On Leeds, Karen Carney & Me
As a female writer in the sports journalism industry, criticism is something you find in every comments section for every piece. Some well-intentioned — a stat you misused or a player’s name you misspelt — some more patronizing in tone, others very bluntly prejudiced.
It’s a way of online life you become accustomed to — the nature of social media platforms is to give people the freedom to throw sexist slurs in an unrelenting manner just because you decided to stray from the kitchen and brave the writing fray.
Which is why the tweet published from the official Leeds United Twitter account, targeting Karen Carney’s post-match analysis on The Whites’ previous season is personally upsetting.
Sure, perhaps Carney’s phrasing wasn’t exactly perfect. The reaction, however, from Leeds blew things out of proportion.
It wasn’t just the tweet encouraging 660,000 followers to pile onto the former Chelsea midfielder. It wasn’t just the words of president Andrea Radrizzani that failed to acknowledge the wrong that had occurred. It wasn’t just Leeds players like Mateusz Klich jumping on the band-wagon with a jibe of his own while the abusive messages — ‘slut’, ‘slag’, ‘bitch’ to name a few — poured in.
The most alarming thing to surface out of this absolute steaming heap of shit is the ignorance, the lack of awareness of the consequences for Carney — and all women — and the inability to comprehend what it feels like to be a female on the other side of such an abhorrent stream of abuse.
It’s something that I’ve only experienced to this degree once in my life, and it was enough to force me to wonder whether or not rising up to the sexism and gender discrimination online is worth it. Whether I could face having to absorb abuse just because of the article I wrote about a sporting star, in this case one Cristiano Ronaldo.
“She said that she didn’t want to… she kept saying no. ‘Don’t do it’ — ‘I’m not like the others.’ I apologized afterwards.”
With the Portuguese (still) facing credible rape allegations at the hand of Kathryn Mayorga while simultaneously being hero-worshipped for his Champions League feats, I took to the internet to voice my feelings, to make people aware that while we give players a God-like status, they are not above the law. Kathryn’s case had to be heard regardless of how many goals he’d scored.
What resulted was abuse in a manner that, as a female writer in the industry, I’d never faced.
It started with the expected replies under the article tweet, but very swiftly progressed to death threats in direct messages telling me that I ‘needed to be raped’.
Fake Instagram and Twitter accounts then followed with my name and pictures used, sending the most graphically sexual messages to friends, family and work-places. The peak of it all was when I was approached by a man in a real-life setting who brought up the article in a sinister manner. I happened to be among friends.
It took a good few weeks, countless people online reporting the abuse, and a huge effort on my part for the saga to end. And even then, it’s something that still remains with me, something that makes me hesitate whenever I’m about to tweet something I feel particularly passionate about.
Though the matter with Leeds and Carney may not be over something as controversial, the point still stands. That something that is simply about what happens on the pitch can result in the same amount of abuse as my own personal experience. The sorry state is that no matter what the circumstance, women will always be at fault, and always on the other side of the picket fence.
The resolve should not lie in women being more careful in what they say just because a club social media account or a fan-base may out you for what you believe needs to be voiced. We shouldn’t need to hide what we think, or even ponder that articles such as these may need to be posted anonymously to protect ourselves from online abuse (something which I have considered with this piece).
Social media club accounts like Leeds need to instead stand up and acknowledge their actions, gain a deeper understanding of the consequences, and start acting as allies, not enemies, to women in sport.
