things’ but also the ‘order of things:’ this includes reminders that women should sit small and that men ought to man-spread. Welcome to the LSE’s sport culture.
The lads’ disdain: can women even really play football?
In the realm of LSE football, gender hierarchies are hardly invisible or hidden. The LSE boasts two football clubs known as the Football Club (FC), and the Women’s Football Club (WFC). Why the first one is not called (or call themselves, see twitter @LSEFC and SU page description) the MFC (Men’s Football Club) is a mystery, or rather a thinly-veiled consensus that football is a man’s sport by default. The WFC’s and futsal coaches and referees for women were always men. Some – like the current ones – were brilliant. But some were vastly unqualified and condescending, and of course, the players were aware and resentful of that. Karly Graf was one of the LSE sport ambassador for 2016-2017: she came from the US where she played for UC Berkeley’s First Team – a big deal – and joined WFC’s First Team. Despite her appreciation of the Women’s Football Club as a whole, her comments on the coaching and football culture are vitriolic: “I think there’s a lot to be said that our [first team] coach did not play and had very little understanding of the game in a country filled with self-proclaimed experts of the game. I was surprised at the lack of seriousness given to women who played sport”.
The experience of male disdain towards women who play football is a desperately common one at the LSE, and it often comes from fellow students. In 2016, the then Boxing Club Captain, who was since elected as 2018-19 Activities and Development Officer, told the WFC captain and 1st Team captain that “[he] plays football better than any girl in WFC”. Uncalled for, the assertion was also nothing short of daring, considering that the club included several semi-pros and former semi-pros. Of course, he could not have possibly known the level he was comparing himself to, for he had never seen the women’s team playing or training. Hopefully, his consideration of women playing football has in the last two years and since his election become less dismissive, but the example hardly constitutes an isolated case. How many times have we heard random blokes claim that their team could comfortably beat the LSE Women’s Team? How could we not wonder that they should fail to see the blatant sexism and basic offensiveness of their comments? And also – why they felt the need to say them out loud – and to us! And this is not even getting into all the double-edged compliments that taught us to expect that “you play so well” tends to be followed by “… for a woman.”
[Editor’s note: the first red sentence was initially changed to the following ‘a prominent member of the AU who was since elected to an executive position’.]
[The word ‘Hopefully’ was also taken out.]
Of course, the level is, on average, not as high in the women’s football team as it is in the men’s football team: that is largely another consequence of the problem of asymmetrical socialisation to sport, especially acute in deeply-gendered, deeply male-dominated sports like football. Most men played football at some stage of or throughout their childhood; most women did not. Yet there is no question that some of the current and past LSE female football and futsal players are better than most male FC or futsal players – a simple truth which those men who do watch them play (like the futsal club members who came to many of the women’s matches) spontaneously recognise. More broadly, and more importantly, nobody who pays attention could avoid seeing the seriousness, the dedication and energy that women at the LSE put into their sports, and that this should be met with prejudice and disdain rather than respect is, well, disgraceful.
Refereeing women’s football: benevolent sexism or I don’t know what is
The gender-biases do not come from students only – they are also apparent on the pitch, in the figure of the referee and in the quality and style of referring practices. Mint Kovavisarach, who has been playing for WFC since 2016 wrote about the frustration with gender-specific refereeing engagement and practice on her blog. She thus described the team’s encounter with a referee “After a clash of bodies that sent the ball off the pitch, [the male referee], his hands on both the girls’ shoulders, said slowly, “Okay, girls, I’m going to drop the ball and one of you can kick it back to that half. After that, continue to play on.” Odd and kind of patronising, I thought. Not a free kick, which would have been the most logical call if it was even a foul at all, or a drop-kick back to the keeper? Surely, this isn’t the proper rules of football. As the game progressed, this man kept making questionable calls, rewriting the rules of football, speaking to us in an extremely patronising manner, and dumbing down the game for us […] At what point did he deem it necessary – and acceptable – to change the rules of a university level sports game in the British Universities and College Sports League? I do wonder if he would have done the same if it was a men’s football game”[1].
