Between heresy and humor: The rites of abuse in the “trial” of Stephen Milne

Women’s Studies International Forum xxx (xxxx) xxx

Contents lists available at ScienceDirect

Women's Studies International Forum journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/wsif

Between heresy and humor: The rites of abuse in the “trial” of Stephen Milne Rachel V. Hirsch Monash University

A B S T R A C T

When Mick Malthouse, a (former) AFL senior coach, was reported in 2010 to have called Stephen Milne, a player from the opposition team, a “fucking rapist” during a televised match, these words threatened football with an act of heresy that would unmask a connection between Australian football and rape. In the public “trial” of Stephen Milne, which spans a decade, the performative effect of words uttered and by whom reveals the extraordinary life of a single utterance to transform what was a dropped investigation in 2004, to rape charges some years later and, finally, a guilty plea of indecent assault. What is distinct about this case is the way in which the female victim of indecent assault continues to be displaced and erased throughout the narrative discourse. Public debate is instead reduced to the permissibility or impermissibility of abusive speech acts in Australian football. When it comes to the ritualized practices of abuse in football, the figure of Stephen Milne can be seen to represent a magical boundary between heresy and humor. Through an analysis of online football fan responses to the Malthouse-Milne episode, the symbolic relationship between verbal abuse and sexual abuse in Australian football is revealed.

When they deliver his I shall give them a :spade: to dig the bloody hole so they can bury him. When the AFL is rid of Milne then can once again be played as it should be.1 1. Introduction The protracted public “trial” of Stephen Milne, a former Australian Football League (AFL) player from the St Kilda Football Club, spans ten years, from 2004 to 2014, and, in extraordinary ways, comes to exem­ plify some of the serious impediments to prosecuting elite footballers for sexual assault in Australia. Milne was first accused of rape in 2004, in circumstances of “partner-swapping” in which the complainant believed she was having sex with Milne’s teammate Leigh Montagna (DPP V Milne 2014). However, it was not until 2013 that Milne was formally charged with rape, which was soon downgraded, for reasons unknown to the public, to a lesser offense of indecent assault. Milne pled guilty to this charge under a plea-bargaining agreement (DPP V Milne 2014). In November 2014, Milne was successful in his plea hearing, avoiding a recording of conviction. He was instead fined A$15,000. The legal response to this matter comes to overshadow the woman at the center of this ten-year ordeal, emphasizing instead the public abuse directed against her alleged attacker by football fans at games. What is unique about the case of Milne is the precise way in which

public debate over his 2004 rape allegation re-emerged in April 2010 when a senior coach from the Collingwood Football Club, Mick Malt­ house, reportedly called him a “fucking rapist” during a televised match. The public and online responses to this event present a departure from the more public “trial” reserved for the women who allege rape against high-profile men (what Andrea Dworkin (1997, 55) refers to as the “third rape”). It also remains significantly distinct from the more com­ mon “trial by media” that had previously protected Australian foot­ ballers from accountability and responsibility for sexual assault (Waterhouse-Watson, 2009). While a “trial by media” involves a “dy­ namic, impact-driven, news media-led process by which individuals … are tried and sentenced in the ‘court of public opinion’” (Greer & McLaughlin, 2011), the new media response, the online technologies of social media, has the potential to open up entire theatrics of debating and deliberating, of competing discourses. The “trial” that I locate in this paper is, thus, an unofficial one; it concerns the power of words and of what they reveal – about football, masculinity, and sexual violence. As Michael Salter (2013, 2) warns, however, these “online counter-publics” can be just as bound to the status-quo (or the “hegemonic public sphere”) as the mainstream media. In this paper, I examine the “trial” of Milne through the perspective of online football fans on BigFooty.com, a popular online AFL fan forum. The debate around the event of Malthouse’s alleged insult of “rapist”

E-mail address: [email protected]. Collingwood supporter 1, Is Mick in Trouble? (online) 11 April 2010 (last accessed 15 May 2013). 1

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2020.102422 Received 29 November 2018; Received in revised form 29 October 2020; Accepted 8 November 2020 0277-5395/© 2020 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Please cite this article as: Rachel V. Hirsch, Women’s Studies International Forum, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.wsif.2020.102422

R.V. Hirsch

Women’s Studies International Forum xxx (xxxx) xxx

relegates the very question of rape in Australian football to the imper­ missibility or permissibility of an on-field abusive taunt, an act referred to in the game as “sledging.” I argue that the ritualized practices of abuse in Australian football, that informally regulate abusive speech acts, frame the discourses of rape and criminality in the football fan online community. It is the figure of Stephen Milne who sits precariously be­ tween heresy and humor, between an injurious act of speech that threatens to impugn both male reputation and the institution of football (Section 2) or a playful exchange of comic banter that is simply part of the game (Section 4). Such debate exposes the discursive strategy of female displacement or deprivation that, Nina Philadelphoff-Puren ar­ gues, leaves rape complainants unsymbolized, unhoused and outside all relation (2004, 37). The twofold fan responses on Big Footy, that either rebuke Malthouse for heresy (Section 2) or defend him through a logic of masculinity (Section 3), together succeed in erasing the female victim of indecent assault and alleged rape from the public narrative by placing her outside the ritualized laws of football. The permissibility of the sledge in the “official” AFL discourses, especially with regard to the rules of abusive sledging, go even further, reducing rape to the ludic function of a taunt (Section 4). This serves to normalize footballer rape allegation as a trivial matter, positioning the female victim as an object of rape humor. In the final section, I argue, who breaks the rules governing abuse in AFL football, and why, determines who is to receive final accountability in the legal judgment of Stephen Milne’s decade-long case. Through a feminist application of critical sociologist and social theorist Pierre Bourdieu (1990, 1991, 2001), this paper explores the textual and linguistic process through which male fans as a collective are socially implicated in ritualized practices of abuse that serve to uphold masculine domination. This has a profound effect on how women at the center of footballer rape allegations are treated both in the sporting context and the legal sphere. I draw upon speech-act theory to weigh the potential success of Malthouse’s reported utterance (“you’re a fucking rapist”); integrating Pierre Bourdieu (1991) and Judith Butler’s (1997, 1999) understanding of Austin’s (1962) theory of the performative. The discussion traces a logic of masculinity that serves to redeem Malthouse, structuring the two competing readings in ways that protect the sanctity of the game from the public disgrace of rape allegation. It is in the dynamism of online technologies, of social media as a deliberate space for both community and dissent, that offers renewed ways of examining not only the relationship between online and public abuse, but the symbolic relationships around verbal and sexual abuse in Australian football. The theoretical sampling of the Big Footy discussion threads offers an interpretive textual analysis of the gendered themes specifically related to Stephen Milne and the resurrection of his 2004 allegation via the Malthouse episode. A textual analysis in the tradition of Norman Fair­ clough (1992) recognizes the interconnection between the form and quality of a text (i.e. its distinct vocabularies, grammar, and metaphors, etc.) and the intertextual properties that are realized herein (1992, 195). The methodology of this project did not set out to look exclusively at male fans. Instead during data sampling of the discussion threads related to Stephen Milne and the Malthouse episode, there was a predominance of a language of masculinity that remained significantly unchallenged on the Big Footy forum, an issue also recognized in online fan scholar­ ship (Kian et al., 2011). Through theoretical saturation, a method that uses “theoretical reflection on data as the guide to whether more data are needed” (Bryman, 2012, 420), I was alerted to a deeper logic at work in the way that many fans interpreted the game. I then cross-referenced their individual posts to confirm their chosen status on Big Footy (e.g. “Male from Melbourne”). This included the context in which they told their stories, that provided information as to whether or not others on Big Footy also recognized them as men. In total, I examined select posts from 211 pages of discussion threads and 5275 individual posts (which constituted part of a larger project). I retain the anonymity of each fan, avoiding their chosen online

