On an evening in which Manchester United appointed Louis van Gaal as manager and Ryan Giggs, taking up the reins of deputy manager, retired as a player, Radio 5's 7 p.m. sports programme led with . . . . yes, the news that the Premier League had decided not to take any action against Richard "Sexist" Scudamore. The panel of middle-aged sports journalists plus token woman mused over the issue self-righteously for the first twenty minutes of the programme.
Not once did any of the panellists suggest that, loathsome though they might personally find Scudamore's leaked private sexist emails, they worried about a society where one step out of line could result in a media campaign for you to lose your job. The BBC is far from being the worst offender in this case, but their news headline went along the following lines - Peter Scudamore will keep his job despite (and this was the word which stuck in my craw) being revealed as a chauvinist pig. "Despite" implies that Scudamore had done something wrong. After all, you wouldn't say he kept his job "despite" having eaten porridge for breakfast. But I don't need the BBC to tell me whether Scudamore has erred - I can make up my own mind - and it worries me that the Corporation employs people who don't understand this basic point. Either that or they don't understand what words mean.
But I guess that's kind of person who works for Radio 5, and if I don't like it I shouldn't be listening to it.
Of course the most sickening aspect of the holier than thou broadcasters was that football has always been a deeply sexist sport. One doesn't have to read the tabloids to get an idea of the Caligulan scenes which take place when a gang of footballers meets a gaggle of impressionable wannabe Wags. Out of many, two vignettes spring to mind. One anecdote was in Ronald Reng's book about Barnsley's German goalkeeper, and concerned, well, let's just say it concerned group fellatio. The other concerned the former Chelsea player Gavin Peacock, a Christian, who sometimes travelled to away games in the luggage compartment of the team bus. This was because the then manager showed porn movies to the players en route and Peacock didn't want to watch them. Football is a profoundly sexist game, female referee's assistants notwithstanding, a sexism which extends from players to fans to management and, yes, to journalists; that's to say the same journalists now agitating for the hapless Scudamore to lose his job. It is still very a largely working class pursuit, even in the prawn sandwich seats at Old Trafford, and the working class are, by and large, less careful to hide their sexism under a cloak of "respect" for the opposite sex than Proust-reading liberal humanities graduates like me.
Under the circumstances it's not surprising the Premier League clubs voted unanimously to back their Chief Exec. No doubt they would have done so even if Bruce Buck, the Chelsea chairman and one of the panel who examined the issue, had not been a shooting partner of Scudamore.
What, I wonder, would the Premier League have done if Scudmore's remarks had been racist? I expect they would have sacked him, and I think they would have been right. Racism is much more serious an issue than sexism. That's because a society can't function properly where people can be discriminated against just because of the colour of their skin. But sexism doesn't quite have the same heft. That's because while most men may be sexist to one degree or other, we all have mothers, wives, sisters, partners and daughters. We all mingle with each other in a way in which, even now, most black and white people don't. If a crude summary of male/female relations might be Can't live with them, Can't live without them, it doesn't seem unreasonable that men (and women) should be able to give vent to their feelings about the differences between the sexes from time to time. It doesn't mean that anyone is going to do anything horrible about or to the opposite sex. I thought Scudamore's remarks were bad; but nothing like as bad as it would be to sack him because he made them.
PS As Allison Pearson pointed out in the Torygraph a couple of days later, it's interesting to compare the UK media interest in Scudamore with their lack of interest in Meriam Ibrahim, a Sudanese Muslim sentenced to death for adultery; and not because she actually committed adultery, but because she married a Christian. Ms Ibrahim is pregnant by the way. Where are the double page spreads and radio phone-ins about her? The Sudanese court exercised a degree of clemency by the way - it is going to allow her to have her baby before she is stoned to death.
In a society which, for all its faults, is almost certainly getting less sexist by the day, the fuss over Scudamore and the silence about Ibrahim reveals our media to be contemptible to a degree which overruns the boundaries of the word.
