Women and the AFL

I have been a fan of Australian Rules football for a long time. I believe I still have somewhere a VHS copy of the 1994 Australian Football League (AFL) Grand Final, won by my beloved West Coast Eagles. It is labelled in multi-coloured ink 'My most treasured possession', a record of a game that saw my fabourite player of all time, Dean Kemp, awarded the Norm Smith medal for best afield on Grand Final Day. The memories. The glory. The memories!
Being a female footy fan didn't seem all that unusual to me as a kid, but as I grew up I came to realise that football is pretty much a man's world. The players, the officials, the administrators, the commentators, the journalists and many of the most vocal fans are men. The violence of the game is both a product of and feeds into some basic staples of masculinity: physical strength, aggression, denial of pain, and a desire to dominate (or defeat) other men. These men's bodies are bruised and broken by the time they retire; an average match can see upwards of four serious injuries to ankles, kness, ribs, or shoulders. This is part of the appeal of Australian Rules: watching grown men throw themselves around with blind courage is almost as fun as watching the more graceful parts of the game, such as running, passing the ball and scoring goals.
Be that as it may, the culture of masculinity that is so entrenched within the AFL has in recent days come under some scrutiny. Not enough scrutiny, I would argue, but a little. The former president of the Carlton Football Club, John Elliott, a bankrupt and odious man, has stood by his claims a week ago that while he was president during the 1990s, Carlton paid 'three or four' women wads of cash in exchange for their not pressing rape claims against players. In the context of a year already featuring public soul-searching by the National Rugby League (NRL) regarding sexual assault cases, these relevations - seemingly made to entertain a corporate audience - are serious indeed.
Or are they? The AFL's top administrator, Andrew Demetriou, has distanced himself from Elliott by calling him a 'dinosaur' from an 'age that is a bygone era'. Carlton has made no comment at all, while rumoured to be taking active steps from preventing life-member Elliott from having any further role at the club he used to run. By focusing on Elliott himself rather than on the substance of his allegations, the club and the competition's top administrator have neatly sidestepped the question of whether indeed there were cover-ups regarding sexual violence by Carlton players, and the implications of such cover-ups. The 1990s are not so long ago, as Victorian police acknowledged when they promptly called on Elliott for interview regarding what they rightly view as a criminal investigation. That these incidents might have involved real women, with real grievances, seems not to have occurred to the AFL or to Cartlon. How can this be so? The only conclusion I can draw is that they think it self-evident that either Elliott, or the women of whom he has spoken, are lying.
There have been rumblings of discontent regarding such a muted, indirect response. The ABC's Offsiders programme demanded this morning that if this was a story from a bygone age, the AFL should hire some archaeologists and start digging. Caroline Wilson, the only senior woman journalist reporting on the AFL, has made the links between the AFL's response and its attitudes to women overall. (http://www.theage.com.au/news/rfnews/regard-for-women-still-plagues-afl/2009/06/28/1245961459479.html?page=2). Indeed, Wilson has herself been the target of outrageous sexism in the past, with a mock-up of her body physically attacked on prime-time television by the AFL media's resident shock jock, Sam Newman. She is best-placed to make such a comment, and I applaud her courage in once again being the only female voice permitted to raise the issue of what it means to be a woman in the AFL, where men's bodies and men's voices take centre stage. But Wilson is like David to the AFL's Goliath, surrounded by less critical colleagues and facing a wall of 'no comment' from the senior playmakers.
The AFL has made some overtures towards women of late; a handful sit on club boards, and there is always a thrill in seeing the one female umpire, a young goal umpire, adjudicating the big matches on television. But if it wants to retain its image as a quintessentially Australian sport to be enjoyed by all the family, the AFL needs to rethink its attitudes to violence against women. It is a serious issue, and not just because it can be embarassing. It is serious because it is violence, because it is against women, because it is a crime, and because it is unacceptable at any level in society. And the AFL, like it or not, influences plenty of kids, just as it did me many years ago when I cheered my team on to bloodied, bruised victory.