To the Editor:
If ice skating wasn't so intertwined with sex, eliminating the violence in hockey would be a lot easier. By acknowledging the roots of skating's sexual nature, those who promote the continuation of violence in hockey and promote fighters and enforcers as "real men" would be treated with the same scorn and opprobrium we now treat domestic abusers who use their fists as a sexual outlet.
Those who decry the notion that skating is sexual haven't spent much time watching figure skating. One of the reasons sibling ice dancers Isabelle and Paul Duchesnay gave everyone the creeps was precisely because they could not fulfill the unspoken but obvious sexual narrative of their sport. So, too, in the Vancouver Olympics with sister and brother dancers, Alexandra and Roman Zaretsky who, when skating the compulsory tango, had to be careful not to get too "close" in their interpretation of that overtly sexual dance.
Nobody would ever confuse figure skating with hockey, but they arise from the same root - the growth of winter sports in the 19th Century.
It would be easy to dismiss hockey as just some brutal, macho sport without the sexual component, but to do that would be to ignore what fuels the aggression of hockey. Sex is so intertwined with hockey, so unspoken a part, most efforts to remove the violence, the rage and the fighting will be resisted for fear of destroying the game itself.
To take out the rage and aggression from the National Hockey League player would be to remove his masculinity, so the delicate operation - and the challenge - is to eliminate cheap shots and chippy play and leave intact the man.
Isn't this so-called masculinity what the Don Cherrys of this world admire? Even if the blowhards don't put it in psychological terms, even if the most rabid NHL fan refuses to entertain the thought it's all about sex, that's the bottom line of our love affair with hockey.
Meanwhile the late Nobel prize-winning Konrad Lorenz and the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik have both tackled the question of aggression and sex, albeit separated by more than 40 years.
Lorenz in his 1966 book On Aggression first recognized that aggression and sex were intimately linked and studied social behaviour patterns, sharing the 1973 Nobel for his work "concerning organization and elicitations of individual and social behaviour patterns." Gopnik took a more modern and readable approach in his five 2011 Massey lectures entitled Winter: Five Windows on the Season, published in book form.
For anyone seeking to explain why hockey is so infused with violence, Gopnik's observations, as both writer and a lifelong fan, make absolute sense.
Gopnik writes of the growth of social skating in the 1860s: "By mid-century, the imagery of skating, as it became 'socialized' and took to cities, was rapidly becoming almost openly erotic and sexual."
At a time when public displays of affection were unknown and men and women were held to tight strictures of behaviour, there were few polite and socially acceptable activities available to the unmarried pair where they could, in fact, touch each other. "Ice-skating was one of the few things urban people could do in public as an acceptable form of flirtation and sexual display."
Writes Gopnik: "Skating rinks in the 19th Century served the purpose that health clubs and gyms serve now - they're places where, with impeccable motives, you can go and engage in wild flirtation and open body display."
"Once actual sex between unmarried people became socially acceptable... the energy fell away from ice-skating and... Skating became again a thing the kids did."
From there to hockey isn't a huge leap. Hockey is a clan sport, a your-group-against-mine endeavour, on the level of the preening male in nature who must attract the female with his display.
Gopnik deplores the thuggishness that has infused the game. On a professional level, hockey "has become so adulterated by a dross of brutality and by brutality's mental twin stupidity . . . mere violence, simple thuggery left unpublished does not extend hockey's traditions; it sells out its soul and to the worst instinct of contemporary entertainment... dumb spectacles made for young men with an appetite for violence and an insulation from its effects. In hockey this has begun to so disfigure the game as to make it at times almost ugly."
Hockey when played with skill and finesses is, unfortunately writes Gopnik, seen as "essentially passive and feminine, and so somehow threatening; anyone who plays that way should be humiliated."
Violence in hockey is sexual insecurity: Teach young players that, and the violence will disappear.
Catherine Ford, Troy Media Corporation.