pseudonyms (see Cleland, 2015), in favor of identifying them through club affiliation (for example, Collingwood supporter 1, Collingwood supporter 2). It is important to note that Big Footy is a heavily moder­ ated site, especially when it comes to rape allegations involving elite footballers. This has the effect of shaping particular types of discourses over more overt forms of victim-blaming. The result allowed the figure of Milne to occupy the liminal space between heresy and humor, framing the narrative away from the criminality of rape and instead toward the permissibility of ritualized practices of abuse in football. While Kevin Dixon (2012, 335) warns against inquiries into “exceptional forms of fandom,” especially those that ignore the “social inquiry into everyday life” that sport affiliation affords, I argue that the ritualized abuse of Stephen Milne is no exception in football, but is, rather, a constituent of how the game is played and experienced by fans. In this paper, I also include select news articles written by Caroline Wilson, (former) chief football writer for The Age, a major Australian daily, published in Mel­ bourne; an opinion piece written by Mick Malthouse published in the Australian, a national daily; as well as the official transcript of Stephen Milne’s Plea Hearing and Reasons for Sentencing. 2. An unintended heresy When Mick Malthouse was reported by the news media to have said “you’re a fucking rapist” to Milne, in April 2010, during a televised broadcast of a football match, he shook the foundations of Australian football. On one level, the words precipitated a whole series of conse­ quences attached to the question of Milne’s innocence, reigniting the controversies around the 2004 rape investigation. On the surface, this utterance appeared to produce far-reaching performative effects. In June of 2010, it was alleged by whistleblowing former police detective, Scott Gladman, that the investigation into the complaint against Milne had been corrupted by senior officers. This led to a review of the case by the Office of Police Integrity (OPI) in 2011 and a recommendation for Victoria Police to review the evidence of the original 2004 case. Rape charges against Milne were then laid in 2013. However, in the imme­ diate aftermath of the Malthouse-Milne episode in 2010, the main question dominating the public debate, both in the mainstream media and the Big Footy forums, was not whether Milne was a rapist or not, but whether Malthouse’s utterance had brought disgrace upon the game – a performative act of heresy – by bringing the externality of Milne’s offfield disgrace into the protected internality of football’s field of play. In Austin’s speech-act theory, whether a statement is true or false, and merely a “constative” is an “arbitrary abstraction” (1962, 148) that distracts from assessing the illocutionary force (intended effect) of all speech acts (Austin, 1962, 12). Austin offers instead the dimension of “happy” and “unhappy” utterances (1962, 15–16; 131–132), in order to develop an understanding of the performative efficacy of speech acts, regardless of their truth or falsehood. As such we can determine the rules and conditions (1962, 14–15) that produce both the illocutionary and perlocutionary effects of a given utterance. Illocutionary acts refer to the intentions of the speaker, whereas perlocutionary acts refer to how ut­ terances are received by their audiences. During this episode, Malthouse was said to have retaliated in response to Milne’s use of homophobic language against Collingwood’s assistant coach, Paul Licuria. Words like “fucking faggot” or “homo” were rumored on Big Footy to be the insult Milne deployed against Licuria, as well as “old cunt” directed at Malt­ house. The position advanced by The Age’s chief football writer at the time, Caroline Wilson, was to condemn the words alleged to have been spoken by Mick Malthouse, while dismissing Milne as a playful forward and “well-known ‘yapper’” (Wilson, 2010a). The public debate that Wilson participated concerns the power of words, especially with regard to who utters the word, not why, and who (or what) requires protection from its effects. Abuse in Australian football is a legitimate practice that is consti­ tutive of the way the game is played. The ritual exchange is part of an onfield strategy that is routinely used to unnerve or weaken an opponent 2

R.V. Hirsch

Women’s Studies International Forum xxx (xxxx) xxx

during a football match. The practice itself is referred to as “sledging” and is defined by Deb Waterhouse-Watson (2007, 159) in the following way:

Malthouse’s speech is endowed with a legitimacy that significantly ex­ ists prior to that moment of enunciation (see Threadgold, 1997, 63). From the perspective of these fans, for Malthouse to have delivered a sledge from a position of authority is “inappropriate” to the ritual context of abuse: “My point is that Malthouse is the senior coach, and should act like a professional, not be dragged down to that level.”5 For Austin (1962, 16), this is what causes an illocutionary “misfire”, as this unauthorized utterance is seen to miss its “mark”: “It’s not the sledge itself, it’s WHO did it.” Such critical reactions to the Malthouse episode would suggest that the conventions of the sledge have resulted in a “botched” performative: it certainly produced an effect, but not the one intended (see Austin, 1962, 16). These fan responses to the Malthouse episode, many belonging to St Kilda, dismiss competing arguments that were critical of the prohibited language, specifically the alleged homophobic insults, used by Milne against Collingwood’s assistant coach, Paul Licuria. While homophobic speech is sanctioned under the AFL’s anti- vilification policy (discussed further in Section 4), to many football fans (perhaps not belonging to Collingwood), Milne’s aggressive language and posturing, even skirting around the Collingwood huddle, does little to change the unwritten rules of sledging upheld by fans and players alike. Opposition players regu­ larly sledged Milne with the taunt “rapist” and by way of reputation he appeared to give as much as he received: “he didnt [sic] get the nick­ name Yapper for being Mr nice guy.” In this way, Milne achieves the desired perlocutionary effect of his utterance: Malthouse’s loss of “composure” results in an “illocutionary uptake” of the sledge (Austin, 1962, 116). Words like “fucking homo” and “old cunt” constitute a “happy” performative (Austin, 1962, 15–16; 131–132), precisely because the conventions and procedures of sledging have been met: Milne has successfully unnerved his opponents and verbally asserted his dominance. Indeed, moreover, what makes Milne such an effective sledger is precisely his ability to take up the force of another’s sledge: he routinely “cops” the opposition’s abuse against him (Wilson, 2010a). The appropriate conventions and procedures that govern abusive sledging in football appear to have been disrupted here by Malthouse’s “uptake” of the sledge. This is the problem of “uptake” that Judith Butler locates in Austin as it “underscores the contingent dimension of all such appropriation regarding perlocutionary performatives” (1997, 117). Once the coach is believed to have uttered “you’re a fucking rapist” and it is interpreted as such by the collective, the meaning ascribed to the utterance changes. Once abusive words are publicly broadcast, they cease to be a sledge. The words “you’re a rapist”, disputed by some to have even been broadcast on national television, unveil the “disruptive tension” within authoritative language itself (Bakhtin, 1981, 342). Malthouse is seen to assign a “social essence” (Bourdieu, 1991, 120) to all footballers, not just to Milne. By attributing a “quality label” (Bourdieu, 1991, 125) onto even just one footballer, Malthouse is seen to contravene the “official” discourse of football that often silences, evades, and denies the question of footballer rape and the experience of the victim (Waterhouse-Watson, 2013). Malthouse, through no intent of his own, inspires a potential “break with the ordinary order”, whereby these words are then trans­ formed into an act of heresy (see Bourdieu, 1991, 129). It is here that Malthouse becomes the Heresiarch who by “naming the unnameable” (Bourdieu, 1991, 129) threatens football with the production of a new common sense – one which would destroy the beliefs that surround football by exposing the symbolic violence – the violence of masculinity – that structures the game. This is the point at which Caroline Wilson comes to the defense of football, revealing the power of words and of what they reveal. She demanded that Malthouse immediately apologize to Milne (via another

