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You don’t have to spend much time around certain football fans or on places like Twitter to be witness to blatant sexism. This is already pretty common knowledge, though.
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When nobody is calling that behaviour out, it’s very easy for an echo chamber to be created where everyone thinks it’s completely fine. The NUS report That’s What She Said described contemporary laddism as being “founded upon a trio of drinking, football, and fucking,” and pointed out that links between lad culture and sexual violence have been highlighted by research which found that people “often could not differentiate between the language used by convicted sex offenders and ‘lads’ magazines to describe women,” further suggesting that such magazines functioned to give violent language a “respectable veneer.” Basically, a significant chunk of football fans seem to be trapped in the distant past in terms of their attitudes towards women, and the culture around football supports it.
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The reason I mention all this is because a significant chunk of football fans participate in “lad culture,” which is closely related to rape culture in regards to attitudes surrounding women and sex. There are more details to the case that make the whole thing more complex, and while we’ll probably never know if Ronaldo committed the crimes he is accused of, it would not be a first to see somebody with extreme wealth and power get away with a heinous crime. Ronaldo has strongly and consistently denial of all allegations, and the Las Vegas Police concluded that the claims “could not be proven beyond reasonable doubt,” but rape is a notoriously difficult crime to prove and the star athlete is hardly going to simply confess. Cristiano Ronaldo, who also plays for Manchester United, has faced rape allegations himself from an American woman, and a lot of the general public and football fans aren’t even aware of it. You don’t have to look much further to find more evidence of rape culture, either. Behaviours such as sexual objectification, trivialising rape, and the denial of widespread rape are huge red flags, and they are behaviours that rapists and people guilty of sex crimes often participate in – as well as being major elements of rape culture, which is why you should always call people out if you witness it. On the flip side, though, it does make one wonder if anyone knew about (or suspected) their actions before it came into the public eye. Thankfully, to their credit, the respective clubs have handled the situation as best they could, cutting ties with the players as much as they are legally allowed to and condemning the behaviour. Another recent major story was the arrest of Manchester City player Benjamin Mendy, who was charged with seven counts of rape and one count of sexual assault against five different women. The recent arrest of Mason Greenwood following allegations of sexual assault and rape is one of many similar stories in the footballing world in the last few months.