Tampa Bay Lightning head coach Jon Cooper stated that if goaltenders cannot handle net front battles, "we might as well put skirts on them." As Ian Kennedy writes, it was a sexist message claiming the inferiority of women in hockey.
Tampa Bay Lightning head coach Jon Cooper stated that if goaltenders cannot handle net front battles, "we might as well put skirts on them." As Ian Kennedy writes, it was a sexist message claiming the inferiority of women in hockey.
Most men in sport have heard it.
"Stop throwing like a girl" or "you're playing like a bunch of girls."
Monday night, following the elimination of the NHL's Tampa Bay Lightning from the Stanley Cup playoffs, head coach Jon Cooper made it clear. Cooper felt goaltenders don't have to be tough. He felt the NHL is "letting the goalies off the hook" and that they should be able to battle in front of the net too because "they've got way more pads on than everybody else does."
To cement his argument, he stated that if goaltenders can't handle the battle, if they aren't tough enough to deal with the traffic in front of the net, then "we might as well put skirts on them."
"Net front battles aren't allowed anymore? That's part of everybody's game, it's like, the boxing out that goes there, it's like prison rules, in the playoffs, but it's not prison rules for the goalie?" Cooper questioned in the post game press conference. "Like the second something happens, you know like, we might as well put skirts on them then, if that's how it's going to be. I mean hey have to battle through things too."
It's the type of sentiment that has pushed the growth of women's sport backward. It's a sexist remark rooted in misogyny that equates femininity to weakness.
When WWI and WWII arose, women joined the workforce in numbers never seen before. In Canada, the number of women holding full time jobs jumped from 600,000 to 1.2 million during WWII at a time when Canada's total population was only 11 million. It was the era of Rosie the Riveter. Before, between, and specifically after those wars however, women were pushed out of the workforce, shamed for leaving the home, and taught the sexist message that a life of domesticity was the appropriate existence.
"It helped perpetuate the sexist belief that women are weak and powerless. Hence, this propelled the idea that therefore, anything feminine was also weak and powerless," wrote Domani Sharkey for the Women's Republic.
“You run/throw/hit/play/etc. like a girl” is one of the most toxic displays of this idea. It indicates that doing something, typically an athletic activity, “like a girl,” means you’re doing it poorly," Sharkey continued. "Not only does this sustain the exclusion and discrimination of women in sports, but it paints a picture to those who hear it that being “like a girl” is undesirable. That being “like a girl” is synonymous to being weak and vulnerable. It pushes women’s rights activists back decades."
In recent years, women have reclaimed the statement, and we've seen it in signs across the PWHL. "Skate like a girl" and "play like a girl" have become signs of power as fans watch the elite athleticism and competition of the Professional Women's Hockey League. Or as soccer legend Mia Hamm is quoted as saying, "My coach said I run like a girl, and I said if he ran a little faster he could too."
But that's not what Jon Cooper said. Jon Cooper said that if you fail to perform, if you can't handle the competition, you belong in a skirt.
As researchers have found, "sport has... been central to the promotion and maintenance of men’s dominance over women."
The idea Cooper perpetuated in his comments, is the same idea that has been used throughout history to keep women from hockey. It was the entire principal behind the creation of hockey alternatives like ringette, invented by Sam Jacks in 1963. As Michael McKinlay wrote in "Hockey: A People's History," ringette prohibited body contact "to address concerns that hockey was too rough and could damage the girls’ reproductive organs."
By saying that players who can not physically battle for a puck should have "skirts on," Cooper reiterated these antiquated ideas, amplifying the idea that women cannot be physical, or handle the physical rigours of sport.
In a landmark case fought in the 1980s where Justine Blainey, a young girl banned from playing on a boys' hockey team, argued her right to participate in hockey to Canada's Human Rights Commission, testimony was given by a Team Canada and Toronto Maple Leafs doctor that “most women are too weak to survive in a physical sport such as hockey.”
It was an argument made about a 12-year-old girl, who as she entered the arena had coffee and popcorn thrown on her to chants from grown men of “kill the girl, get the girl.” She persisted, and won her case.
Body checking and battling in front of the net has been "part of everybody's game," as Cooper stated, but falsely claimed for men that fit his definition. Battling and body checking have historically been part of women's hockey, removed only prior to the 1992 World Championships by men, who as Nancy Therberge, a prominent hockey scholar wrote, were "not ready to handle powerful images of women.”
Prior to 1992, body checking had been part of women's hockey for nearly a century. As it was written in Coast to Coast: Hockey in Canada to the Second World War, "as early as the 1920s, female hockey players were challenging the residual Victorian notions of women as weak and passive and, by extension, their imposed inferiority status....Newspaper reports from women's hockey during the interwar years suggested that, like the men's game, women's hockey was also fast, aggressive, and, at times, violent." Since then, body checking has returned formally through the SDHL and PWHL. But the physicality and the net front battles never went away. And still, Cooper made his comment.
Physical play in women's hockey has been the norm throughout history, yet many men in hockey continue to spread false and harmful messages that dissuade young girls and other individuals who do not conform to a stereotypical definition of masculinity, from engaging with the sport. And it's the same harmful story that Tampa Bay Lightning head coach told. Cooper used his platform to tell women they are lesser, and that what's wrong with the sport of hockey, and the reason his team lost was because men on the ice were playing like they belonged in skirts.