Tag: language

The pussy-fication of male athletes

I think back to my days playing different sports at various levels of competitiveness . The lessons I learned have been carried on through my life and I have passed many of these lessons on to my kids and as a coach to young competitors. Mantras such as always having the backs of your teammates and never pointing fingers when mistakes are made but rather raising up your brothers/sisters in arms are just a couple of these lessons.

However, one that I have strongly conveyed seems to be getting pushback in the world of safe spaces and trigger warnings. That is the belief that words are just words and they will only hurt you if you allow them to rent space in your head. How one responds in a sports setting will likely be reflected when a person is faced with similar circumstances in the real world.

The recent suspension of Landon Sim, the son of former NHL player, Jon Sim was in a word… ridiculous. The star centre of the London Knights was handed a five-game suspension after an on-ice incident in his team’s Ontario Hockey League conference final match-up with the Saginaw Spirit.

Hockey is a physical game and often players cross the line. Liam Arnsby – captain of the OHL’s North Bay Battalion – was suspended for six games for delivering a hit to the head of Linus Hemstrom during an April 3 game. The hit saw Henstrom taken off on a stretcher after spending several minutes prone on the ice.

Mississauga Steelheads defenceman Stevie Leskovar was suspended four games for an on-ice incident. The blueliner slashed Evan Konyen in the face during a battle after a face-off. Fortunately, Konyen was able to return to the game but the suspension recognized that the possible outcome of such a reckless act could have been much more severe.

So what was Landon Sim’s transgression you may ask? He must have done something worse than slashing an opponent in the face and slightly less egregious than laying out a player with a dangerous hit to the head – the kind of hits that have led to the end of player careers (see former NHL star forward Marc Savard as an example), right?

Well, as it turns out the London Knights forward never actually laid a hand on his “victim”. He made the cardinal sin of inflaming the sensitivities of the woke mob by using a word that the language police deem as “misogynist”. No, he didn’t use the “C” word (as in C-U-Next Tuesday) or even the less offensive but still taboo twat (an aside, I love watching British comedy because both of the aforementioned words are sprinkled in liberally to the dialogue by both men and women). He called his opponent a word commonly used as slang for a cat. Yes, for those of you fellow Gen Xers he used a word that we had as part of the competitive verbal tool kit and used often. He called Saginaw Spirit captain Braden Hache… a pussy.

As I often say context matters. Sim, who had recently recovered from a shoulder injury was responding to a comment made by his opponent. Prior to a face-off Hache said to Sim that he was going to “break your shoulder”. Sim’s response? “No you won’t, you are too much of a pussy to do that”. Really, that is what gets you five games, in the midst of the playoffs no less?

Maybe I shouldn’t admit it  but I would have served an unending/overlapping suspension in every competitive sport I ever played. What was said on the ice or on the pitch, where I played a lot of hockey and soccer respectively, was left on the ice or pitch. Usually we said something that may have gotten your mouth washed out with soap at home in my day (yes, this was a thing and I still can’t get the taste of Irish Spring out of my mouth) but was totally acceptable within the confines of the game.

There were two reasons to dig into our urban dictionary of the day during a game. One was because you were angry, which probably meant the other team was winning. The other was because you wanted to get under the skin of your opponent, which probably meant your team was winning.

We were taught that words were just that… words. When an opponent said something a little offside to you your response was under your control. The player delivering the insult was hoping to illicit a response, preferably a physical one, which would lead to a power play for your team , a yellow card or possibly an ejection/red card.

When you returned to the bench after drawing a penalty or getting a player tossed by using nothing but your words you were greeted with pats on the head from your teammates. You had helped the team. Conversely, if you were the player who allowed something as simple as a word (or words) to get you to lose your cool the coach usually found you a not so nice spot at the end of the bench for an undetermined length of time. Your actions were “undisciplined” and “selfish”. You had hurt the team.

What makes the situation involving Sim which led to his suspension even more disheartening for those who believe the world has lost its collective mind is that the player who threatened to break Sim’s shoulder went to the official to report this unforgiveable verbal act. In the world in which I grew up that person would be known as anything from a tattle-tale to a rat. What’s next, telling his mommy so she can call Landon’s parents and tell them what a bad boy he has been?

For clarity, we never saw the word “pussy” as meaning anything other than soft… like a house cat. When we began using the word I would hazard a guess than none of us boys knew that it was also a slang word for part of the female anatomy. Even if we did know, so what? We called each other dicks all the time.

Do you see the problem here? When we start policing words in sports we will be playing a game of whack-a-mole. My kids use words which may be deemed offside that I have never heard before. Should we choose to police language, we will need to establish a full-time arbiter to keep track of words and deem which are acceptable and which will get you banished.

I am going to say something controversial here. I believe this also applies to race and sexual orientation slurs. I say this as someone who has been subjected to slurs. Yes, white people can be the victim of racism as well.

The difference for me is that I was taught to ignore the words. Sometimes I did – sometimes I didn’t. I learned that  choosing to ignore the attempts to get me off my game was always more preferable given the potential penalties and the spot in the coach’s doghouse.

