Left Out and Laughed At

Reflections on USA Men's Hockey, and how "good" men devalue women

Two Girls Playing, Robert Barnes (1840-1895)/ Public domain via Wikimedia Commons

When my brother was around 10, he was initiated into the sock fraternity. It was a running gag at Ryan Christmas Eve celebrations for all of the men– uncles, grandpa, male cousins once they hit a certain age– to be gifted plain socks, and for all of the sock-getters to commemorate that gift with an over-the-top celebration.

My sister and I never got socks. My female cousins didn’t get socks. My grandma and aunts didn’t get socks. We weren’t even asked if we would want to participate. There was no equivalent goofy celebration tradition for the girls. We got other gifts, just not socks. Just not a gift that was part of an inside joke.

My dad grew up with five brothers and no sisters. Five of the six Ryan boys (they were called “Ryan boys” well into their adulthood) were athletes; one of my uncles was an all-American baseball player in college, and went on to be a great high school baseball coach. My dad was the assistant coach of the boys’ high school basketball team in my school– his alma mater. There are scrapbooks full of newspaper clippings about my dad’s football, basketball, and baseball accomplishments shoved in a drawer in my parents’ basement somewhere.

The Ryan Boys and some of their male cousins (other Ryans, also jocks) formed a very intense softball team called Ryan’s Hope, which played in a league of much-less-intense, more casual teams, many of which were based in area taverns. Over the course of a few seasons, Ryan’s Hope won more than 30 games in a row. The other teams hated them.

Suffice to say, mine was a male-dominated, sports-first extended family. Holiday gatherings always involved either hunting excursions or some form of casual game that would spiral into something way too competitive, and the game would inevitably pause or end because someone got a head injury, or had run off the makeshift baseball diamond or touch football field or backyard volleyball court crying. The game’s ringleaders just couldn’t stop before things got so intense that they stopped being fun.

I don’t know when the first time was that I felt like, because I was a girl, I was less important. It could have been when I decided I didn’t want to go hunting with all the men (no girls in the family chose to go hunting with the men).

Maybe I first felt Less Than when I first hurt myself trying to keep up with my older cousins and uncles. Or when it became clear that my younger brother had gotten better than I was at baseball, and I could sense my dad preferred to play with him. Maybe when my brother got invited on the annual South Dakota hunting trip that all the men go on together– the one that’s so important that my dad has missed important events to go. The ramshackle cabin they stay in on these trips looks disgusting even in the photos, but I wanted to at least be asked!

At family events, the men roughhoused or watched televised roughhousing, the women cooked. The women bought and wrapped the gifts; my grandpa, and later my Uncle Tim, played Santa, distributed the gifts and collected all the gratitude. (But hey, at least everybody cleaned.)

I wanted to be cool, a cool girl, a girl who knew about boy things and could hang out with boys, while not being seen as boy-like. I would watch Vikings and Twins games with my dad, even though my interest paled in comparison to his, because it was something we could do together. Bonus: it gave me something to talk about with boys at school. I didn’t dislike watching men’s sporting events. Sports are fine! But watching them just took up an oversized amount of time relative to how interested in sports I actually was. And it was almost always men’s sports, because that’s what was on TV.

In college, I met one guy I’d end up dating on a long bus home from an away football game. We spent most of the ride talking about baseball, and he told me that he was impressed by how much I knew— Wow, a girl who actually knows about sports.

At the time, that compliment made me feel good. Wow, a girl who actually knows about sports. As though millions of women around the country aren’t sitting through endless little league games every single spring, although his own mother hadn’t carted him to football practice and games for the previous ten years of his life and ostensibly learned plenty of sports watching him. As though there aren’t women having fun attending live sporting events. As though this guy and I didn’t go to one of the biggest jock schools in the country where practically every undergrad— male and female— went to every home football game unless they were deathly ill or foreign. Wow, a girl. I ate that shit up.

He never asked me a single question about any other interest I may or may not have had, but that’s pretty normal for a first conversation with a straight man.

As an adult, I’ve found it valuable that my striving for relevancy in my jock family led me to knowing about a lot of “boy” stuff and having a casual appreciation for it. It’s good to learn about popular hobbies and interests, even if you don’t share them, because a lot of people are truly awful at asking other people questions. I’ve met plenty of straight men who have no interest in or ability to hold conversations with women unless those conversations are about themselves or their own interests. They expect the world to bend to their preferences, because it always has.