Over the last couple of years, WFC players have been asked “not to be too physically engaged so as to avoid injury” after perfectly safe tackles which involved no collision or sanction. The game was stopped on occasions where referees wanted to enquire about the players’ well-being, even when nobody had complained; all were back on their feet and playing; there was no semblance of a foul. “What pissed me off in the style of refereeing was this attempt to protect us, because we are very fragile females” (Mara Nogueira, former PhD student now research fellow, played 5 seasons for WFC). Paternalistic concern for the safeguarding of women’s bodily integrity is combined with the general dismissal of the seriousness of their engagement – both physical and mental – in the sport. While the game is often stopped for no valid reason, cards are virtually never given even when they would be deserved. Guillaume Paugam was a WFC coach, a futsal club member and also played many matches for the men’s FC. He continues to coach both women’s and men’s football in Oxford, and explains his own confusion at the handling of fouls: “In men’s football, I did see a lot of cards. Whereas when I think about it, I don’t think I saw a single card in a women’s football match. […] I feel that women are refereed as if they could not have any bad intentions. […] The cliché on women’s football is that “they are nicer towards the refs, they don’t talk back as much, etc…” so my impression is that nasty tackles in women’s football are interpreted by referees as a form of clumsiness rather than an intent to hurt (hence no card), and they also consider that women are less aggressive. Tackles that would have been worth a yellow card in men’s football but were not carded in women’s football, I saw that a lot, yes”. Many of the WFC and former WFC players we talked with had the same sentiment towards referees who operate in women’s football: that the refereeing style was most often characterised by disengagement and benevolent condescension.
Of course, dissatisfaction with referees is in no way specific to women’s football. But there is little doubt that such sloppy and ad hoc refereeing practices would not be tolerated in men’s competitive university football matches. As Guillaume Paugam notes: “personally I have a hard time believing that [some of the referees] would survive long in men’s football. I’ve seen bad referees, but guys with this attitude, rarely.”
Try to imagine a woman refereeing a competitive men’s match in this way; or picture the LSE’s men’s first team being coached by a woman with disputable competence and qualification. The fact of this inconceivability is telling: football is a male domain; being a man grants football authority over women – regardless of actual skills, expertise or engagement. This is tangible in many interactions with various categories of men: students, football players, referees, and even some of the staff. Many of them were involved in an incident that we draw on here – not only because it was marking, but also because it is in many ways a textbook illustration of what the problems are, how they come about, how they combine, and how we try to address them. It is also – sadly – an example of women raising their voices to no avail.
The battle of the pitch
In February of 2017, at the LSE sports grounds in Berrylands, on a Wednesday afternoon that saw both the women’s first team and the men’s second team playing simultaneously, the pitch noticeboard indicated that the Men’s 2nd Football Team was to play on Pitch 1, and the Women’s 1st Team on Pitch 2. The policy for pitch allocation — which is still the one informally endorsed today — is that the ranking of pitches corresponds with the ranking of teams. According to this policy, the women’s first team should have been given priority over the men’s second team, and therefore should have played on Pitch 1, which is always in much, much better condition than the others. The women’s first team captain brought it to the attention of the groundsman. “Are you going to moan?” he sneered back. He then relieved himself from the decision of the allocation of pitches and suggested that the captain direct any objection to his superior, who happened to be absent on the day in question. When asked to change the pitch allocations, he refused, relinquishing his responsibilities and humiliating the team captain in the process. A WFC player then proceeded to comment about the unfair allocation of pitches to the Men’s Second Team Captain, who shrugged. The men’s team argued that they were not responsible for pitch allocation, and that the men’s second team rarely had opportunities to play on the best pitch. This was, of course, also true of the women’s second team, who had never been given a chance to play on that pitch and usually played on the worst pitches.