Sledging is purported to be part of the mental side of the game, a test of a player’s ability to focus on the game whilst being taunted by the opposition. The targeted player either simply laughs it off, knowing that it isn’t true, or fails this test of mental toughness and allows himself to be put off, giving the opposition an advantage. The ritual exchange is part of a legitimate on-field strategy, used to unnerve or weaken an opponent during a football match. Sledging here refers to the verbal component of the game that complements the physical aggression and force directed against opposition players. In this sense, it can be seen as an extension of the banter, humor, and ridicule, indicative of men’s dominance bonding rituals (Curry, 1991; Kehily & Nayak, 1997), and, hence, further representative of the “playful” competition that exists between team mates (Sabo & Panepinto, 1990, 119). This attitude toward sledging is certainly exemplified in Stephen Milne’s signature style of play. He is referred to as a “goalsneak” a player who scoops from the crumbs to kick goals from odd angles and distances (Matthews, 2013). This physical skill mirrors his supposed mental skill – a sniping tongue that is just as keen as his kicking: “‘when it comes to sledging, Milney’s the best’” (Wilson, 2010a). Indeed, Milne is no stranger to the taunt of ‘rapist’, having received the insult by opposition players since the rape allegation first surfaced (Wilson, 2010b). However, for a senior coach – and the coach of one of the most commercially successful football clubs in the Australian Football League – to name an AFL footballer a ‘rapist’ is to destabilize the carefully crafted reputation of the league that had fortified itself against the cycle of rape allegation from 2004 onwards (Waterhouse-Watson, 2013, 131). It does this by keeping rape as far away from an association with football as possible. Malthouse, by virtue of his hierarchical social position, threatens football with an act of “performative social magic”: a term that relates to the success of a performative utterance – to bring “into exis­ tence that which [is] utter[ed]” (Bourdieu, 1991, 42). Whether a speech act has achieved its “magical efficacy”, moreover, “comes down to the question of the appropriateness of the speaker” (Bourdieu, 1991, 111). For the St Kilda football fans below, the power vested in Malthouse as a coach exposes the converging performative conditions (Bourdieu, 1991, 72) revealed in the abusive exchange: You’re missing the point. It’s not the sledge itself, it’s WHO did it. Milne would have been called a rapist nearly every game by oppo­ sition players - and he cops it. Coaches are a diffelt [sic] story - they should keep out and show some composure.2 Basically Milne did nothing out of character … he didnt [sic] get the nickname Yapper for being Mr. nice guy out on the field … Milnes [sic] comments are not the big story … MMs [Mick Malt­ house] reaction, comments and lies are.3 The responses to the controversy by the St Kilda fans above suggest that sledging is only a legitimate exchange when it occurs between equal players on-field: “player v player is all fair game.”4 As a spokesperson “entrusted with delegated authority” (Bourdieu, 1991, 109),

2 St Kilda supporter 1, Malthouse Apologises (online) 12 April 2010 (last accessed 15 May 2013). 3 St Kilda supporter 2, How does Stephen Milne escape the wrath of the media? (online) 13 April 2010 (last accessed 5 December 2013). 4 St Kilda supporter 1, Is Mick Malthouse in Trouble? (online) 10 April 2010 (last accessed 15 May 2013).

5 Fremantle supporter 1, Is Mick Malthouse in Trouble? (online) 11 April 2010 (last accessed 15 May 2013).

3

R.V. Hirsch

Women’s Studies International Forum xxx (xxxx) xxx

Without the silence and protection of denial and disavowal of the ut­ terance, the public would have the potential to disrupt the masculine domination in football – to challenge, unmask, and unravel it. Yet by upholding a sacred division between the laws of football and the laws of the external world, the impermissibility of the sledge as an act of heresy insidiously comes to condone sexual violence against women by elevating reverence for the game over any discussion of rape in Australian football.

performative act of speech) and denounce publicly the utterance (Wil­ son, 2010a). The basis of Wilson’s concern is the preservation of foot­ ball. She warns her readers of the damage that Malthouse’s utterance poses to Australian football: You only needed to listen to Melbourne radio yesterday to argue strongly that Malthouse – if guilty – has brought the game into disre­ pute. He will not enjoy the scrutiny nor the prospect of a fine. But worse would be the damage to his reputation.

3. The logic of masculinity

(Wilson, 2010c; emphasis added) To “bring the game into disrepute” is, in practice, quite a serious offense outlined in the AFL rules. The offense broadly refers to “conduct unbecoming or likely to prejudice the interests or reputation of the Australian Football League or to bring the game of football into disrepute” (Rule 1.6; currently 2.2 (iii); emphasis added). It is the organization’s equivalent to ritual banishment and the highest and most shameful denouncement of any instituted body in the league. Wilson refers to it as “football’s lowliest place” (Wilson, 2010a). The rule itself is indicative of the AFL’s priorities (and anxieties), which can be seen in the significance it places upon the public reputation of football and its intentions to preserve the game’s cultural dominance in Australia. Referring to public expressions of disapproval on Melbourne radio, Wilson criticizes not just the unprofessional behavior of the coach, but the effect of his words on the wider community. In 2011, when crowd abuse against Milne at games reached its crescendo with the chanting of “rapist” by thousands of Collingwood fans, Wilson restated her public demand that Malthouse “take responsibility for his ugly sledge” (Wilson, 2011). She insists upon the magical efficacy of his words: “wrong Michael … there is compelling argument to say that the crowd – to whom you are a role model – took your lead.” Malthouse, however, is no willing heretic. In 2010, he shared Wil­ son’s view despite their professional disagreement. This is first evident in his immediate response to the media in the post-match press con­ ference: he denied speaking to any St Kilda footballer at quarter time (Wilson, 2010b). Second, after the St Kilda Football Club decided to issue a complaint against Malthouse to the AFL, the President of the Collingwood Football Club, Eddie McGuire, declared on radio that Malthouse had actually called Milne a “pest” and not a “rapist” (2010c). The act of denial (or outright deception) in both of these instances, at great risk to the reputation of both the coach and the club, is an acknowledgment of the power of words and of what they reveal. While Malthouse never publicly admits to saying those words, he does para­ doxically confess to speaking an unspeakable, of uttering an unutterable. He states:

In football fan discourse, there emerges a desire to cross gendered boundaries between regulated and unregulated practices of abuse both on and off-field. The ritualized practices of abuse in Australian football examined in the Big Footy discussions of the Malthouse-Milne episode are framed through a narrative of fan “passion.” It is the masculinizing of passion, examined in this section, that exposes a logic in football that becomes central to understanding both the public “trial” of Stephen Milne and the judge’s reasons for sentencing in the criminal pro­ ceedings. Here Big Footy fans speak of passion as a rationale for verbal abuse, and, in this way, open up new and competing ways of receiving the Malthouse utterance. Tracing the life of a performative utterance and its trail of destructive, perlocutionary effects is a more complex process than the one I have outlined so far. As Judith Butler argues in Excitable Speech (1997, 117), just because an utterance is construed as an act (that produces an effect or consequence) “it does not follow that all utterance acts upon its listener in a prescribed or mechanical way.” In this section, I argue that it is the logic of masculinity, demonstrated through football fans’ passion for the game, that structures the two competing readings of the Malthouse utterance (permissible versus impermissible). Passion provides the discursive means through which verbal and physical abuse are considered acceptable practices for foot­ ball fans as it articulates their collective belonging to the game. Football fan participation in verbal abuse is a ritualized convention in Australian football, historically directed at umpires (“white mag­ gots”); opposition players (for example, the collective chanting of “rapist” at Milne [Wilson, 2011]); players who transfer to different clubs; and even players from their own team. Cash and Damousi (2009, 25) consider the verbal abuse of football players at games as the “most severe of footy afflictions.” This is misleading, as the language of “affliction” suggests that abuse, including racial and sexualized verbal abuse, is something external to football, an “illness” that plagues the game (Tatz, 2011, 102). On the contrary, abuse is an integral part of the way the game of Australian football is played and enjoyed. As one fan puts it: “2000 years ago fans would cheer and boo gladiators. Abuse is part of the game” (emphasis added).6 On the Big Footy fan discussion forums, Milne is often referred to as: a “germ of an individual”; “grub of the highest order”; “little weed”; “little rat”; “little germ”; “scum bucket”; and a “tip rat” who “deserves everything he gets.” Vivi Theo­ doropoulou (2007, 316) classifies this type of fandom as that belonging to “anti-fans”, those who hold “dislike” or “hatred” toward the “object that ‘threatens’” them (i.e. the other team; or rape allegation). For the football fans in this paper, the fan rivalry that motivates their abuse of Stephen Milne is traceable through a logic of masculinity that underpins the less-than-conscious rules of abusive sledging. I argue that this is a practical knowledge or ritualized “commonsense”, which fans of rivalry teams, like Collingwood and St Kilda, each share. Passion is a term often assigned to Australian football in an effort to describe the intensity of club belonging (see Klugman, 2009a, 22, note 7). Academic scholarship on football fandom in Australia has demon­ strated that it is the emotional investment of football fans, of their