I am not a passive victim of this dynamic. I am a participant. I have willingly cleared space for men I would never expect to clear space for me, because that’s just how things are done between men and women. I have spent so much of my life learning about somebody else’s hobbies for their sake and their sake only. I watched every single University of Florida football game for like three years (I did not attend the University of Florida). I learned how to play Magic: The Gathering. I watched Fast & Furious: Tokyo Drift several times. I spent a road trip listening almost exclusively to Patrice O’Neal comedy specials and the band Murder By Death. I have seen almost every episode of one of the worst sitcoms of all time, which I realized at the time was one of the worst sitcoms of all time, but that I pretended to like because it was this one guy’s “comfort show.” I’ve watched a bunch of Bond movies, all of which suck. I’ve seen so many Terrence Mallick films. I’ve watched so many Martin Scorsese films. Both directors— sorry guys— are fine, but not my favorite.

The expectation that girls and women take interest in men’s hobbies but men and boys have no reciprocal responsibility to meet women where they are is so baked into the way boys and girls are socialized that I don’t think most guys realize they’re doing it. Most girls probably don’t, either. I didn’t.

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I didn’t find out my older daughter’s sex until she was crying and covered in goo on my stomach in the delivery room. One of the nurses said “girl!” A flood of relief washed over me in the chaos of the birthing suite.

I couldn’t bring myself to admit it during that pregnancy, but I’d really wanted a girl. Same thing, if I’m being totally honest, with the second one.

So now we’ve got these two little girls careening around the house. The older one has blonde hair almost down to her waist that I taught myself to french braid. When she runs, the braids trail behind her like tails of a kite. The little one isn’t even two yet but wants to do everything her big sister does. The only thing I can do with her hair is make a tiny ponytail that sticks directly up from the center of her head, like a Dr. Seuss character.

One unpleasant task of raising children is teaching them that there are people out there who would hurt them. The two-year-old is too young to understand much, but I’m trying to teach the four-year-old about stranger danger. I tell her to be wary of adults, but the subtext is that I don’t want her to trust men. If she gets lost, find a mom. Never go with a man you don’t know, anywhere. Don’t let a man who isn’t your dad help you get dressed, take a bath, or go to the bathroom.

I didn’t notice this when I was a little girl, but many adult men say totally out-of-pocket things to and about very young female children. Unbidden, strange men tell my daughter she’s pretty. That she’s going to break hearts when she gets older. One random man asked my then-three-year-old if she had a boyfriend. I have a niece who tends to attract a lot of adult male attention. She’s six. My sister-in-law says that men have been saying weird things to her child, in front of her, since she was a baby.

Teaching my daughters to avoid dangerous men and when men are being creeps is not a complicated concept for them to grasp. But I’m dreading witnessing them learn, each in her own way, about the ways that men are disappointing. Sometimes, when I’m watching my daughters play together or marveling at how lovely they are, a dark little cloud of a thought creeps in: some day, somebody is going to make them feel worthless.

Men who are disappointing vastly outnumber creeps and monsters. My daughters will have to learn that a lot of boys and men (and some girls and women, but mostly boys and men) will look down on them, just because they’re girls. Even if my daughters are more clever, or funnier, or smarter, or faster, or better at singing or playing guitar– what they accomplished is automatically lesser, because they’re girls. That a lot of people still believe that my daughters’ purpose is to serve and support men, even the dullards and the psychos and the losers, because they’re girls.

I’ve been thinking about that quite a bit in light of the whole Team USA Hockey debacle– when, minutes after winning their first gold medal in decades, FBI director Kash Patel was allowed into the postgame celebration, for some reason. And then, our pig of a president called the team and joked on speakerphone that he’d only be inviting the gold medal-winning women’s hockey team to the White House so that he didn’t get in trouble. Kash and the players laughed.

The men and women’s teams, prior to this, had a reportedly good relationship. They were friends with each other. They were in close quarters at the Olympics. They supported each other at games. The men laughed at a joke at the women’s expense, anyway.

I don’t have high expectations for men in groups. Of course that’s how the men’s hockey team reacted in the moment. Because most men would rather casually degrade women than make another man uncomfortable.

This is a demoralizing thing to learn, as a woman. Most men are not frothing misogynists. But when most men who don’t actually hate women are around a man who does, they’ll make moral accommodations for the pig. They’ll laugh at his jokes. They’ll nod along with whatever gross story he’s telling, even if, in their minds, they realize that what they’re hearing is unacceptable. Even when the situation is egregious, there are still many who won’t speak up. How many of them will actually interfere when they see a man they know about to do something bad to a woman versus saying something bad to a woman?

