How Barstool Sports Uses Social Media As A Weapon
There is obviously a market for the site’s lowbrow content, but how its stories manifest on social media is alarming nonetheless.
It’s no secret that social media has become the best, most efficient way to disseminate hate. In this brave new world of instant invective, Twitter is the perfect platform from which to launch attacks at, well, anybody. In 140 or fewer characters and a click or two, anyone can unleash a string of hateful, harmful words at any public account. And while certain recourses still exist (blocking or muting, specifically), discussing any controversial topic can quickly become a kind of digital Whack-A-Mole: bat down one troll, three more pop up in its place.
Last weekend yielded a perfect example of that very phenomenon.
When Huffington Post reported that Al Jazeera was planning to run a documentary linking numerous notable athletes — including superstar quarterback Peyton Manning — to the use of human growth hormone (HGH), response, particularly on the Internet, was bound to be spirited.
Manning’s status as a beloved figure and Al Jazeera’s Middle Eastern-owned origins, coupled with the always-inflammatory presence of performance-enhancing drugs, made for the perfect #hottake storm.
Sure enough, there was no shortage of comical reactions.
Meet the man known as “KFC,” a writer for Barstool Sports. For the uninitiated, Barstool Sports is a site dedicated almost religiously to the everyman fan, trafficking in simplistic commentary and jabs at just about every aspect of the sports world.
It’s also a profoundly despicable corner of the Internet, where writers cater to the misogynistic underbelly of sports fans and revel in its piggishness. Complete with a “Girls” section highlighting the scribes’ favorite scantily clad women, Barstool deals in masturbatory, self-aggrandizing sexism. They call female reporters sluts, and gained notoriety when they ran a story about the size of Tom Brady’s young son’s genitals. They revel in “bringing back the word “cunt.”
You know, “guy stuff.”
So when Twitter users began calling out KFC for his blockheaded ignorance of Al Jazeera’s credibility, things got very ugly very quickly. When one of the people to do so turned out to be a woman, the problem confounded tenfold.
Jen Mac Ramos, a graduate student studying journalism at USC and a writer at the SB Nation blog Purple Row, sent out the following tweet, which was quickly brought to KFC’s attention.
Once Ramos’ tweet was shared to the Barstool readership, the vultures descended. Ramos’ mentions quickly filled with remarks such as these.
KFC then shared more of Ramos’ tweets to his audience, claiming she and one of her friends didn’t have enough followers “to be his intern.” That friend was then called a derogatory slur that so frequently haunts these ordeals:
Ramos wasn’t the only woman to receive hate from the Barstool hit squad, of course. Yankees blogger Stacey Gotsulias and The Cauldron’s Julie DiCaro were the targets of more than a few scum-scraping tweets.
Before the ordeal was over, KFC would make a shrine to his own brilliance over at Barstool, crowing over his perceived victory over Ramos, Sporting News writer Jesse Spector, and generally everyone on Twitter he believes pales to his intelligence. I’ll begrudgingly link to it here, because while I don’t relish the idea of giving the website page views, it’s important to understand the hellacious cult of personality that the Barstool writers enjoy.
A venture into the comments section of that recap finds many a reader congratulating KFC on his victory over the Big Bad Feminists. How brave their leader was, lobbing nasty insults at people who don’t like/agree with him, then sending his fanboys to flank their lines.
Not surprisingly, Barstool Sports never said anything to condemn the harassment and abuse levied by their community. To the contrary: If KFC’s victory-lap post is anything to go by, they rather enjoyed it.
And why wouldn’t they? Here was yet another chance for this troll-feeding rag to revel in their displeasure of women, to objectify them as definitively lesser than. Using “feminist” as an adjective to identify something as negative or somehow worthy of scorn amounts to little more than naked sexism. Feminism, at its most basic level, is the belief that men and women — politically, socially, or otherwise — are and ought to be equal. To use the term as a pejorative is to throw that value to the fire. And with sports being so heavily male-dominant (still), it’s almost the perfect terrain for this fallacy to fester and grow.
This is hardly a new narrative. DiCaro continues to deal with all sorts of sexist harassment, stemming largely from her outspoken reporting of the Patrick Kane rape case. Some Twitter users went so far as to send her death threats, or openly wish she be raped. It would be easy to write this off as an inevitable-ugly side effect of the immediacy of social media. Yet the men sending these abusive messages — many of them, anyway — must first actually believe what they’re saying before tweeting it out. This isn’t a mere byproduct of Internet trolling; it’s the direct result of a systematic disapproval of women in society, and more specifically, women in the world of sports.
As a man, writing this column is an interesting exercise. Jen is a colleague of mine, and neither she, nor any other woman, needs me to leap to her defense. She’s perfectly capable of articulating her own thoughts on the matter, and has done so rather eloquently.
Rather, I’m writing this because Jen is my friend. It sickened me, as a friend, to see her weekend derailed by this. It sickened me, as a friend, to see an outlet so eagerly sic its readers on someone who didn’t agree with them. As a friend, as a member of the sports media, as a human being, it sickened me.
All the while, the Barstool crowd — “stoolies” as they refer to themselves — laughs it all off. To them, it’s all just a bad joke that we don’t get. It’s satire. Good clean fun that falls on the deaf ears of the church of politically correctness.
It’s not. It’s not funny. It’s not a joke. It’s not satire. It’s actual harassment, and actual verbal abuse. Calling it satire doesn’t make it go away, and it doesn’t immunize it from attack. Barstool’s pivot to self-defense only belies the fact that they know all too well what they’re doing, and in what they take such pitiful pride in.
I wish I could say that those who run Barstool Sports know better. But that would be a lie. They don’t know better, because they can’t comprehend that what they do isn’t gospel. They can’t fathom that their brand of humor and arrogance isn’t what they or anyone else should be spewing all over the Internet. Appealing to the lowest common denominator is easy, and Barstool Sports is living, breathing proof of it. They aren’t just a tiny blog. Barstool has nearly 250,000 followers on Twitter, and many notable athletes regularly chat with their writers. For better or for worse, they are a part of the sports-media landscape.
I realize picking this particular hill to die on is likely a losing battle. A column will not change the way that people think. Sports media will never shed its rampant sexism as long as women are used as eye candy on the sidelines and accused rapists like Jameis Winston, Ben Roethlisberger, Kobe Bryant, and Patrick Kane are idolized. Things will never change as long as the likes of Greg Hardy can be paraded onto a field and be called a “leader” by his team’s owner.
Still, it’s a conversation that needs to be had. Even if seemingly tiny Twitter flame wars are what spark the conversation, that conversation needs to be had loudly, and by those at the highest levels of sports media. That is where real change will come from.
Until that day comes, misogynistic echo chambers like Barstool Sports will continue to levy venom towards women, a campaign with which their readers are all too happy to help.
