Your interest in football might not extend much further than the team you got in the office sweepstakes for the World Cup, but last night you couldn’t scroll about on any form of social media without seeing someone talking about the humiliation the host team Brazil suffered as they were defeated by Germany by a whopping 7-1. In fact, the game was the most tweeted about (580k per minute) event since Miley Cyrus twerked on Robin Thicke at the 2013 VMAs (360k per minute). And if you saw any tweets or Facebook posts about the game, then it’s likely you saw some comments like these:
and, um, this:
Of course, the abundance of Nazi jokes we’ve seen are also are very indictable, and we’re not forgetting those. But let’s also not ignore this sort of sexualised comparison. Whether it starts with or feeds into the notion that to be fucked is a bad thing is neither here nor there. Because the overtone is that to be the recipient of penetration is a sign of submission, of failure, of weakness.
We’re not saying the jokes are purposefully there to upset women or to make them feel like shit, but every time you see that comparison made, it adds to a culture where we’re supposedly meant to think that men’s penises are these gross obtrusive objects that women only ‘let’ themselves get involved with, when they have a brief lapse in self-control. It’s not good for men or women, and this attitude is in part what makes people so horrified at the girl but not the 24 boys who all took part in a sex act while on a night out in Magaluf. With this dicks-as-intruders mentality, she was cast passive (apparently), just letting the game happen to her, which makes her shame and victimhood all the worse.
Though there are endless, mildly funny double entendres to be made about letting balls in etc, the casual connection, between rape, sex, and a simple game of football, is damaging in that it encourages a skewed culture where women are meant to feel lessened by the sex they have and, yes, actually desire.
What to do about it? Maybe catch yourself next time you try to make that joke. Pornhub made a joke, but it was an apt one, directly comparing Germany's treatment not to sex or rape, but public humiliation:
Perhaps the football fans too lazy to make jokes beyond boring clichés should admit that there just is no joke bigger than the tragedy of a football team losing so badly in a semi-final of the World Cup they were hosting for the first time in 64 years.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.