A different playlist for athletes

Dr Gabrielle Jamela Hosein

IT’S DOWN SEASON for triathletes, but there were back-to-back 5k races and track and swim meets these past few months.

In many of them, including corporate-sponsored, fundraising 5K and 10k races, I was alarmed and troubled by the music played.

This column is for everyone who holds sports competitions of any kind in which children and adolescents participate. It’s for the DJs and the sponsors, the coaches and the bodies that govern sports.

Sports is one of the few places where girls are valued for being physically strong and fit, and where their bodies are not sexualised. In a world of advertising, music videos, fashion, Carnival, gender socialisation and street sexual harassment, where they are bombarded with expectations that they be attractive and desirable to boys and men, sports is a refuge that focuses on their determination, discipline, ability and ambition, the way that education is a refuge because it values girls not for how they look, but for their minds.

This role of refuge, from pervasive sexualisation from early adolescence and for the rest of girls’ lives, is huge. We should feel protective of it and make decisions that reflect such protectiveness.

I’m imploring every sporting event in the country: please stop playing music with lyrics that repeatedly instruct girls to bend over, go down, spread out, wine up, take bam--o, push back or any other inanity that totally violates the space that sport provides for girls to be recognised on terms that have nothing to do with sex, sexual skills or sexiness.

To be clear, I am in full support of adults being as sexy as they like. This is not conservative moralising about respectability.

This is a column about irresponsibly blaring messages that are inappropriate for children and adolescents, and particularly for adolescent girls who are training to win medals and podium places, who are aiming for scholarships, and who are building confidence in their toughness, grit and power.

Why should I bring my 14-year-old minor to race and have her be bombarded by music which, in such a context, is shockingly demeaning?

I’ve gone up to men DJs playing music in triathlon and track, and asked them to please play something else. Typically, it’s not something they have thought about. Many are dads. They usually get it once we start talking, and fully agree.

Bend over in a fete. Bend over in J'Ouvert. When it comes to sports, try to bend over backwards to think about how to make it the most mentally and emotionally healthy space for young athletes, many of whom don’t know there is a whole world of great music and the possibility of a whole future world that isn’t sexist.

In sports, where there are children, we must be more mindful as adults of showing them, and especially girls, that we respect them enough as athletes to think through our playlist.

It's not just that, bizarrely, music is blasted so loud it can be hard even to have a conversation, because speakers are placed immediately next to the allocated seating or bleachers. It’s also that neurodiverse children and athletes of all ages, including non-diagnosed ones (who are the majority), may find music so loud to be over-stimulating and dysregulating, affecting their behaviour, performance, and even emotional state and need for recovery when they get home.

We want pump, excitement, vibe. Parents who have been paying fees, buying gear and driving up and down to training want to scream and cheer from the sides. Everything is a lime. I’m right there with those parents – on the field, at the swim meets, at the 5ks, at the triathlon events.

I just want that over-loud music to be a little more mindful of gendered realities of sexism and objectification.

I’m hoping that there’s a selector, a DJ who can mix, or a remixer who can see a niche that needs to be filled and produces the sessions that can transform TT’s sports events’ music. (For a start, I asked Ziya’s remixing dad, "Where’s your long-promised Razorshop Live Mix Sports Session?" He said, "Check Lyndon Livingstone on Mixcloud this weekend').

I’m hoping these words resonate. I’m not asking for a big change. I am asking for songs telling girls to twist themselves into what appears sexy not to be played where there are young athletes.

Parents teach by repeating things to our children. Loud music on repeat everywhere socialises them in the same way. Our developing sports heroes and heroines deserve better. It matters what DJs play.

Diary of a mothering worker

Entry 547

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