Trolling of the belle
AFLW star Tayla Harris has put the troglodytes firmly in their place. Pity about the response from AFL boss Gillon McLachlan.
It was a shot for the ages, an image that showed Australian women’s sport precisely where it is right now.
She’s aloft.
Women are flying!
Female athletes are ascendant on the world stage, in the mainstream media, with sponsors, and in the public’s imagination.
And she looked so freaking focused. AFLW star Tayla Harris had her eyes on the prize, in this case, a goal from 40m out. She knew what she had to do — up there, Cazaly — and she was going for it.
So the photograph got posted, and the first comments were appreciative: “What a stretch!”
But of course the trolls weren’t far behind, posting lewd comments.
How trolls roll
What exactly was said about the image? You can skip the next few paragraphs if you don’t want to know. One troll looked at the photo and wrote: “About an inch away from seeing the full ham sandwich.”
That’s a reference to the footballer’s genitals. Shortly after came a photo of a ham sandwich, contents spilling.
One man said of the image: “Anyone else enlarge it to try to see up her shorts?” There was a comment about Hannah Mouncey — a transgender athlete who has played women’s football — along the lines of what the photographer might have captured (“a pork log sticking out of her shorts”) if she’d been photographed similarly.
If you’re horrified about any of that, rest assured, it’s situation normal for women online. Actually, for women in politics, at work, in life. Women still feel harassed and nervous in the workplace, where they routinely are looked up and down, disparaged, or whistled at, occasionally groped, plus they are woefully underpaid, and rarely in positions of power.
Not that power helps: two politicians — one Labor, one Green — have sued for defamation this year after being slut-shamed at work. It happens to journalists — one recently had a NSW politician put his hand in her pants, and she felt as if she couldn’t complain. It probably happens in every coolroom behind every bar in the country.
Culture of misogyny
Misogyny — that’s what this is — is part of the culture, which is why all that really matters in this story is what happened next: @7AFL took the image down.
They censored the image.
Erased the woman.
Threw a shroud over female athleticism.
Took down one of precious few examples of a woman not standing with a trophy but actually playing sport.
You can perhaps see why: it was easier to remove the picture than try to moderate the comments because that’s like whack-a-mole. You hit one, another one pops up.
As Bridie O’Donnell, director at the Office for Women in Sport and Recreation, told The Weekend Australian: “Every single woman with any kind of public profile in Australia will know what kind of task they had in front of them. You have to go through, and moderate, and delete, and block, and take down, and it’s ugly and nobody wants to be exposed to it but that’s what you’ve got to do because otherwise they win.”
There are comment moderation programs — we use them at The Weekend Australian — but they are designed to pick up swear words. “Ham sandwich” and “pork log” — and for that matter “beef curtains” and “where Mummy got hit with the axe” and all the other crap women routinely deal with — just aren’t on the list.
Tayla’s retort
But Tayla wasn’t having it. She fought back. She reposted the image, saying: “Here’s a pic of me at work … think about this before your derogatory comments, animals.”
And she’s dead right.
The picture wasn’t the problem.
The trolls were the problem.
The picture didn’t have to come down.
The comments should have come down.
In a radio interview the next day, Tayla described the comments as “sexual abuse on social media … it was repulsive, and it made me uncomfortable”.
As responses to trolling go, this was brilliant, and 100 per cent accurate. You can’t criticise a woman’s genitals and have it dismissed as anything other than a workplace safety issue. It’s not something that can be treated like water off a duck’s back. It may have an impact on Tayla’s ability to do her job. Next time she leaps, what’s on her mind? Tayla’s a tough cookie, but not everyone’s tough, and why should anyone have to suffer through it?
Of the trolls, Tayla says: “I can see (on their profiles) they’ve got kids, or they’ve got daughters or women in their photos … If people are saying things like this to someone they don’t know on a public platform, what are they saying behind closed doors? This is the start of domestic violence.”
Again, 100 per cent accurate: violence against women starts with the mindset that declares: women aren’t human beings. They are body parts, ripe for mocking. Then for hitting and maybe for strangling, raping and leaving for dead on the side of the road.
Tayla can’t have known what kind of response she’d get, standing up to bullies, but clearly the tide has turned sufficiently in Australian public life, meaning there are enough women now in positions of seniority or at least relative security to push back. And they stormed into the space she created.
Retired track cycling champion Anna Meares was first to leap, tweeting: “How this incredible image of Tayla Harris by Michael Willson was seen as negative, and drew trolls to comment, and the AFL took it down ASTOUNDS ME.” She wanted to “share it proudly” and did.
