Another Ivy League College Suspends Their Sports Team Over Misogynist Emails

Anyway, despite the fact it's late December and really I'm just typing words rather than sentences with meaning and stuff, I think I've improved on Einstein's madness definition. Here goes:

Madness is writing a stupid misogynistic email to your teammates despite knowing that emails of this sort always wind up getting leaked to the press, jeopardizing the expensive Ivy League education your parents worked so hard to pay for.

As a definition, it could probably use some finessing, but it's basically all there. And because I know that science stuff is meant to be supported by evidence, here are some examples of top-level university sports teams (which are supposedly full of intelligent people, but what do I know) doing some exceptionally dumb, misogynistic stuff.

Let's start with my own former Oxford college, where members of the rugby team encouraged each other to spike first-year girls' drinks with "a substance of your choice" in 2013. Over the pond, Harvard's entire men's soccer season was just cancelled in November after the team sent emails rating women on their sexual attractiveness and physical appearance.

Now the men's swimming and diving teams at Princeton University have been suspended for sending emails including content that is "vulgar and offensive, as well as misogynistic and racist in nature," according to a press release from the university on December 15. No further details have been released about the emails, although a university spokesman told the New York Times that the remarks were made about members of the women's swimming and diving team.

"The behavior that we have learned about is simply unacceptable," comments Ford Family Director of Athletics Mollie Marcoux Samaan. "It is antithetical to the values of our athletic program and of the University, and will not be tolerated."

All of these cases involve men at literally the best universities in the world. You may find this confusing, as I do. You'd expect highly intelligent dudes not to be stupid enough to write misogynistic bullshit in emails, which can be left open on the wrong computer or forwarded or hacked with a personal directive from the right world leader. But they continue to do so, even as scandal after scandal emerges. Which raises the question, are men routinely being lobotomized as part of their initiations into these sports teams?

"If we were to look historically at the development of male team sports as they are known today, they were all about developing masculinity," explains Dr Rory Magrath of Southampton Solent University, an expert in masculinity construction and the sociology of sport. "During the Industrial Revolution, sports were used as a way of re-masculinizing men and boys to ensure that their identities were conveyed as heterosexual."

Now, he argues, our cultural obsession with team sports has shifted. "It's not the case that men play team sports to portray a heterosexual image, it's more about creating a type of identity that isn't replicated elsewhere in society." As such, developing close relationships with your fellow teammates becomes integral to the sport in general.

As a result of their desire to fit in and make friends, men do incredibly dumb things. "Sending these type of emails often fits into a narrative of wanting to sustain and develop rapport amongst a close-knit group of guys," Magrath tells me. "There's a perception amongst teammates that you're in an 'insider group' and you need to build rapport, often by means of various forms of 'banter.'"

Are things getting any better? "What my research indicates is that men are less likely to engage in activities that have becomes socially unacceptable, such as homophobic behavior," Magrath responds. "So although hazing-type activities still exist, they're no longer such an exhibition of masculinity."

I ask Magrath whether he feels that men involved in these behaviors regret their decisions later on. "I think there's very little regret actually," he says. "Men look back at their time at university fondly, and celebrate."

"Of course," he adds, "I'd speculate that with the Princeton case there may be some regret over those emails."