On that February day, the women’s first team ended up playing on Pitch 2 and the men’s second on Pitch 1, as had been decided by the groundskeepers, and consented by the Men’s Team. The situation was infuriating to many of the women present. There had been numerous other moments of frustration – some of which we have already described – that led to the question of pitch allocation becoming, at that point, the crystallisation of rampant sexism in LSE Football. On other occasions, the women’s first team has already been asked by some players of the men’s second team if they could let them have the best pitch, on account of the men having a “difficult game” – this at times when the man who asked knew full well that the women were facing the top team of their own league. Statements such as “You know that sometimes you guys use our pitch” (from one LSE male footballer to a WFC player at the 2018 Carol) are plenty. They tend to come with ready-made mitigating factors such as alcohol, ‘banter’ and the pressure of competition in men’s football. They also stand as the embodiment of a sports culture that continues to assign sportswomen a secondary role, explicitly assuming that sports facilities are men’s property and that women’s presence and use of said facilities are merely indulged.
Taking a collective stance and paying for it
The pitch incident led to the committee of WFC taking a public stance on the issue. On the day after the event in Berrylands, a Facebook post was published, addressed by the 1st team captain to the LSE Athletics Union. It was shared by the entire WFC committee and many WFC players. It included a precise description of what had happened, and can still be consulted in the visitor post section of the Athletics’ Union’s Facebook page, along with all the comments that it elicited.
As is often the case with social media, the comments section is the most colourful and instructive part. The Athletics Union commented, apologising for the incident and stating that it was ‘horrified’ by it. It then indicated that it would instigate private discussions so as to ‘escalate this matter.’ The Men’s Team also commented that ‘if there are still issues which need resolving, we are more than happy to attend a meeting in order to do so’ (nothing of the sort was ever organised or “escalated”). The bulk of the comments section is constituted of a discussion between the then Women’s First Team Captain and the Men’s Club Captain. The Men’s Captain expresses his support for ‘the majority’ of the issues raised, but defended the ‘unfair(ly)’ singled out Men’s Second Team captain — ‘an individual who had himself tried to help your cause’ (emphasis ours) by advising the Groundsman on the day that ‘in the future, give [the women’s first team] the 1’s pitch’ in the same situations. The women’s captain then asks why, if aware of the unfairness of the situation before the game, the men’s second team captain chose not do anything about it at the time. This, she remarks, seems like a case of “having your cake, eating it, and then advising that the cake be shared in the future.” The men’s captain, however, rejects the critique with the same line of arguments that had been used by the male footballers in Berrylands: “the second team played on the pitch that was allocated to them.” In other words: they could not be held responsible or criticised for following – unfair – decisions, even if these benefited them. The men’s captain concludes that ‘the general consensus (in Men’s FC) is that they would’ve preferred to have been given pitch 2 from the outset & thus not have to have the distraction of arguments over the allocation of pitches prior to the game.’
Puzzlingly, many men from the LSE’s men’s football and rugby clubs tagged each other under the post, without leaving any further comment, explanation or reaction. Combined with the striking amount of men who rallied to “like” the Men’s captain’s comments and did not react to the post itself or to any of the women’s comments, this came off as a strange display of force. This show of male solidarity, of course, has potent powers of intimidation. It also takes a serious toll on the women who raise the critique. In this case, the main figure of WFC’s position was the women’s first team captain, Eponine Howarth. She describes the stress deriving from the post and its reception: “The whole situation was quite upsetting. I couldn’t concentrate on my university work for the following two weeks. I felt that guys I had never seen before were looking at me oddly. I understood that they had probably recognised me from my Facebook post”. When it comes to publicly questioning taken-for-granted privileges, the costs of defiance are very real. This is also true of situations that do not involve harassment per se. When privileged, straight, largely white men get together on the internet to undermine minorities’ claims and make them feel marginalised, it tends to be effective, see #liguedulol and other online bullying scandals involving boys clubs. Of all the comments on the post – there wasn’t one comment of support from a man.
