In 2012, members of the men’s soccer team at Harvard University produced a detailed Google document that assessed the physical characteristics of the high-school seniors recently recruited to the women’s team. The “scouting report,” which the Harvard Crimson revealed in an article last month, was vulgar even by Trumpian measures, not only quantifying each woman’s attractiveness with a numerical rating but assigning her a nickname and sexual position.
Following the Crimson’s exposé, the school’s director of athletics, Robert L. Scalise, initially minimized the significance of the document, stating that “whenever you have groups of people that come together, there’s a potential for this to happen.” In what might have been a bit of wishful thinking, he added, “This is not a media thing.” Four days later, though, the story had been picked up by major news outlets, and the women targeted in the document responded with their own piece in the Crimson, titled “Stronger Together.” The Crimson report had protected their identities, but now they chose to shed their anonymity and address the “careless, disgusting, and appalling” words of their male peers. With notable grace, they framed the team’s behavior as “aberrant,” and counter to the prevailing spirit of athletics at Harvard. They also appealed “to the men of Harvard soccer and to the men of the world” to join them in confronting sexism: “We cannot change the past, but we are asking you to help us now and in the future.”
The men’s soccer team had performed impressively this season. Harvard was ranked first in the Ivy League, and fifteenth nationwide, within striking distance of both the league tournament and the national N.C.A.A. tournament. There was a strong sense on campus that they had winning left to do. However, after learning that the scouting report was not a unique artifact but part of a tradition that has continued for years, and that members of the team had been less than transparent in their initial interviews, the university decided to cancel the rest of the men’s soccer season. Harvard’s president, Drew Faust, declared in a statement that the team’s behavior has “no place at Harvard.” Given the boys-will-be-boys attitudes that have governed official responses to more severe incidents involving other college students (see, for instance, recent events at Baylor University, or the court’s handling of Brock Turner’s case), it’s notable that Harvard chose to act with such decisiveness.
As universities nationwide have been alight with conversations about campus sexual assault in recent years, the students and faculty at Harvard—where I am a lecturer in women, gender, and sexuality studies—have been engaging with the issue with particular vigor. A 2015 survey conducted by the Association of American Universities found that 29.2 per cent of female Harvard seniors reported that they had experienced nonconsensual penetration or sexual touching since arriving at college; 72.7 per cent of all undergraduates reported that they had been sexually harassed. These disturbing numbers were in line with those of other universities, but one fact about the study stood out: over all, 53.2 per cent of Harvard students had responded to the survey, the highest response rate of any of the twenty-seven participating institutions. Last March, a sexual-assault task force made up of faculty and students from across Harvard’s schools was convened, in response to an investigation by the Office for Civil Rights, and issued a list of recommendations for adjustments to the university’s approach to undergraduate socializing, alcohol use, and extracurricular activities, in addition to recommending the appointment of a high-level position within the Provost’s office to coördinate assault prevention and Title IX compliance efforts. Since then, Harvard has doubled its funding of the Office of Sexual Assault Prevention and Response. And, in May, the college announced a controversial new policy that will exclude members of single-sex campus organizations like final clubs—the invitation-only groups that are notorious bastions of wealth and privilege, which were singled out in the task-force report as presenting “distinctive” challenges to a safe and equitable campus for women—from earning student-leadership posts or prestigious fellowships like the Rhodes Scholarship.
Yet the soccer-team revelations are a sobering reminder that sexist behavior can’t easily be stamped out through rules, regulations, and imposed consequences alone. The problem with “locker-room talk,” whether it takes the form of Trump boasting about groping women or college students ranking the appeal of their peers, is that sexist speech normalizes sexist behavior. In the case of Harvard’s soccer team, what’s extraordinary is that the talk can’t be dismissed as casual or made in passing: it was co-authored, edited, and preserved as an official group record. While we might be resigned to encountering objectifying speech or behavior at a bar or a beer-soaked spring-break party, it’s sobering to see it codified in the form of a shared Google document. In effect, the scouting report became a set of instructions used, year after year, to dehumanize women.
There are a lot of ugly truths about human hierarchies that get lip-service-level disavowal. The vast majority of men at Harvard would describe themselves as liberal and egalitarian; Donald Trump “respects and promotes women.” But it’s telling that even in as progressive a place as Harvard, where students have been exposed to sharp thinking about sexism and inequality, some men feel entitled to assert verbal, if not physical, authority over women’s bodies. When Trump dismissed his own comments as mere locker-room banter, many professional athletes spoke out, asserting that no locker room they’ve been in has been a site of such crude conversation. While I would like to believe this, it would be naïve to assume that the soccer team’s reports are an isolated instance of misogyny. Since the Crimson’s revelations last week, it has already come to light that the men’s cross-country team at Harvard produced its own spreadsheet rating their counterparts on the women’s team.
It would be a mistake, too, to seize upon these instances of overt vulgarity while ignoring more insidious forms of sexist language. In a group apology released after the men’s soccer season had been cancelled, members of the team took responsibility for their actions, and asserted that their report did not reflect their views of these women in particular, nor of women in general. “No woman,” they wrote, “deserves to be treated in this manner; not our mothers, our sisters, nor our peers.” While this apology might very well be heartfelt, it is limited. Like many of the male commentators who have expressed outrage over Trump’s remarks, the team members frame women’s dignity in relation to men’s: a man sees an insult as problematic when he imagines how he would feel had it been levied against a woman to whom he is intimately tied. A commitment to equality requires shifting this mindset, so that a man can imagine himself in the role of the target—that is, to empathize with women not as potential sisters and daughters but as potential selves.
At Harvard, I teach a class on feminism in the twenty-first century, and my students have sometimes expressed despondence, especially during this election cycle: How can they make a difference, given the magnitude and complexity of the obstacles women still face across the world? It’s a fair question. But I hope that they are heartened, as I am, by the eloquence and dignity their peers on the women’s soccer team have demonstrated in confronting the misogyny closest to home. In their Crimson op-ed, one player wrote, “I can offer you my forgiveness, which is—and forever will be—the only part of me that you can ever claim as yours.” One week later, the women’s soccer team claimed the Ivy League Championship.