The reason I denied talking to any St Kilda players when asked about the incident after the match was because I wanted to kill the issue stone dead. There are many things said in football, particularly in the heat of the moment under pressure in tight, tough games, which are better left unsaid in public, and that’s the way it should be. (Malthouse, 2010; emphasis added) This shroud of silence and secrecy, emphatically expressed in the tautology “to kill” the word “dead”, is an alarming admission of how dangerous the word rape is to the institution of Australian football. It exposes the tenuous boundary between regulated on-field masculine domination and unregulated off-field male sexual violence. This is the symbolic efficacy of an utterance that Malthouse denies speaking and which, paradoxically, is “better left unsaid.” To disavow the utterance as a heresy that threatens football with an association with rape is to view rape allegation strictly as an injury to male reputation (both Milne and Malthouse in this instance), one which extends to the football institution as a whole – to the exclusion of the alleged victim of footballer rape.

6 Hawthorn supporter 1, Milne wants ban on all abuse (online) 27 May 2013 (last accessed 5 December 2013).

4

R.V. Hirsch

Women’s Studies International Forum xxx (xxxx) xxx

passion and love of the game, which strengthens and gives meaning to “Aussie rules” football (Cash & Damousi, 2009; Klugman, 2009a, 2009b; Mewett & Toffoletti, 2010). These works succeed in countering the psychology of violence, previously attributed to sports fans (such as “hooliganism”), and develop instead the under-explored topic of emo­ tions, with regard to fan attachment and identification with their affili­ ated club. Passion here, however, is not a neutral terrain nor an ungendered term; and it would be a mistake to perceive it as such. Indeed, for football fans who remain unfazed by the Malthouse-Milne abusive exchange – particularly Collingwood supporters in support of their club’s coach– their commentary on the event quite tellingly reveals the tethered relationship between abuse and passion in Australian football. In defense of Malthouse, football fans turn to passion as a means to dismiss the controversy made by the news media’s reporting of the incident and in the process come to reveal what attaches them to the game itself:

rule of the game by speaking out. By reacting to Malthouse’s utteranceas-a-sledge, Milne is now the one who has failed the test of “mental toughness.” Note the language of masculine combat, competition, and feminized mental weakness that the following fans use to deny Wilson’s version of events as well as to justify abuse of Milne:

PASSION. Without it, i [sic]would not have watched last night, mick would not have coached, Licca [Licuria] would not be there....... Passion. Can’t beat it.7 Who cares. There’s still a little bit of hot blooded passion left in this corporate game. Don’t smother it.8 (emphasis added). I like that rage myself. It’s [sic] shows his determination and burning passion. He’s not coasting. It’s a bit “us versus them” at the moment. Our players are a tight bunch and i [sic] can tell you that the vast majority of them love MM [Mick Malthouse]. I think we will come out firing this week.9 (emphasis added). I still can’t understand why any fan from any team would want people to be punished for this. This is going to make the next game between these two teams even more interesting. A bit of passion in the game, why are people against it.10 (emphasis added).

The fans above exhibit a masculine orientation around abusive sledging that reveals the value of their emotional stake in a game of football. In making a formal complaint, Milne has not only failed the test of “mental toughness” by “crack[-ing] the [sads]” – or as Wilson puts it, letting his “guard down” (2010b) – he also fails in the role that he is most renowned and celebrated for: a sledger. Milne is not only infantilized for his failure (“children”; the repeated diminutive of “little”), but the sentiment is more definitively feminized (“girly men”; “man’s game”): his weakness is one of bodily submission. In notable scholarship, it is observed that the less-than-conscious rules of the game in Australian football rely upon the “power of the secret”, an acknowledged agree­ ment of silence and protection by the all-male team that “augments the group’s power” (Philadelphoff-Puren 2004, 46–47). The perceived “threat” in rivalry fandom is, therefore, not so much about Milne’s op­ position to the Collingwood team or its fans but his opposition to the masculinity that makes football, for these fans, a “man’s game” (“Toughen up”). The supposed attachment toward rivalry, however, is not only about “the construction of fan identity” (Theodoropoulou, 2007, 316); it also concerns the linguistic mechanics that underpin the construction of a collective masculine identity. This is the logic of mas­ culinity which runs through both sides of the Malthouse- Milne “sledging” debacle (permissible as a sledge, impermissible as a heresy) that concerns the power of words and of what they reveal. The logic working here is the same as the St Kilda fans in the previous section who are critical of Malthouse. Just as they rebuke Malthouse for “lowering” himself to the level of Milne, exhibiting weakness as a coach in his failure to withstand Milne’s sledge, the fans above contest this view by drawing on the power of the “secret” that, to them, Milne, and not Malthouse, had broken. The logic remains the same in both positions. The sledge either fails because it brings disgrace to the coach (and football) as masculine ideal (the general, the leader, the embodiment of football), or the sledge succeeds as an example of masculine domination. The “homologous oppositions” (Bourdieu, 2001, 106) – triumph/ failure, us/them, victory/defeat, love/hate, dominance/submission – reveal the football fan’s orientation of his body toward the same

Its a mans game played in a combative atmosphere…ffs [for fucks sake] nothing was audible…the game was not brought into disre­ pute…11 (emphasis added). Nothing wrong with a good sledge, whether the coach is involved or not! Toughen up the lot of ya! [sic].12 Milne is a sledger of the highest calibre our Coach calls a spade a spade and milney cracks the [sads] if that hurt his feeling hole he never hears the barrage of abuse I’d give him, ****en little rat.13 I have never encountered a bigger number of cry babies and girly men in all my days. He called me names!! Give me a break children! Such a non story. Pay the fine and move on.14(emphasis added).

To the football fans above, passion is not only the reason that fans attend games, or watch it on television, but that the game itself could not exist without it (“I would not have watched. Licca would not be there”). In this view, “passions and emotions” are not just “pervasive aspects of a keen supporter’s attachment to their team” (Cash & Damousi, 2009, 19), but further synonymous with attachment to the game of football and of what that symbolizes to them. Passion, in the above excerpts, conveys a whole “universe of ritual practices and utterances” (Bourdieu, 1990, 76), of bodily metaphors like “hot”, “burning”, “firing” that, for Bour­ dieu, correspond to the objects and activities of the “male universe”: the “dry, fire, the high, the cooked, the day” that materialize in hierarchical opposition to the “female universe of the moist, water, the low, the raw, the night” (Bourdieu, 1990, 76). Theodoropoulou states that, for antifans, “bipolar oppositions act as the definitive mechanism of distinc­ tion to the outsider and enable[s] identification with the team” (2007, 316). I go one step further and suggest that the language of oppositions that is definitive of competition orients abuse around gendered dispo­ sitions of dominance and defeat. When the St Kilda Football Club offi­ cials contemplated lodging a formal complaint to the AFL against Malthouse (Wilson, 2010c), Milne is seen to have broken an unwritten

7 Collingwood supporter 2, Is Mick Malthouse in Trouble? (online) 10 April 2010 (accessed 15 May 2013). 8 Melbourne supporter 1, Malthouse Apologises (online) 12 April 2010 (accessed 15 May 2013). 9 Collingwood supporter 3, Is Mick Malthouse in Trouble? (online) 14 April 2010 (last accessed 15 May 2013). 10 Collingwood supporter 4, Malthouse Apologises (online) 12 April 2010 (last accessed 15 May 2013).

