Pat Forde's Gender Trouble

On February 19, regular espn.com columnist Pat Forde, who focuses on college football in the fall and men’s college basketball during the winter, voiced concern about the prospect of viewing the Memphis men's basketball team as "America's team." His concerns were based on a number of incidents involving members of the team and their coach, John Calipari. Among these incidents, Forde noted violence toward women on the part of Memphis player Robert Dozier. Yet, a week later, in his February 26 column, Forde himself said that “Siena [men's basketball coach] Fran McCaffery apparently needs to fit his wife, Margaret (37), with a muzzle." While it is important to address incidents of violence by men toward women like the incident involving Robert Dozier, it also important to look at the ways in which men, women, and their interactions are discussed and represented. Forde’s statement about Margaret McCaffery suggests that violence toward women is acceptable and, thus, helps to perpetuate the problem and reinforce a culture in which such violence is seen as acceptable.

This is further reinforced by the ways in which Forde routinely talks about women in his column. Every “Forde Yard Dash” column during college football season contains reference to a woman who meets many of society’s norms for attractiveness. Each woman is mentioned as that week’s “Dashette.” (For an example, see toward the end of the webpage here.) During men’s basketball season, each “Minutes” column also features a reference to and a picture of a woman who meets many of society’s norms for attractiveness, with Kentucky men’s basketball fan Ashley Judd making numerous appearances, including by picture and/or written reference in his February 19 and February 26 columns. In the February 19 column (the same column in which he mentions the incident involving Robert Dozier), Forde refers to Judd as “First Minutes girl,” repeating the cultural pattern of referring to women as “girls” and, thus, infantilizing women—a pattern in which Forde regularly engages. (A notable example occurs in the January 22 column, where Forde uses the term to refer to a woman who cried when the North Carolina men’s basketball team lost to Maryland. Here he refers to the woman as “Carolina Girl” and uses part of the column to remark derogatorily on expressions of sadness at a men’s basketball game in January, linking this, in part, to female identity.) In his February 19 column, Forde adds that Pamela Anderson was recently spotted attending a Pepperdine men’s basketball game and, as a student of mine astutely pointed out in my Gender and Communication course today, Forde reinforces stereotypes of women and women’s roles by framing his discussion of Judd and Anderson in this column with the statement “College basketball bleachers got a whole lot prettier last week, when a pair of hotties showed up to cheer for their favorite teams.”

Forde seems like a rather liberal or liberal-leaning guy, based on a number of issues that he has raised and some more explicit political statements that have appeared in his columns (for an example, see this column, which also contains yet another of those Ashley Judd references). This would seem to align him with issues of women’s rights (though, not necessarily, I suppose). Yet, Forde continually uses language that marginalizes women and, in the process, engages in practices that continue to feed a culture that teaches men that treating women as lesser human beings is acceptable. I believe that the proliferation of these kinds of cultural norms is a very significant factor in the continuing prominence of gender discrimination and gendered violence. Until we look much more fully at such cultural norms and the everyday practices that teach and reinforce them, it’s hard to expect greater degrees of improvement. While Forde’s February 19 column, in small part, comments on the mistreatment of women, he (and this goes for all of us in American culture in general) needs to be much fuller in examining the ways in which he contributes to that mistreatment himself.