Vanishing responsibility: if no-one is to blame, is there a problem at all?
Why do we take the time to come back on this? Firstly – not much has changed, and the frustration and anger at being looked down at as football players and sportswomen remains as valid and commonplace as it was then. Secondly, the pitch dispute was a moment when the terms of the power struggle became more visible, and when the strategies of denial and dismissal towards women were easier to pinpoint.
Consider the matter of responsibility. Most people agreed that the pitch allocation had been unfair (the Athletics Union, the Men’s club captain, etc…). Yet it remained entirely obscure who exactly should be blamed. The Men’s club captain and second team captain had stated that the Men’s team was not responsible for pitch allocation and asserted that the groundsman was. Yet the groundsman on the day had also shifted the responsibility onto his superior, who was not there. WFC was never able to locate the person responsible for the sports facilities in Berrylands, as various staff members during the following weeks all declared that they were not ‘the person in charge’. Both the Athletics Union and Student’s Union staff stated that they were not responsible for the sports facilities. Needless to mention, the LSE is not responsible for the incident, as the Athletics Union is a student body run independently from LSE’s administration. Finally, and perhaps unsurprisingly, no meeting was ever organised with the Student’s Union, the Athletics Union or the Men’s FC on the matter. Nobody was responsible anyways. Since no clear culprit could be identified, it apparently ensued that nothing could or should be done, and every third part quietly hoped that the the noise would eventually recede and the problem go away on its own. Of course, elusive responsibility is a well-known strategy to guarantee inertia and preserve the status quo. As long as everyone we talk to keeps throwing the hot potato to someone else, we feel like we are screaming in the desert. The bottom-line of it is that in these situations, virtually all parties involved are responsible. The groundsmen are obviously responsible for having made and then stuck to an unjust decision in breach of the pitch policy, and for the humiliating treatment they reserved for the WFC captain who contested them. The Athletics Union is responsible for having done nothing about it, beyond a mere statement of intention in their Facebook comment. They never escalated the matter as they had said they would, even though they have a women’s officer position who we would expect to be elected specifically for such purposes. And the Men’s FC is responsible, because those who gladly reap the benefits of discriminatory decisions are responsible for accepting and endorsing a system which they know to be unfair.
Fundamentally, it is not a matter of finding a single perpetrator of sexism. In such matter, there is a nebula of responsibility which, altogether, allow for these things to happen. Either one of these three bodies could have, alone, changed the situation for the better and prevented the (re)production of discriminatory practices. It is because they did nothing that nothing changed, and therefore they are all responsible, individually and together, for their explicit or implicit defence of an unjust situation.
Gender equality: such a distraction
This dispute also provided an illustration of the strategy that consist in treating women’s denunciation of gender inequalities as mundane and marginal. As the men’s captain expressed, the consensus among the male players was that this event had been an unnecessary “distraction”, while the groundsman had reduced it to a woman’s “moaning”. This analysis is further reinforced by the repeated allusions to the fight for gender equality being “our cause”, i.e. a women’s problem, as opposed to a men’s problem or a problematic feature of the world of football at large.
What this development also made crystal-clear is the capacity for the dominant side (here male footballers) to simultaneously profess their support for gender equality while choosing to focus on criticising the specifics of women’s stances – typically their tone or formulation. This has the effect of undermining women’s critical voices and sense of legitimacy while preserving progressive and gentlemanly appearances – a form of elegant and all-too-trendy back-stabbing. Practically all the male footballers we talked to at the time were explicit on their ideological alignment with gender equality. This, however, always came with a “but…” and rarely (if ever) with any kind of positive action to actually turn this support into anything tangible that would have helped us. Whilst the Men’s Captain assured that the ‘men’s football club are fully behind the women’s FC in promoting equality in sport’, the club does very little in practice. The only concrete support of the Men’s FC has been that of attending the annual Women’s Football Club Mixed Tournament, which WFC organises on their own. Two of their members are also known for having won the 2018 ‘dick of the tournament’ award for ‘worst sportsmanship’ during the competition. As a comment by one of the WFC players at the time of the discussion on pitch allocation pointed out: ‘Though the support from the men’s football team is very appreciated, it could indeed have been concrete, on the spot, as opposed to abstract, now. Saying you support the cause of gender equality and actually making gender equality happen in the moment – even if that means a certain amount of sacrifice – aren’t quite the same thing’.