11 Collingwood supporter 5, Is Malthouse in Trouble? (online) 11 April 2010 (last accessed 15 May 2013). 12 West Coast Supporter 1, Malthouse Apologises (online) 11April 2010 (last accessed 15 May 2013) 13 Collingwood supporter 5, Is Mick in Trouble? (online) 10 April 2010 (last accessed 15 May 2013). 14 Collingwood supporter 6, Is Mick Malthouse in trouble? (online) 10 April 2010 (accessed 15 May 2013).

5

R.V. Hirsch

Women’s Studies International Forum xxx (xxxx) xxx

structures of domination indicative of gender inequality. As one fan remarks in response as to why he abuses Milne: “I’m anti-Milne and would love to see him fail; it’s the nature of competitive sport” (emphasis added).15Indeed, just like the players on the field, football fans are likewise motivated to defeat and dominate the opposition through similar acts of abusive speech. In this way, abuse becomes a ritualized and repetitive aspect of the game for both fans and players. It further designates “a capacity for verbal violence” that in turn designates a “capacity for physical violence” (Bourdieu, 1991, 87). Consider the alleged aggressive response of Paul Licuria, Collingwood’s assistant coach, to Milne’s homophobic insult: “‘[let’s] finis[h] this off in the carpark’” (Wilson, 2010d). He is significantly depicted here as taking the speech outside of football – transporting Milne’s alleged verbal sledge into a physical threat of violence; a masculine defense against the feminized charge of homosexuality. On the Big Footy discussion forums, fans’ “linguistic competence” for masculine speech is a “body technique” that expresses and informs their “relation to the social world” (Bourdieu, 1991, 86). In 2012, when football fans (including Collingwood fans) this time defend Milne’s use of homophobic speech – after he is again involved in an on-field homophobic sledging incident (with yet another Collingwood player) – they reveal a practical permissibility of verbal violence through the same logic of masculinity that rationalizes the acceptable use of both verbal and physical abuse:

“is showing he will defend his players to the death when some little piss ant walks through the huddle and abuses one of our players” (emphasis added).19 What is distinct, however, concerning the above excerpts, compared to the previous ones, is the crossing over, the moving beyond the game and into the everyday lives of fans. Fans are not just idle spectators or passive consumers of the sport (Crawford, 2004). They believe themselves to embody the sport (“Go play footy at the park”; “you may have played football”) and in this way they carry its masculine logic (like Licuria to the carpark) beyond the sporting field – to the bar, to the home: this to them represents “life.” Again, it is the mirrored in­ tentions of abuse that are significant here: masculinity as both the site of violent “intake” (to “cop” or receive abuse) and the site of speech “output” (to “give” abuse) that unites the language used to describe passion with a “life-style ‘made flesh’” (Bourdieu, 1991, 86). In this way, passion as an extension of abuse corresponds to a way of speaking that “is inscribed in the most deep-rooted of bodily disposi­ tions” (Bourdieu, 1991, 86): those that are governed by masculine domination. That football fans may even desire such “rage” for themselves sug­ gests that the less-than-conscious rules of the game further demand that the boundaries of male discipline and control (emblemized by a senior coach) be crossed. Such a descent into masculine madness through fan passion is what makes football, to these fans, precisely a “man’s game.” When footballer rape allegation takes place within competing discourses that concern the permissibility or impermissibility of on-field abuse, it underscores the masculine strategy of female displacement that con­ tinues to frame the discourse of rape in Australian football fan com­ munity. The masculine rites of abuse reinforce the alleged victim’s erasure from the discussion, reifying fan passion for the game above all else. The logic of masculinity, inscribed in the ritualized practices of abuse, furthermore dissolves the question of acceptable versus unac­ ceptable speech acts in the competing readings of the Malthouse-Milne episode. If the abusive rites in football demand that boundaries be crossed, perverting the lines between the laws of football and the laws of the external world, then allegations of sexual assault or rape against footballers off-field cannot be removed from the homosocial sporting context that cultivates its acceptance in the first place.

Never said its okay to call someone a homo for no apparent reason… things are different though when you are charged up in the middle of a footy ground playing a contact sport, that’s what ppl like yourself cannot appreciate because you have never been in that situation… or (as said previously) you may have played football but u weren’t the most combative player to ever pull on the boots. [sic].16(emphasis added). But that there is the problem, do we need to ask every person we meet in life there [sic] situation before we speak to them? Most times things are said in heat of the moment battles be it on the sporting ground, in a bar or even at home with friends. Arguments get heated, things are said. It seems you will need a license to even speak soon for fear of offending someone.17(emphasis added). How would you react in a high stress environment with a critical decision going against you. Would you show no passion or anger? Don’t worry I doubt you will ever be faced with this.18 (emphasis added).

4. The politics of laughter The public figure of Stephen Milne, while not the first nor last AFL player to embody questions of acceptability of abuse in Australian football, does, however reinforce the logic of masculinity that pervades the AFL’s “official” response to the problem of rape allegation. In this way, the “official” rules that govern abusive sledging in the AFL are not so far removed from the “unofficial” rules examined in the Big Footy forums. The Australian Football League promotes and champions its anti-vilification policies, with its governing body, the Tribunal, regu­ lating sanctioned acts of aggression or vilification, both on and off-field. In the AFL, vilification is defined as verbal abuse that targets race, religion, disability, and, from 2009 onwards, also sexual preference, orientation or identity (AFL Rules, 145: Rule 30.1; currently, 35.1). These rules are relevant to the question of permissibility in the alleged Malthouse utterance, in which St Kilda Football Club officials were re­ ported to have considered charging Malthouse with a breach of the AFL’s rules that prohibit such acts of vilification (Wilson, 2010a, 2010b). Stephen Milne shifts between heresy and humor, between an impermissible act of injurious speech that threatens his and football’s reputation or a permissible act of playful banter that is all part of the rules and rites of abusive sledging. I refer to the latter as the “politics of laughter” (Bray, 2013, 82), a “ritual denunciation” of women (Bourdieu,

The homologous oppositions of hot/cold, strong/weak, thick/thin are repeated here to rationalize abusive sledging, expressed again through the metaphors of fire and heat. The “footy-crazy”, “footy-mad”, and “footy- obsessed” (Klugman, 2009a, 22) passion for the game is transported here to the masculine realm of war, inscribing onto football the emotions that are suitable for battle (“heat of battle”; “charged up”). The language of masculinity through metaphors of war and battle here is indeed replicated in the defense of Malthouse back in 2010: Malthouse 15 Collingwood supporter 7, Is Mick Malthouse in trouble? (online) 10 April 2010 (last accessed 15 May 2013). 16 Geelong supporter 1, Milne investigated over taunt (online) 10 August 2012 (last accessed 5 December 2013). 17 West Coast supporter 2, Milne investigated over taunt (online) 10 August 2012 (last accessed 5 December 2013). 18 St Kilda supporter 3, Milne investigated over taunt (online) 9 August 2012 (last accessed 5 December 2013).

