The one heartening element of an otherwise dismal season at ITFC has been the restoration of a positive, encouraging atmosphere among the Town support, both home and away. In particular, a new and imaginative repertoire of songs has developed: some recalling our club’s proud history, others – such as the adoption of Bob Marley’s Three Little Birds – purely and defiantly uplifting. Hearing and singing these songs has made it fun to be part of the Ipswich support, in direct contrast to what’s been happening on the pitch. The supporters group Blue Action, whose interview with Turnstile Blues is reproduced here, have, in all senses, orchestrated this revolution, for which they deserve our thanks and congratulations.
But there’s one song, which somehow retains a place in that repertoire, that stands out for the wrong reasons, jarring, bothersome, and unpleasant. It’s like the one track on your favourite album that you always want to skip, or the anchovies that you pick off your pizza, or Hayden Christensen’s contribution to the Star Wars series. You know the one we mean: it’s the one about Delia Smith which contains repeated repetition of the phrase “she’s a whore”.
We could write a very long essay here, on society, football culture, and the treatment of women in traditionally male environments, but we won’t. All we need to say is that picking out the term “whore” as your insult of choice for a football rival who happens to be female, is not OK. It’s part of the centuries-old but remarkably persistent practice known as “slut-shaming” – the process by which anyone found guilty of being in possession of a vagina is then defined by their perceived levels of sexual activity, and persecuted for it.
There might be people reading this, or people who enjoy singing that song, who would justify it by saying “it’s about the owner of Norwich City – of course we’re going to insult her. It’s just a terrace chant: we’re not being sexist, we’re singing about our local rivals. We don’t hate her because she’s a woman, we hate her because we hate Norwich”. But ask yourselves this: how many terrace chants about other hate figures make reference to sexual activity, or sexuality? Does Town fans’ song about Darren Huckerby say anything about how many people he might have slept with? When Keith Stroud’s infuriating ineptitude ruined the recent game against Forest, was anyone calling him a slut?
Football grounds should be welcoming places for everyone, but for women or girls to hear Ipswich fans choosing “whore” as the label with which to brand a rival figure is an important signifier, and not in a good way. It sends the opposite of a welcoming message: it says “if we don’t like you, and you happen to be female, we will judge you according to our perceptions of what you do with your bodies, and by doing so we will remind you of your assigned roles at football - whores or frigid lesbians”. People may not realise that this is how women are sometimes made to feel in football grounds, but one of the authors of this article has thirty years’ worth of personal experience to confirm that it is. Those who join in with that song may not consciously want to send that message to the female supporters around them, but by singing it, they’re contributing to an atmosphere that is permissive of misogyny.
And, at a time when there’s so much else to admire about the Town support, that one song really stands out as a nasty stain on an otherwise progressive and uplifting fan-led movement. Which is why it was really disappointing to read Blue Action’s response when Turnstile Blues asked about their view of it: “we would join in just to keep things going”.
If Blue Action, who have attracted so much well-deserved acclaim for their positive and inclusive approach, were to instead come out and say “actually no, that’s not OK and that’s not what we want to be about”, it could have further increased their constructive impact. It was interesting that Blue Action made a point of rightly condemning the song that a small number of Ipswich fans used to sing about Justin Fashanu as completely unacceptable – perhaps this reflects the (seemingly widely-held) perception that it’s not OK to be racist or homophobic, but a bit of sexism is still allowable.
Legitimised misogyny is part of the mechanism by which women are prevented from achieving any kind of equality – and by which some girls grow up thinking that they’re less valued, or less valuable, than their male peers. In 2019, songs about what a woman does or doesn’t do with her vagina shouldn’t be part of what happens in a football ground. We’re really grateful to Blue Action for everything they’ve done to make watching Ipswich fun again, and we love joining in with the songs that they’ve come up with. If everyone – including groups like Blue Action – could play a part in eliminating the unnecessary and damaging nastiness of songs with phrases like “she’s a whore”, then we really would be making progress.
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