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Dirk Hayhurst is Not All Men

Former bad pitcher and current baseball talker Dirk Hayhurst recently caused a certain amount of sensation on the internet by writing a piece in Sports on Earth about misogyny in baseball, specifcally among minor leaguers. The piece itself is disturbing in its rather graphic descriptions of sexual assault and rape, and I don’t really recommend anyone read it for that reason.

Since the piece was published, Hayhurst has taken a beating on twitter for not speaking up at the time. He defends himself by describing the baseball culture he was in:




First, I agree with the people condemning Hayhurst. He definitely shouldn’t have stayed silent. Other people have already discussed this in depth and it’s not necessary to repeat their words.

Hayhurst wrote his piece in reaction to the public outcry regarding the NFL’s weak condemnation of Ray Rice beating the shit out of his then-girlfriend (now wife). "You think this problem is limited to the NFL?" Hayhurst is saying. "Look at what happens in baseball."

This is where the entire discussion loses its focus for me.

Football and baseball (and hockey and basketball and fraternities and drumline and brony conventions and blogs and online games and twitter and tumblr and concerts and) are part of a society we all have to share, more or less. This society is, unfortunately for both women and men, overflowing with what feminists call rape culture. In rape culture, women are devalued. We are considered to be less than fully human, with our own agency, we become only what men think (or don’t think) of our bodies. We are not the main characters in our own stories, we are only the props, the object lessons for men.

Dirk Hayhurst is working on this concept, but based on his piece, this is something he still doesn’t get. He’s figured out that it’s wrong to assault and rape women, but he continues to think within the framework of rape culture. He describes in ugly detail how a girl he’d admired was gang raped by his teammates - do you think he asked her permission before relating that story? He gave her a fake name, but do you think he considered that maybe, just maybe, she would prefer he not tell a story about what was probably one of the worst experiences of her life to the entire internet? Does Dirk Hayhurst realize that for her, this was not an an object lesson on how to treat people, a subplot in his next book?

I doubt it.

To be honest, I was not surprised by Hayhurst’s piece. Groups of young men raised in rape culture on their own with very few moderating influences? Yeah, that’s pretty much exactly what I expect. But the focus is all wrong. They didn’t assault women because they were minor league ballplayers, they did it because they were raised by rape culture to think that this was acceptable behavior. Ray Rice isn’t an abuser because he’s a football player - he’s an abuser because he was raised in a society where knocking out your girlfriend is not considered particularly heinous.

Hayhurst and his fellow critics of abusive masculinity in sports are a mixed blessing. It’s good that the discussion is happening at all. But limiting it to sports is unfortunate and has the unintended consequence of implying that only big burly athletic guys who spend a lot of time in hypermasculine society can be abusive. I know from unfortunately personal experience that this is the farthest thing from the truth.

I was going to tell you a highly personal story here, but as it turns out I don’t really want to right now. I’m glad I have that choice. Fortunately, Dirk Hayhurst wasn’t around at the time.

If we want to remove the ugly misogynist treatment of women in sports, it will behoove us to not act like ugly misogyny treatment of women is limited in some way to sports.

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