19 Collingwood supporter 8, Is Mick Malthouse in Trouble? (online) 10 April 2010 (last accessed 15 May 2013)

6

R.V. Hirsch

Women’s Studies International Forum xxx (xxxx) xxx

2001, 97–98), that underpins the logic governing the acceptability of abusive sledging in the “official” discourse of the AFL. Many of the football fans on Big Footy agree that racial and religious acts of vilification are not appropriate to the rules of on-field sledging. Their rationale behind this position corresponds to the logic of mascu­ linity: such rules service the primacy of the male bond. In other words, it is not so much that racism is wrong or repugnant to them, but rather that anything that disrupts male unity should be prohibited. Regarding a similar high-profile sledging incident, Waterhouse-Watson (2007) traces how sexually abusive sledges in Australian football persist outside vili­ fication rules and have increasingly come to be considered “fair game.” In 2012, when fans debate the acceptability of abusive sledging, they turn to this earlier sledging incident as a basis in which to negotiate their sense of the limits regarding abusive taunts of a sexual nature. This was a controversial case in which the AFL tribunal had refused to penalize both the sledger and his opponent’s physical assault of him (on the paradox of the decision itself, see Waterhouse-Watson, 2007, 156).

cold beer.” To react in anger or aggression to sexually abusive sledging simply ensures the performative “success” of the sledge itself (“the sledging worked”), which in turn secures the dominance of the one doing the sledging. In this way, sexually abusive sledges should not be taken seriously to begin with. Whether a truth statement or not, “your mum’s a whore” is hardly a test of one’s manhood – except with regard to masculine self-control. The only requirement that ensures the perform­ ativity of a sledge is that it be a sledge; and what characterizes a sledge is the very parody of verbal violence. It is hyperbolic fun to name a sixfoot, beefed up footballer a “faggot” – he is not really a homosexual after all. That the figure of Milne comes to represent this magical boundary, between heresy and humor, is what makes him so distinct in every discussion of rape and in every discussion of abuse. Herein emerges the key issue that ignites the visibility of the ritual­ ized practices of abuse in the “trial” of Stephen Milne. When Malthouse is deemed by the media to have proclaimed Milne a “rapist”, the performative effect of his utterance also threatens to break one of the key rules of sledging: it transports the sledge away from its comic context and into real-life events and allegations that live off-field. Significantly, however, the “official” rules that govern abuse in the AFL, just like the rules that determine the performativity of an utterance, rely upon reaction to the sledge: in other words, the “uptake” of the abuse (Austin, 1962, 116). When the St Kilda Football Club considered charging Malthouse under the rules of vilification, it was the most striking effort on the part of the club to get the AFL to enforce the unutterableness of “rapist” by classifying it as an act of vilification. To prosecute the utterance “you’re a rapist” through such a proposed regulation would inevitably produce the same paradox that Butler (1997) observes in the US “don’t ask don’t tell” context of the 1990s. To prohibit the words “you’re a rapist” would cause the very [re]action of “redoubling” (1997, 102). It would “bring the term into public discourse, rhetorically enunciating the term, performing the circum­ scription by which – and through which – the term becomes speakable” (Butler, 1997, 104). To institute the unspeakableness of the footballeras-rapist in this way would have unambiguously marked the utterance a heresy. Malthouse knew this in his attempts to “kill the issue stone dead.” The AFL’s governing body, like Malthouse, refused to accept the alleged utterance as a violation of the rules of vilification (Wilson, 2010c). Instead, Mick Malthouse, Paul Licuria, and Stephen Milne were all found guilty and fined ($7500 for Malthouse and $3000 for Licuria and Milne respectively) under the rules of conduct that prohibit acting (not speaking) in a “threatening or aggressive manner” (AFL Rules, 144: Rule 29.1; currently 34.1). What this further suggests is that despite the undesirable perlocutionary effects of the supposed utterance, the inten­ ded illocutionary speech act – the alleged sledge of “rapist” – remains “happily performed” (see Gould, 1995, 30). Indeed, were the AFL to have recognized Malthouse as the originator of the utterance (or “sov­ ereign” [Butler, 1997, 77–78]), as Wilson demanded, they would have paradoxically authorized into being the very group of people that the utterance vilifies – their own men. In this way, the naming of Milne a “rapist” is considered no real threat to football or the league so long as the utterance remains interpreted within the performative boundaries of a sledge. This forms the magical process through which “you’re a rapist” is revealed to be equivalent to “your mum’s a whore” or “you’re a faggot.” The insult of “rapist” imposes a sexual essence, which, by designating a sexuality (through sexualized violence), it, thereby, meets the legitimate conditions of the ritual exchange. Routine sexual abuse of women via sledging consecrates men-as-men (heterosexual and dominating) and women-as-women (violable objects of masculine domination; “sluts” or “whores” deserving of abuse). The heretical meaning thus dissolves into an acceptable form of sexual abuse, mobilized by the “force of authority” (Butler, 1997, 51) and conveyed through ritualized practices of abuse. This is not to suggest, however, that Malthouse’s authority as a spokesperson or delegate of football is what had enabled the success of

So talking about raping or sexually assaulting another players [sic] child would be fine?20 Response: Yes. I’m sure an opposition player deep down really wants to rape the oppositions [sic] child. Should hear the shit we cop at local level. At the end of the day, everything is ended with a handshake and cold beer. It’s a football game for christ sake and sledging is a part of the game. If people get upset with harsh words directed towards them, then the sledging worked. Thats [sic] why it’s used, isn’t it?21 (emphasis added). In my opinion, anything outside of racial vilification and religion is fair game. Like seriously, grown men are getting upset with their mum’s being called a whore on the football field?22 The Collingwood fan’s response here takes place within a larger discussion concerning the call for increased penalties for on-field abuse. The Sydney supporter appears to sympathize with the violent reaction caused by the sledge but, for this reason, supports the regulation of abusive sledging to avoid physical assault in the first place. The outcome of that decision by the AFL tribunal (the AFL’s judiciary) is more in accordance with the Collingwood supporter’s view of sledging. Whether the sledge is a truth statement or not, the less-than-conscious rules that govern an on-field sledge suggest that is not about belief as such but instead the parody of verbal violence. A footballer’s mother is not really a whore, and the footballer himself does not really wish to rape the opposition’s child. The AFL’s official response to the Malthouse-Milne incident would appear at first to confirm the view that sexual abuse is “fair game.” However, there is a deeper logic at work in the AFL, one that follows the trajectory of masculine logic, that demands that the sledge remain a sledge and not a case of injurious speech. The sense emerging here is that, outside racism and religion (both sanctioned offenses in the AFL), abusive sledging is experienced through the playful, joking, and sexual competition between players. It is the “politics of laughter” that enables a sledge to end “with a handshake and

20 Sydney supporter 1, Should “what happens on the field” stay on the field? (online) 10 August 2012 (last accessed 15 May 2013). 21 Collingwood supporter 9, Should “what happens on the field” stay on the field? (online) 10 August 2012a (last accessed 15 May 2013). 22 Collingwood supporter 9, Should “what happens on the field” stay on the field? (online) 9 August 2012b (last accessed 15 May 2013).

7

R.V. Hirsch

Women’s Studies International Forum xxx (xxxx) xxx

this utterance to remain a sledge. As Butler contends the “provisional” success of any speech act is “not because an intention successfully governs the action of speech” (i.e. an intention to sledge and not heret­ ically insult); but instead because “the action echoes prior actions, and accumulates the force of authority through the repetition or citation of a prior and authoritative set of practices” (1997, 51). In other words, the success of the sledge remains contingent upon the “act” being “itself a ritualized practice” (1997, 51) to begin with. Abuse is a repetitive, ritualized, and historical practice in Australian football that precedes the abusive exchange between Malthouse and Milne. As Butler concludes, “no term or statement can function per­ formatively without the accumulating and dissimulating historicity of force” (1997, 51). The ritualizing of sexual humor in Australian football is what permits the performative utterance to remain a sledge and not a sanctionable act of injurious speech. Through discursive acrobatics, footballer rape allegation comes to be normalized as a trivial matter in football, one that renders the victim of indecent assault into an object of rape humor. When rape allegation is bound to football’s status quo, as simply a by-product of the ludic function of sledging, it loses its gravitas as a real and serious injury with criminal consequences that occur off field. The permissibility of the insult as a playful exchange accords with the same ritualized practices of abuse that institute sexual inequality and which symbolically unite all men in games of masculine domination.

