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On the same day that the good people at The Womens Game reached their crowd-funding target to begin their own online show, controversy broke over Holger Osiek’s “off the cuff” remarks.
“Women should shut up in public” said Holger at a Socceroos post-match press conference. “I say it to my wife at home.” Charming.
He would have been wiser to have kept it as a private joke.
Yesterday wasn’t a great day for gender equality in Australia. As Holger hurriedly apologised for his remarks, news broke about a menu at a Liberal Party function which crudely referenced Prime Minister Julia Gillard’s physical appearance in a chicken dish.
It’s since been claimed that the menus never made it too the tables at the function, and was all an in-house joke among the staff.
Maybe so, but anybody who has hung around Liberal Party types long enough wouldn’t have been particularly surprised if they were behind the offending menus.
Predictably, many people simply wrote off the subsequent outrage as “political correctness gone mad.”
Those beige, predictable keyboard warriors are about as boring as Holger Osiek’s tactics. As my favourite punk poet, Attila the Stockbroker, once wrote about the use of the term “politically correct”,
“You’ll find that most who use the term/ will only do so to affirm/ sad outdated bigoted views/ they’ve swallowed via the Murdoch news.”
It’s not “politically correct” to call a spade a spade. While Holger Osiek might have been only joking around, his words still offended many people. If it’d been the first time anyone had ever made a sexist remark in football, perhaps it would have allowed to let slide. But it wasn’t, and you can bet it won’t be the last.
The sad thing is, joke or no joke, Holger’s comments ran against the grain of the direction our game seems to be heading.
With more women and girls playing football than ever before, we should be affording as much space as possible for women to have their voices heard.
The Matildas are a national treasure, and are already more successful than the Socceroos.
One of their former stars, Moya Dodd, now sits on FIFA’s executive committee.
Some of our best and brightest football journalists and bloggers, including Bonita Mersiades, Kathy Stone, Kate Cohen, Kate Lamberski and Ann Ondong are all women.
Not that they are given as much space or opportunity to write as us men.
As Wendy Bacon pointed out in her recent media analysis in New Matilda, women don’t get much of a look in, especially when it comes to sport.
Sometimes sport can seem like a black hole when it comes to issues like sexism, racism and homophobia. It needn’t be the case.
Osiek has apologised for his comments, and hopefully he realises the reasons why they are offensive.
Like racism, sexism feeds off apathy and silence. It feeds off the self-indulgence of the “political correctness gone mad” crowd.
Still, simply hanging Holger misses the forest for the trees. The struggle against these outdated attitudes shouldn’t simply be occasional show-trials of individuals.
Calling someone to account for sexist, racist or homophobic remarks is only the beginning.
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