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My four-year-old daughter loves “boy” movies from the 1980’s. The primary reason is that she and my husband are movie buddies, and when my husband watches movies with her, he tries to steer her toward movies he liked when he was a little boy, in the 1980’s. She’s seen the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Movie (much to my chagrin), Goonies, the original Star Wars.

And that’s fine. I hate Goonies more than is seemly (so much screaming!), but she likes what she likes. At the same time, I don’t want her to see girls as sidekicks or damsels or girlfriends. In addition to the cowabunga popcorn cinema of my husband’s youth, I want her to see girls doing all sorts of things. If other people don’t believe in her, at the very least I hope she believes in herself.

I’ve tried to balance out the “boy” movies and all-male-character hero content with stories that show both male and female characters both taking active roles in pushing the plot forward (including princess movies, which she blessedly is not nearly as into as I was). That can be a tall order.

I’ve found that, even though there are much more female non-princess protagonists in kids’ movies and TV than there were when I was a kid, most of the characters who get to go on adventures in children’s media are still boys. And when they’re in any kind of mixed-gender “squad” situation, there are always more boys on the superteam than girls. According to a 2024 study, 57% of characters in children’s movies and TV shows are male. The study also found that only 44% of leading characters were female. There was no breakdown in the study about how many of the girl characters got to lead a team of boys and girls on an adventure.

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Whoever started the sock tradition in my family probably wasn’t thinking about how it would make the girls feel. I’m sure the people who make movies and TV shows for kids aren’t trying to make girls feel like less important parts of the adventure squad. I’m sure they are noted to death by executives who want to maximize audience reach, and there must be some research out there justifying making boys the leaders as often as they are. I’m sure the guys who laughed at the president’s dumb joke didn’t do it because they because they agree with everything President stands for and believe everything he believes about white supremacy and the patriarchy and grabbing women by the pussy, etc, etc, etc. They just didn’t think.

I’ve heard plenty of people who aren’t as disappointed by hockey locker room moment minimize the incident by projecting anything but engrained misogyny onto the motivations of the players who laughed. Of course they were in the middle of a victory party, things were loud and confusing and there was drinking going on. Maybe they didn’t hear the joke. What were they supposed to do??? There’s no excuse for it, but here are a few excuses for it….

The apologies didn’t start trickling out until days later. On Wednesday, a reporter asked Team USA goaltender (and Boston Bruin) Jeremy Swayman about the incident. Swayman said that the team should have reacted differently. Defenseman Charlie McAvoy (another Boston Bruin) separately said he was sorry about how the team had responded in the moment.

I appreciate Swayman’s and McAvoy’s candor and reflection, and acknowledge that the biggest assholes in that room were FBI director Kash Patel, whoever let Kash Patel into the locker room, and the President himself. The hockey players were set up to be political pawns by a flailing, unpopular President desperate to latch himself to their accomplishment. Unlike the women’s hockey team, most women who have their accomplishments turned into a punch line never get an apology from the “good guys” who laughed along with a bad joke. Most women never even know when it happens to them.

It bears mentioning that these apologies have happened after the men’s hockey team (minus five defectors) were guests of the president at the State of the Union, grinning emptily as the stink of the celebration adhered to their gold medals like cigarette smoke on a shag carpet. The women’s team declined their invitation to the White House.

Does it really matter if the players who laughed at Trump’s “joke”— if a statement that sounds exactly like other things that somebody has said sincerely can be classified as a “joke”— meant it to be hurtful? In the moment, the action’s impact is the same regardless of whether the action was mean-spirited or not. An apology can help repair a damaged relationship, but it’s not an undo button.

It’s already dredged up negative feelings from women and girls. Feelings that this hockey team is not fully responsible for, but that they have now perpetuated.

One of the toughest lessons that I learned in adulthood is that “good” men sign off on demeaning women all the time, often without realizing it, because it doesn’t occur to them that they might be demeaning women. They don’t think about it because they’ve never had to think about it. They’re used to getting a good faith read. They’re used to other people making excuses for them. They see themselves as good, therefore they are, conclusively, good.

These are lessons that I can’t teach to my daughters. They’ll have to learn for themselves, probably the same way most women do: by being disappointed in the same way enough times to turn a minor annoyance into a raw nerve.