Fellow AFLW player Darcy Vescio made three of the most salient points:
● Deleting the post is giving in to trolls.
● You’re eliminating all the positive conversation.
● You’re removing more content around women in sport, of which there’s already so little.
Before long everyone was sharing the image and celebrating it.
Public victory
That Tayla was able to score such a public victory over the mob is interesting. For years, women simply weren’t allowed to compete in sports (the first modern Olympics, in 1896, was men only; the first female marathoner didn’t arrive until Los Angeles 1984) and it’s only really this century that women have stormed in record numbers into the “non-traditional” areas such as AFL but also soccer and cricket.
Louise Evans, communications director for Women Sport Australia, the peak national advocacy body for women in sport, says: “Women have struggled to get media attention, they have struggled to be taken seriously.
“But now they are having incredible success around the world — the Matildas, the women’s cricket team winning the World Cup and now women’s AFL is gaining ground — so we suddenly have all these images of strong, fit, athletic women playing sport, and for some men that is challenging.
“We saw it in December, when Ada Hegerberg was named best footballer in the world. She came up on stage to collect the award, and the presenter said: ‘How about a twerk?’
“Tayla’s situation involves the same mindset. We have an amazing photograph, amazing athlete, in a skilled, strong pose, and it’s not ‘Wow, what an amazing athlete’, it’s ‘Look, you can see her crotch’.”
Quick kill
Evans says Seven AFL “pulled the image down because that’s the quickest way to kill it”.
“But of course, it’s the wrong response, and good on them, they put it back up,” she says. “But even better, we applaud the AFL integrity unit. They have now launched an investigation to see who was making the comments. They’re going to track them down and remove their club membership, ban them from games, and that’s great, because that is going to hurt and the best way to change culture is to give it some teeth.”
AFLW boss Nicole Livingstone — a former swimmer and Olympic silver medallist — apologised for the takedown, saying her team has since worked around the clock to keep the image up and unsullied.
AFL disappointing
The response by AFL boss Gillon McLachlan, by contrast, was pretty disappointing. He called on the “general public” to be held accountable. “It’s an open platform, so that can happen. It’s a challenging space. I know the guys work hard to moderate and take comments down. It’s a big wide world out there.”
A stronger show of support was necessary. Cultural change requires grassroots support, but also leadership.
Here’s something that may help: Women’s Sport Australia this year launched the Women in Sport Photo Action Awards for photographs that showcase “the strength, skill and athleticism” of female athletes.
Says Evans: “It’s a national award, it’s backed by Nikon, who will put up the prizes, and the purpose is to ingrain in the public and in media that they are not fitness models. They are strong. They are fit. They are athletes, and this is what they look like in action.”
Girls in the game
Yes, women sweat. They train and they strain, they thrash themselves out there, and more every day just love doing it.
Says O’Donnell: “I know there’s a lot of talk about women on the world stage, but I’m just being blown away by women’s participation.
“Right now in Victoria, women and girls are playing in huge numbers in what were non-traditional sports, even five to 10 years ago. We’re seeing inclusion: families previously couldn’t afford to play, families from different backgrounds, of different races, who didn’t feel as included.
“They’re all getting out there, and it’s just fantastic.”
Women’s AFL in particular has proven immensely popular. From pretty much a standing start, they’ve suddenly got 30,000 registered players. A capacity crowd of 24,568 attended the first AFLW match, between Carlton and Collingwood on February 3, 2017.
Footage of the lanky McLachlan having to go outside and turn disappointed fans away was, for many of the women who made it happen, one of the most satisfying moments of the year.
Women’s overdue win
And the media is catching up. The Australian women’s cricket team scored the back page of pretty much every newspaper in the country when they won the T20 World Cup. The Matildas will go to the soccer World Cup in June, and you’ll definitely hear about it. Plenty of female athletes are now household names: Ellyse Perry, Alyssa Healy, Sam Kerr, Stephanie Gilmore, Ash Barty.
It seems women are having a moment. In truth, they’ve always been there. Evonne Goolagong and Shane Gould and Raelene Boyle and Cathy Freeman — we like ’em! We always did. We want to see them compete and we want to see them win, and wouldn’t it be great to be able to so do without the inane commentary?
In the meantime, Tayla’s back at work again today — 2.45pm at Ikon Park in Melbourne’s Carlton North — so if you want to show your support, get yourself there.
Tayla will be the one soaring high above the crowd, and above the fray.