The Girl

Last week, I went on my computer and watched a video of a match I did with a team I was on for a local TV show. It was a “brain bowl” team and the show was like a game show involving teams from local high schools answering questions for points. I’d seen the tape before a dozen times, though not for nearly two years because it was too painful for me to watch. Later on in the playing season that we went on that show the team captain began stalking and sexually harassing me to the point I was forced to quit the team because I just couldn’t stand to be around him any longer. Even if he had stopped treating me like that I think I still would’ve had to leave because I just couldn’t look at him the same way.
That was the experience that made me a feminist, and looking back I realized it was all much worse than I had understood at the time. Because of the way the team captain had treated me I had forgotten the blatant sexism demonstrated by most of the other people associated with that team. It’s like if you have a horrible day and get into a car crash on your way home; the crash makes you forget about all the more minor issues you had that day.

From the start I was the only girl on the team. There were others officially on the roster, but they never showed up for practice or matches. I believe that in America, with the prejudices you have today, when you have a team with one female player and eight male players, there will be sexism on some level. Let me say there was one boy on the team who was completely fair to me and stuck up for me when the other boys gave me issues. There were also a few who were for the most part indifferent to me and the way I was treated. In fact, my main issues were with two of the boys.
One of them, who I’ll call 1 because he’s unworthy of any name real or fake, was your standard misogynist asshole. He called me “the girl” and got others on the team to do likewise. If forced to address me by name he’d use my last name. To be fair, he called several of the boys on the team not by their last names, but by feminine versions of their first names so I wasn’t the only person he picked on. He would make rude comments about my wardrobe, claiming I dressed like a prostitute (I live in the south and it gets very hot; I was not dressing more risque than plenty of other girls in the school) or that I dressed like a lesbian (I had taken to putting on baggy sweatshirts before practice to stop the prostitute comments).
The other boy, who I’ll call 2 because he’s also unworthy of any name real or fake, seemed so nice at first. We’d known each other in middle school and I felt bad for him because 1 always treated him so horribly. I later discovered he and 1 were friends and that he told 1 to be cruel to him so he could get sympathy from me. He called me by my name and was respectful to me and defended me when 1 upset me. I knew he had a “thing” for me, but I tried my best to make it clear that I was fourteen and younger than him and that I wasn’t ready to get involved with guys. Truthfully, some of my friends were already dating and it was more that I just wasn’t interested in him like that, but I wanted to be nice. I was later convinced by a friend to tell him I already had a boyfriend because my first excuse didn’t seem to get through to him. I now realize that probably only made the situation worse and that I shouldn’t have lied.
About mid-way through the season, 1 left the team, and 2 became captain. I’ll admit 1 was a better player than me. He just got more answers right. But what I noticed when I rewatched that video was that in that match nearly every answer 2 gave as team captain came from me. All but ten of the points we got during that match were because of me. I now realize that I was better than him. At the time I figured we were about equal and that it was only fair he was captain because he was older than me. Now I realize that in almost every match we played with him as captain, I carried the team. We were a fairly weak team, and I’m no genius, but I now realize that if I had been a guy (or at least a few years older) I probably would’ve been captain.
I can’t blame this one on our coach because there were occasions where 2, (being the “nice fellow” I thought he was) let me play as captain. Though the moderator was told I was captain and I was the one giving her the answers, for almost every question the boys on the team gave their answers to 2 who then relayed them to me. Officially, I was playing as captain, but to the boys on the team (with one exception) it was still 2 and not me. Had I been captain full time, it might’ve weakened the team as a whole.
As 2’s time as captain wore on, his advances towards me became bolder. He took to putting his arm around me. When he did this, I always pushed it off me. During one pivotal match 2 had decided to give up his position and let me be captain for the first round. Because of this, and because other members of the team had witnessed him putting his arm around me, a terrible rumor started spreading about me. 1, who, though no longer on the team, was still friends with several of the members, told everyone he knew “for a fact” I’d only been allowed to be captain at such an important match because I had given 2 a blowjob in the girls bathroom before hand. For a fourteen-year-old girl who’s still a virgin in every sense of the world, that felt like a knife through my chest when I finally heard of it. The one boy on the team who stuck up for me told me they were saying “horrible things” but refused to elaborate for fear of upsetting me. It was only months later, after I’d left the team, that I found out what they’d been saying. By then the whole school had heard it.
One day during practice, one of the boys on the team asked to borrow a pen. I opened up my purse to get him one and was fishing around for it when he looked over my shoulder and loudly made a comment that I carry a lot of tampons. I was humiliated, as in that high school kids just didn’t talk about women’s bodies and it just made everyone uncomfortable. I started to cry (which I now realize only made things worse) when 2 told the other boys they were being “awful” and he told me to “go clean up” because I had mascara running down my face.
When I got out of the bathroom he was waiting for me outside. He hugged me, which I probably shouldn’t have let him do given the circumstances (no one else on the team ever hugged each other). I felt him trying to grab my breasts as he was doing that and I pushed him away. I later found out that while I was in the bathroom he had told all the boys on the team that he was going to “get in my pussy” by “this time next week” and that he’d gone through my back pack and looked at what books I was reading so he could pretend we had common interests.
A week later I found out that 2 was stalking me, as in following me around behind my back and asking former friends about me. Apparently he’d been doing this for several weeks. it finally came to a head when he chased me through the school and shouted “You can’t run from me, I know where you live” I told him he didn’t know where I live, but he managed to recite my address even though I’d never told him. I couldn’t bare to confront him once I realized how much he’d found out behind my back and just told the coach I was quitting the team, two matches before the end of the season. He told me he was going to “talk” to 2, which, to be fair to him, he did do, though apparently to this day 2 asserts that I had been “leading him on” and that I actually had given him a blowjob before that match. I told the school what had happened, but nothing ever came of it. 2 was a straight-A student and I was known as a “trouble maker” because I’d made a big stink about refusing to take the PSATs because I thought it was unfair they were requiring certain students to come in early for it while everyone else got the morning off, especially since everyone is required to take it twice anyway and I didn’t feel like doing the same thing three times.
At the time, I honestly felt it was just one student who sexually harassed me. Now I see that almost the whole team had been sexist to some extent in their treatment of me. Online, I’ve discovered that this sort of thing happens all the time. I’ve heard stories eerily similar to my own. I’ve also heard about girls on sports teams who’ve had it much worse than me because not only did they deal with boys like 1 and 2 but they were forced to shower and change at school which gave those boys more opportunities to mistreat them than I ever had to deal with. So, I want to know, how widespread is this? I’ve stated before that I believe that in the cultural climate of today when you have one girl on a team with only boys some sort of sexism is bound to occur.