Harvard Women Take a Public Stand Against ‘Locker Room Talk’

When the women of Harvard University’s female soccer team read the “scouting report” that male players had written describing their bodies and ranking their sex appeal, they were hurt. The report, the women wrote in a commentary last week, was “disgusting,” “appalling,” and “an aberrant display of misogyny.”

But in the opinion piece, published as an op-ed in The Harvard Crimson, the women said they refused to be anonymous or ashamed.

“We do not pity ourselves, nor do we ache most because of the personal nature of this attack,” wrote all six of the former players who made up the 2012 recruiting class of Harvard’s women’s soccer team. Instead, the women who were the initial subjects of the men’s team’s sexual descriptions, called themselves “successful, powerful, and undeniably brilliant female athletes.” And, they added, “This document might have stung any other group of women you chose to target, but not us.”

The strong public statement by the women, all of whom graduated last spring, is unusual because the former players signed their names. And, instead of identifying as victims, they positioned themselves as activists, pressing for broader change.

“There seems to be a new ability for women to speak up about these things and not accept the idea of sitting quietly or anonymously or feeling ashamed or humiliated or degraded by what happened,” says Rebecca F. Plante, an associate professor of sociology at Ithaca College, who studies sexuality and gender.

A prominent example of this, Ms. Plante says, is the woman who has come to be known as “Emily Doe.” She publicly released the letter she read aloud last year at the sentencing of Brock Turner, a former Stanford University swimmer who was found guilty of sexually assaulting her, describing what the attack had meant to her. In an essay published this month in Glamour, she followed up with another strong message: “Victims are not victims, not some fragile, sorrowful aftermath. Victims are survivors, and survivors are going to be doing a hell of a lot more than surviving.”

Her activism, Ms. Plante says, may have helped pave the way for the Harvard women to speak out.

“The Harvard women were the ones who were being objectified,” says Ms. Plante. “But they said, We’re going to out ourselves. We’re going to say who we are and make it clear we won’t tolerate this and we won’t be victims of the men’s soccer team.”

Not only did the women say they wouldn’t be victims, they asked the men’s team to join them in “combating this type of behavior.”

The men’s team was suspended last week and its season cut short following a university investigation of the “scouting report.” The report apparently had been started as a Google document in 2012 and was updated in subsequent seasons, including this year. It included ratings of the women’s bodies and jokes about their preferred sex positions.

The men’s soccer team issued an apology on Friday. In it, they said that they were “deeply ashamed” and that they intended to take up the call issued by the female players to combat issues of sexism and misogyny, within their own locker room and more broadly.

“Starting with ourselves, all players on this team now commit our efforts to spur a cultural change that goes beyond the scope of our own team,” they wrote in the Crimson. “We wholeheartedly promise to do anything in our power to build a more respectful and harmonious athletic field, classroom, and Harvard community.”

Jennifer Baumgardner, executive director of the Feminist Press, based at the City University of New York, said the commentary by the Harvard women was important because it offered male players a chance to “not just be perpetrators, but be part of the solution.”

What the male soccer players at Harvard wrote about the women’s bodies isn’t new, says Ms. Baumgardner. What was different, she says, is that the university shined a light on the behavior and punished the team. And the women who were the objects of the sexual remarks asked the public not to rehash the team’s actions, but to think about what everyone could do differently.

The six women who wrote the commentary in the Crimson said on Friday that they were declining further interviews. Instead, they issued another statement.

“We hope that people will focus on our positive messages of strength, unity, mutual respect, and forgiveness,” the women wrote in an email. “We are hopeful that all of this can lead to productive conversation and action on Harvard’s campus, within collegiate athletic teams across the country, and into the locker room that is our world.”

A Wider Problem?

Drew G. Faust, Harvard’s president, has raised questions about whether traditions like the soccer team’s “scouting report” are part of a wider problem. The university’s athletics director, she told the Crimson, has brought together coaches to discuss their teams’ cultures.

On Saturday, the Crimson reported that problems apparently had existed elsewhere within Harvard athletics. Past men’s cross-country teams, the newspaper found, had produced yearly spreadsheets about an annual dance with members of the women’s team, sometimes writing sexually explicit comments about them. The team culture has since changed, the men’s team captain said in an interview with The Crimson, and no lewd comments exist on the 2016 spreadsheet.

Rakesh Khurana, the dean of Harvard College, said in a statement emailed to the Crimson that he didn’t know details about the cross-country spreadsheets. “We must strive toward a culture and context of respect, dignity, and compassion,” he wrote, “and all of us have a role to play in that work.”

Throughout their college careers, students — and athletes in particular — are required to take part in many training sessions about sexual misconduct, including online programs, videos, and group discussions. The fact that the male soccer players at Harvard, who are some of the brightest college students in the country, could write a report ranking women’s bodies, may sound shocking. But victims’ advocates and female professors who teach about sex assault say it isn’t. “Smart doesn’t have anything to do with attitude,” says Connie Kirkland, director of sexual-assault services at Northern Virginia Community College. “They may feel entitled.”

Training sessions, say female professors and administrators, don’t necessarily stop aberrant behavior.

“I don’t think universities know how to tell students to act,” says Ms. Baumgardner, “any more than their parents did.”

Perhaps more than training sessions, it is punishing students who misbehave that will get people’s attention, says Elizabeth A. Armstrong, a professor of sociology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor who teaches a class about university responses to sexual violence. “The cancellation of the men’s season,” she says, “that’s what’s gonna work — the fact that the institution really doesn’t condone this and there will be meaningful consequences for bad behavior.”

The Harvard men aren’t the first, of course, to get in trouble for sexually explicit remarks. In October 2010, Yale University students pledging a fraternity repeatedly yelled: “No means yes, yes means anal” outside Yale’s Women’s Center. The university banned the fraternity from campus.

The Sigma Nu chapter at Old Dominion University was suspended last year after members hung a series of sexually suggestive posters on their off-campus house during student move-in day. “Rowdy and fun! Hope your baby girl is ready for a good time,” said one. “Freshman daughter drop off,” said another. And “Go ahead and drop off mom too.”

Carol Tavris, a social psychologist who’s written extensively about gender, says the existence of the scouting report at Harvard is “plain, old normal group behavior.”

“The young men were behaving like young men, which is to say, assuming a chummy camaraderie based on their own insecure sexuality and inexperience,” she adds. Rarely, she says, do men — even adult men — call out their peers for that kind of behavior. Doing so would mean being ostracized.

Sexual remarks like those in the scouting report, says Ms. Tavris, aren’t about the women involved, or even about sex. “It’s about showing your fellow males,” she says, “that you are all male, one of the guys, a real man.”

Public humiliation and even punishment won’t change offensive behavior either, says Ms. Tavris. “It will just become even more private.”

“A person has to get why this stuff is harmful,” she says, “and get why they shouldn’t speak this way.”

One thing that may help change behavior, though, says Alexandra Brodsky, a fellow at the National Women’s Law Center, is peer pressure. In the Harvard case, she says, “it’s clear there are not just official university repercussions, but social repercussions. That hits just as hard, if not harder.”

Robin Wilson writes about campus culture, including sexual assault and sexual harassment. Contact her at robin.wilson@chronicle.com.