Defence: No you’re not, but I’m just drawing your Honour’s attention that he was fined $7500 and later publicly apologised for his comment. His Honour: Is that right, is it? Defence: Yes, $7500. His Honour: He thereby admitted making the comment. Defence: Yes. Your Honour, there’s been no subsequent offending and all those circumstances. We rely upon the delay, because in that period of delay, it’s not like it all went away, it’s not like an historic sex case, the matter was bubbling around and floating around, and during this time, you’ve got a period of constant employment as a footballer, constant in the eye of perhaps the media. (DPP V Milne 2014, 28) The delay of which the defense speaks here is the delay in prosecu­ tion (2004–2013), whereby the public scrutiny of Milne (“the matter was bubbling around and floating around”; “clouded in a fog of rumour”, DPP V Milne 2014, 54), the worst of which occurred from 2010 onwards, becomes grounds for avoiding a recording of conviction. This is not the only time that Malthouse is mentioned in this courtroom. He is directly referred to by the presiding judge as the “catalyst” for Scott Gladman’s public claims regarding alleged police corruption over the initial investigation (DPP V Stephen Michael Milne 2014, 3.1). During the pro­ ceedings, the prosecutor further states that: “Scott Gladman was approached by Channel 9 and asked to comment about the fact that Mick Malthouse has recently called Mr Milne a rapist” (DPP V Milne 2014, 408). Malthouse’s utterance is quite central to the review of Milne’s decade long case and the key reason for mitigating the extent of his sentence. However, in 2011, when crowd abuse against Milne was at its peak, Malthouse still refused to accept any responsibility for fan abuse. To Wilson’s frustration, he states: “‘I’ve got no control over the crowd. I’m a coach. I sit in a coach’s box’” (Wilson, 2011). In Australian football, there is a love-to-hate disdain for Milne that is part of his on-field persona, and which existed prior to the MalthouseMilne episode. A statement read out during the plea hearing by one of Milne’s friends goes as follows: “‘Before I met Stephen, I was aware he was an elite AFL footballer, who opposition supporters, including me, love to hate. Partly because of his on-field demeanour and partly because he was so good’” (DPP V Milne 2014, 54). There is something particular about his on-field persona and demeanor (most likely due to his own abusive sledging) that corresponds to his style of play. As the defense posits: “he started to make his mark at St Kilda and become hated by the opposition and seen as a sneaky little goal kicker, which no doubt made people think he was a sneaky little fellow” (DPP V Milne 2014, 34). The defense goes on to explain that Milne is “not athletically blessed”, which is precisely what made him such a “smart footballer”; he “understood the game” which enabled him to play “275 games at the highest level” (DPP V Milne 2014, 61). That Milne is notorious for using the mental side of the game, unnerving his opponents with abuse as opposed to brute force, makes it all the more telling as to why he had become a target for collective abuse in the first place. By challenging Malthouse’s sledge, Milne broke the rules of the game that he himself had ritually embodied. The law’s final intervention in footballer sexual violence and the conclusion to Milne’s case is overall impeded by an authorized view of “injurious speech” that is completely removed from the social and lin­ guistic community in which it was first uttered. No doubt Stephen Milne and his family did suffer – emotionally and financially. But they suffered on account of the institution of AFL football; because of a game of domination that required his failure and submission. When Malthouse was believed by the collective to have uttered “rapist”, the “interpretive diversity” (Butler, 1997, 117) of the words were, through no intent of his own, successfully launched upon a community of speakers whose abuse of Stephen Milne had been both historic and intrinsic to the game itself. It is for this reason that “final accountability” cannot be found in a “singular subject and its act” (Butler, 1997, 52); it cannot be found in

5. Final accountability, or the law speaks football In the judge’s reasons for sentencing Stephen Milne, a false equiva­ lency is presented between the suffering of the victim and the suffering of the accused. The judge explains that Milne has been subject to “public scrutiny and often public abuse”; has suffered financial disadvantage; his family has suffered; and his own “emotional health and reputation has been harmed” (DPP V Stephen Michael Milne 2014, 8. 31). The judge continues: “you have suffered the stress and anxiety of the proceedings, particularly in the sense that the matter was ended but then years on renewed, not of your fault or doing” (DPP V Stephen Michael Milne 2014, 8.31). He implicates Malthouse in this: “The matter was reignited in mid-2010. The catalyst seems to have been an insulting comment to you by another AFL identity” (DPP V Stephen Michael Milne 2014, 1.3). In the utterance’s final iteration, the law, by an act of institution, magically brings about that which is utters (Bourdieu, 1991, 119). This mis­ recognizes the rites of abuse in football by transforming the utterance into an individual act of injurious speech. The judge hears that Milne received no “public accolades” for his retirement from football: “no team mates carrying him off the field, because … he didn’t want anybody to start booing [in] the crowd and bagging the club” (DPP V Milne 2014, 40). He further hears of the repeated harassment that Milne’s family suffered which “all blew up in 2010” (DPP V Milne 2014, 52). He hears of the denial of Milne’s life membership into the AFL Hall of fame, including his lap of honor on Grand Final day, because “the AFL were in fear of having a – a bad product and um having fans maybe booing” (DPP V Milne 2014, 62). It is significant that the sledging exchange becomes interpreted by the law as a “personal abuse”, one in which Malthouse, though never quite admitting to saying those words – does, however, admit to legal fault by way of public apology and payment: Defence: We say that there are significant mitigating factors. The allegation originally investigated, then surfaced again in 2010 and the circumstances, which Your Honour’s heard with Mr. Malthouse making an unfounded and unsubstantiated and inaccurate claim of personal abuse at Mr. Milne. And Mr. Malthouse was fined $7500 and later publicly apologised. His Honour: I’m not sentencing Mr. Malthouse.

8

Women’s Studies International Forum xxx (xxxx) xxx

R.V. Hirsch

Malthouse’s speech act alone. Football fans booed Milne for many different reasons: because they loved to hate him, because it was fun, or perhaps because his avoidance of criminal consequence for nine years threatened a game that they loved. In the excerpts examined in this paper, the sledge of “rapist” is authorized as a sledge on account of the rites of abuse and the logic of masculinity shared by both fans and footballers. It is, therefore, not just coaches and players who are “born into the game, with the game” (Bourdieu, 1990, 67) but also these vocal football fans – men, who constitute the online football collective exam­ ined here; and, who, by means of their own passion, perform and reperform ritualized practices of abuse. The only consequence to rape allegation that football fans believed Milne suffered was a verbal insult, one in which he is seen to have brought upon himself.