Allies and Actions
Yet as we reflect on all this, it does seem clear to us that a lot of people probably did want to help, even among those we took issue with. It is only fair that we should acknowledge also the messages of support, and not discard them as meaningless. Sure enough, words were (are) rarely followed by action, but that is not to say that the people who said them did not mean them, and that saying them is of no importance. The Men’s FC captain did insightfully suggest that men would benefit from the inclusion in discussions and should be involved in meetings in order to have a ‘greater understanding of the issues at force.’ This is certainly a crucial point. In many of the incidents we described in these pages (the photos, the comments, the pitches), there were men involved who, after we had discussed the issue with them, saw our perspective and supported our actions, although this support remained exclusively informal and private. The question of how men – or anyone – can be allies as opposed to opponents in the fight for gender equality is a difficult but essential one, especially in male-dominated environments like that of football. When passivity signifies, by default, a statement in favour of the status quo, how and when to act are key questions, and some answers are already being explored at the LSE.
One example is the very proactive support within the futsal committee for the development of a women’s team and for the promotion of gender co-operation within the club. The futsal committee has been adamant, in the last couple of years, that they wanted the club to include women and women competing, and they have been putting an immense amount of energy into launching and bolstering the women’s team this year. This has gone way beyond the administrative task of setting up a team and a kit, although that is already no small job. A futsal alumni became the women’s coach; the futsal committee and many male futsal players attended most of the women’s matches, with the women’s cup finale last weekend gathering up a little crowd of supporters, all unashamedly partial to the LSE squad. They expressed immoderate, unironic enthusiasm and interest in the games – an experience nothing short of extraordinary for women used to British university football. Their attendance and cheering was mostly not the result of women asking, but the initiative of the men present – an initiative which, of course, was received very warmly by the women’s team.
The futsal club has been putting an explicit emphasis on diversity and inclusion in their events as well as in the development of their teams. Participants to the 2018 ‘Futsal World Cup Challenge’ were instructed that ‘while not strictly compulsory, we are looking for teams to have at least 1-2 women players’, thus making clear the engagement in favour of the participation of women. Although not implemented by all participating teams, such practices actively promote inclusion, especially as the tournament also advertised “welcome to play, regardless of level”. Very recently, the interdepartmental futsal tournament actually made ‘mixing’ an explicit requirement for the registration of participating teams. Similarly, the club participated in ICE London in February 2019, with the committee convincing the organisers to have one day dedicated to mixed rather than only all-male football games. The LSE futsal squad for the 2018 Prague tournament in the Michaelmas term also deliberately included women players, although in previous years the team (like the club) had been all-male.
Matthew Bedford has been part of the club since the beginning, he was there when the club was founded 4 years ago, then club captain for two consecutive years and presently vice-captain. He tells of the conscious focus that was put on creating a more inclusive environment in the futsal club: “We wanted to have the diversity… So we really pushed for it… and that’s why we went to WFC and we did the dual-membership: if they already played for WFC, but it was a big team, a big squad and they didn’t play all the time, well they could get our membership half-price and they could play with us from time to time.” This preferential dual-membership was introduced specifically for women. No such agreement exists between the futsal and the men’s football clubs. No such agreement exists between the futsal and the men’s football clubs, and this is no accident. Many of the male futsal players we spoke with mentioned that they didn’t feel comfortable in the male football culture at the LSE, and that this played into their decision to join the futsal club. For Matthew Bedford, it is even core to the existence of the club: “It’s one of the reasons why I wanted to create the club [as it is now]. I went to the FC trials and I did a couple of matches, and the mindset, it was, wow…I just didn’t want to be there. It’s the, the lads mentality, it’s really… a little bit is funny, it’s part of football, whatever, but it’s too much, it’s too much. It’s talking shit, doing shit, all the time; in the bus to go to matches there was trouble every time… Insults, saying stuff that’s a bit…misogynistic…and that’s when they asked me join futsal because they needed a keeper, and I tried it, and I just loved it. So I stopped 11-aside football and I played only futsal since.” The futsal club has enjoyed incredible success since then, expanding from about 10 members in 2015 to over 80 this year.