No, I am not saying that calling someone a racial/gender/gender identity slur is acceptable. All I am saying is that eventually the referee or the teacher or your mom won’t be there to protect you from the words. What we learned is that eventually the words really didn’t matter to us. Now, instead our kids are being sheltered from the realities of the big bad world where there are people who are jerks. Learning that there are people who will say things that are hurtful is a valuable lesson.

In today’s upside down world we are not teaching our children lessons like stand up for yourself; words are just words but rather we are saying be a victim; words are violence.

For the record, the snowflake culture which wants us to believe that words can be equally as damaging as a punch in the face – we can try that experiment if you want. I have been punched in the face and also been called names like pussy, I will gladly take the latter.

One Dad With a Blog

Common sense does not seem so common these days

We are living in some strange times indeed. Safe spaces, words being considered as violence, trigger warnings, collective guilt based on your ethnic origins and/or the colour of your skin. These are just a handful of recent manifestations of collectivist thinking which has led to an increasing absence of critical thought or what was once just referred to as common sense. Simply put, common sense is becoming less and less common in the modern world and that is not something we should applaud as a society.

A Brief History of Common Sense

The history of the term “common sense” can be traced back to the 14th century but truly took hold during the American Revolution during the 18th century. Thomas Paine authored the revolutionary pamphlet Common Sense which had a profound influence on the desire for American independence from Great Britain. The 50-page pamphlet sold over 500,000 copies in a few short months at the beginning of 1776 and paved the way for the ratification of the Declaration of Independence on July 4 of that same year.

Fast forward just over a couple of centuries. I believe the phrase “common sense” began to receive negative reaction from the public and media back in the 1990s. Like many words/phrases which take a negative turn with the average person, politics usually creates that negativity. This stigma, which now seems attached to the term “common sense”, can be traced (at least in Canada) back to the Common Sense Revolution which was a slogan of the Progressive Conservative Party of Ontario when they ran the province from 1995 – 2002. Other countries, such as Australia, adopted similar slogans to combat a growing social democratic movement in western democracies.

Now in the wake of the negative blowback to some of that Mike Harris led PC government’s deep cuts to program funding, it appears that the term “common sense” is now under attack from the extreme left.

“In order to be able to think, you have to risk being offensive.” Jordan B. Peterson

Think about the meaning of this quote carefully. What it means to me is at the very root of a free society that we should all have the right to express ourselves no matter how offended some people may be by what someone says. The idealogues will counter that free speech does not mean mean speech free from consequences. The problem is that exactly who determines what will be the consequences of speech deemed to be offensive? Even further, who is the arbiter of what makes certain speech offensive? After all, what is offensive to one person or group is not offensive to other individuals or groups.

We have learned from historical events that the litmus test for acceptable speech should never be what is supported by the majority of society. Should the standard of “majority rules” have been the case throughout history we would still believe the world is flat, slavery would still be acceptable and women would not be allowed to participate freely in the workforce let alone vote in elections. In all those cases it was a determined and motivated minority who were able to change the status quo. (side note, I find it a troubling occurrence in today’s world that we as a society often judge individuals from 50, 100 or even 200 years ago through today’s moral lens. Maybe this will be a topic for another day).

The best way to counter “bad” or “offensive” speech is always by taking it head-on and engaging with those who speak in a way that is deemed offensive. Said more simply, the best way to counter this type of speech is with more speech – not less. Free speech should not be afforded just to those who share the same opinions and ideals as the majority of society. Should that become the case we will live in a dystopian world similar to the fictional one from George Orwell’s novel 1984 where the thought police tell us what to think and say at all times. Protecting free speech is about protecting all speech not just the speech we support.

There is a further point I often make when speaking with my children as it relates to so-called offensive language. I believe this is even a more important discussion in today’s world of social media which allows people to say things they would never say in-person. Should anyone find themselves in a situation where they are offended by words their first response should not be to silence the alleged perpetrator. Rather, I believe they should look inward to discover why the words are offending them and further, why the person saying them should carry any meaning in their life. Also, assess why the person is using offensive language (for example, in my experience in a debate/argument, ad hominem attacks usually mean the person has no evidence to support their position).

Yes, should the person on the other side of this exchange be a loved one or a close personal friend then the “offensive” words can and often do cause emotional harm. However, should an anonymous person whom we have never met (and likely never will) say something “mean” or “hurtful” we should be teaching our children not to be offended but rather to ask “why does this person’s words matter to me?”. This will help all of us all to compartmentalize personal exchanges and assign the required priority to each exchange. Were we to create a scale from 1-10, with one being insignificant to our life and 10 being extremely important, most exchanges online would likely never rise above a 1 (possibly a 2) on the scale. To be a 10 an exchange would probably be with someone in your direct family and even further with family members who live under the same roof.

Rather than teaching our children absolutely nonsensical things like “words are violence”, I believe we should be teaching them the old adage many of us heard as children – “sticks and stones may break my bones – but words will never hurt me”.

One Dad With a Blog