Bakhtin, M. M. (1981). Discourse in the novel. Emerson C and Holquist M (trans). In M. Holquist (Ed.), The dialogic imagination: Four essays by M.M Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas Press. Bourdieu, P. (1990). The logic of practice. Nice R (trans). Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (1991). Language and symbolic power. Raymond G and Adamson M (trans). Cambridge: Polity Press. Bourdieu, P. (2001). Masculine domination. Nice R (trans). Cambridge: Polity Press. Bray, A. (2013). Misogyny re-loaded. Melbourne: Spinifex Press. Bryman, A. (2012). Social research methods (4th ed.). New York: Oxford University Press. Butler, J. (1997). Excitable speech: A politics of the performative. London: Routledge. Butler, J. (1999). Performativity’s social magic. In R. Shusterman (Ed.), Bourdieu: A critical reader (pp. 113–128). Oxford: Blackwell Publishers. Cash, D., & Damousi, J. (2009). Footy passions. Sydney: University of New South Wales Press. Cleland, J. (2015). Discussing homosexuality on association football fan message boards: A changing cultural context. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 20(2), 125–140. Crawford, G. (2004). Consuming sport: Fans, sport and culture. New York: Routledge. Curry, T. (1991). Fraternal bonding in the locker room: A profeminist analysis of talk about competition and women. Sociology of Sport Journal, 8, 119–135. Dixon, K. (2012). Learning the game: Football fandom culture and the origins of practice. International Review for the Sociology of Sport, 48(3), 334–348. Dworkin, A. (1997). Life and death: Unapologetic writings on the continuing war against women. New York: The Free Press. Fairclough, N. (1992). Discourse and text: Linguistic and intertextual analysis within discourse analysis. Discourse & Society, 32(2), 193–217. Gould, T. (1995). The unhappy performative. In A. Parker, & E. K. Sedgwick (Eds.), Performativity and performance (pp. 19–44). New York: Routledge. Greer, C., & McLaughlin, E. (2011). Trial by media: Policing, the 24-7 news mediasphere, and the politics of outrage. Theoretical Criminology, 15(1), 23–46. Kehily, M. J., & Nayak, A. (1997). “Lads and laughter”: Humour and the production of heterosexual hierarchies. Gender and Education, 9(1), 69–88. Kian, E. M., Clavio, G., Vincent, J., & Shaw, S. D. (2011). Homophobic and sexism yet uncontested: Examining football fan postings on internet message boards. Journal of Homosexuality, 58(5), 680–699. Klugman, M. (2009a). Love, suffering and identification: The passions of Australian Football League fans. International Journal for the History of Sport, 26(1), 21–44. Klugman, M. (2009b). Passion play. Melbourne: Hunter Publishers. Malthouse, M. (2010). I acted for the greater good of the game (online) 14 April 2010. The Australian. http://www.theaustralian.com.au/sport/opinion/i-acted-for-greater -good-of-the-game/news-story/10c8fe121e77c41052390d4045f7fcae (last accessed 26 February 2016). Matthews, B. (2013). St Kilda Goalsneak Stephen Milne at his evasive best as media descends on Seaford. Herald Sun. Available at http://www.heraldsun.com.au/sport/afl/st-ki lda-goalsneak-stephen-milne-at-his-evasive-best-as-media-descends-on-seaford/n ews-story/a7ff23f5a87ef5aeedaa69f6fa909405#itm=newscomau%7Csport%7Cnc am-story-body-link%7C3%7Chttp%3A%2F%2F (last accessed 17 May 2018). Mewett, P., & Toffoletti, K. (2010). Voices from the margins? Women at the footy. Intergraph: Journal of Dialogic Anthropology, 3(1), 1. Philadelphoff-Puren, N. (2004). Dereliction: Women, rape and football. Australian Feminist Law Journal, 21, 35–51. Sabo, D., & Panepinto, J. (1990). Football ritual and the social reproduction of masculinity. In M. Messner, & D. Sabo (Eds.), Sport, men, and the gender order: Critical feminists perspectives (p. 115). Champaign, IL: Human Kinetic. Salter, M. (2013). Justice and revenge in online counter-publics: Emerging responses to sexual violence in the age of social media. Crime Media Culture, 0(0), 1–18. Tatz, C. (2011). Race matters in Australian sport. In J. Long, & K. Spracklen (Eds.), Sport and challenges to racism (pp. 100–116). London: Palgrave Macmillan. Theodoropoulou, V. (2007). In J. Grey, C. Sandvoss, & C. L. Harrington (Eds.), The antifan within the fan: Awe and envy in sport fandom (p. 316). New York: New York University Press. Threadgold, T. (1997). Feminist poetics: Poiesis, performance, histories. London: Routledge. Waterhouse-Watson, D. (2007). All women are sluts: Australian rules football and the representation of the feminine. Australian Feminist Law Journal, 27, 155–162. Waterhouse-Watson, D. (2009). Playing defence in sexual assault “trial by media”: The male footballer’s imaginary body. Australian Feminist Law Journal, 30, 109–129. Waterhouse-Watson, D. (2013). Athletes, sexual assault and ‘trials by media’: Narrative immunity. Hoboken: Taylor and Francis. Wilson, C. (2010a). Deceit leaves Malthouse with pie on his face (p. 2). The Age, 13 April 2010 http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/deceit-leaves-malthouse-with-pie-o n-his-face-20100412-s44f.html (last accessed 26 February 2016). Wilson, C. (2010b). AFL must act on war of words. The Age (online) 11 April 2010 htt p://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/afl-must-act-on-war-of-words-20100410rzz5.html (last accessed 26 February 2016). Wilson, C. (2010c). Malthouse denies “rapist” slur against Saint. The Age (online) 11 April 2010 http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/malthouse-denies-rapist-slur-aga inst-saint-20100410-rzz3.html (last accessed 26 February 2016). Wilson, C. (2010d). Malthouse facing probe (p. 2). The Age, 11 April 2010. Wilson, C. (2011). You are wrong Michael: It’s time to apologise. The Age (online) 17 August 2011 http://www.theage.com.au/afl/afl-news/you-are-wrong-michael-its-t ime-to-apologise-20110816-1iwf0.html (last accessed 26 February 2016).

6. Conclusion The “trial” of Milne reveals the discursive means through which rape allegation becomes normalized as a trivial matter. As heresy, the ut­ terance impugns male reputation and, by extension, the institution of Australian football; as a parody, it dismisses the seriousness of the rape allegation. The symbolic relation between football’s ritualized practices of abuse and alleged acts of sexual violence by known footballers is exposed in public debates that concern the permissibility or impermis­ sibility of performative acts of abusive speech. The law, however, severs this connection, eclipsing what was a ten-year ordeal for the woman who first contacted Victoria Police with her rape allegation in 2004. A woman whose case was allegedly mishandled by senior officers; whose case was reopened on account of a police integrity inquiry; whose case resulted in charges 9 years later; whose case ended unsuccessfully on account of the public persecution of her attacker. Australian football’s power to protect Milne is so complex and covertly efficacious that it succeeds in again erasing the suffering of the victim of indecent assault and of alleged rape. This was no fault of hers either. Such an end to these events masks the culpability of the AFL in staging the abuse of Milne as a means to protect football from rape allegation; a position that the law unknowingly solidifies by accepting a false equivalency between the suffering of the victim and the suffering of her alleged attacker. This is not to suggest that Milne should have received the full weight of a conviction, but rather to underscore how the rites of abuse ironically protected him from further judicial conse­ quences. I maintain that the public abuse of Stephen Milne in the years after 2010 cannot be traceable to one speech-act alone. Rather the ritualized practices of abuse in football and its masculine logic, exam­ ined in the online context and echoed in the stands of the Melbourne Cricket Ground, rendered him, to both fans and the AFL, a permissible object of abuse. To put it in another sense, the online space that allows rape allegation to be spoken of in a way distinct from the dominant news media is the same space that contributes to the protection of the foot­ baller from criminal consequence. Sexual violence does not begin in the violent act of rape or sexual assault. It is articulated through ritualized practices of abuse, traceable through a language that recognizes masculine domination as a logical outcome of practice. List of references cases Transcript of Proceedings, Director of Public Prosecutions (VIC) V Stephen Milne (County Court of Victoria, Unreported, Bourke MP, 6 November 2014). Transcript of Proceedings (Reasons for Sentence), Director of Public Prosecutions (VIC) V Stephen Michael Milne (County Court of Victoria, VCC 1880, Bourke MP, 6 November 2014). References Austin, J. L. (1962). How to do things with words. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

9