[Editor’s note: The highlighted section of this paragraph was initially omitted.]
The fact is that all-male environments such as segregated sports clubs are prone to becoming boys’ clubs, aka the best terrain for toxic masculinity – which is bad for everyone, both men and women. Implementing gender mixing and gender equality in clubs, at training, at tournaments, at events, is a way of neutralising this and it helps overcome prejudices. This can be achieved in a number of practical ways – often through seemingly insignificant yet conscious decisions, such as the futsal committee’s deliberately scheduling the women’s and men’s training at the same time so that they would be training side-by-side and sometimes together, and would be travelling as a group.
Conclusion: where do we go from here?
For all the reasons we have already evoked, most women will spontaneously and legitimately not feel adequate or very welcome in football and, by extension, in futsal. Expressly inviting them, supporting them and valuing them is a wonderful change, one that we need in order to make male-dominated sports more open and, well, less sexist and toxic. Additionally, there is a pressing need for men to start making gender equality their problem, and to start tackling these issues from their own accord instead of always leaving women alone in the front line. Since the vast majority of us apparently do believe in gender equality, it is perhaps time to really get thinking about how we all turn it into reality; clearly, it’s not going to happen on its own. We – men and women – need to trust women when they say something is sexist and unfair. Even the most vindictive people second-guess themselves when it comes to pointing out discriminatory treatments they fall victim to. Women already filter out so much, because they worry about the eternal critique of “overreaction” and ‘hypersensitivity.’ Saying that something is unjust is by no means easy to do, and it comes at a huge emotional and social cost. This is also important for men and women to keep in mind: it is too hard to fight this as individuals, but collectively, we are so much louder and stronger. The encouragement and dynamic within WFC, between women, within the futsal club has been wonderful and oh-so-important. Without it, all of what we just described would have become just another bitter pill that we would have had to swallow to keep playing football. Eventually it would have killed the fun and we would have stopped playing – but we didn’t, because we had each other, and when we fumed, at least we fumed and laughed together. Collective action is the way to go, and sometimes you have to risk irritating your friends so you can stand in solidarity against inequality. Let us focus on the bigger picture and support women’s voices – nobody needs the critique on the form and the optimisation of the message. At the end of the day, it is basic mansplaining, and it is especially problematic when it comes from men (or women) who otherwise never engage with the issue of gender equality – expect to criticise the ways in which women tackle it.
We will be playing, and playing well and we will get that pitch to which we are entitled. If you are a man, and you agree that this sexism in football, in sport, anywhere, isn’t right, then agree to denounce it with us, and not only tacitly, not only when there’s no risks or consequences, or when nobody’s watching; talk to your team, to the groundsman, to the staff; make a public stance about it; organise a meeting on how to curb sexist and homophobic university sport culture; tell your mates that their comments are actually not ok; invite women to play at your football games and your tournaments; go watch and cheer for WFC or the LSE women’s futsal team. Ask this question – hammer it home: if there are to be two football clubs at the LSE, isn’t it obvious that they should be known as the Women’s football club (WFC), and the Men’s football club (MFC)? Nobody plays women’s football, or men’s football for that matter. We are women who play football, and we belong here just as much as the men do.
