Cricket’s sexist language: A call to cleanse the game of patriarchal terms - Joe Bennett

Joe Bennet is on a mission to make cricket a game that all can play and talk about with a clear conscience. Photo/ 123rf

Joe Bennett is a Lyttelton-based writer and columnist. He has been writing a column since 2017.

OPINION

For more than six decades I have been propping up the patriarchy by playing cricket.

I apologise. But I feel no guilt because I didn’t know what I was doing.

Now, however, I do know what I’m doing and from this day forth I am on a mission. I mean to do all I can to cleanse the game of cricket of its patriarchal sexism.

I was brought up with cricket. I loved it as I have loved few things in my life. I loved it uncritically. But now that my eyes are open to its faults, I cannot close them again.

There is no going back. There is only going forward, however hard that journey may be, however rough the terrain, however great the grief.

It all began with the word batsman. As more and more women and girls took up the game, even the crusty cricketing authorities could see that batsman had to go. It was so obviously gender-based, so mono-domino-sexual.

And thus, on the principle that one who bowls is a bowler, the authorities decreed that one who bats, be it he or she, should be known as that neutral thing, a batter.

So far so disastrous. For in the real world of sexual politics, the word batter is about as far from being neutral as it is possible to be. It reeks of domestic violence.

Of course, the dinosaur cricket authorities have never acknowledged this. In their reptilian ignorance they think that by changing this one word they have finished the job and rendered the game gender-neutral.

In reality all they have done is to open my mind and the minds of others to the chauvinism and sexual bigotry that runs through every aspect of the language of cricket.

Take the names of the fielding positions. What are Long Leg and Fine Leg but a pair of wolf-whistles? Contrast them with the body-shaming Short Square Leg.

It’s all so typically male, superficial, judgmental and lecherous.

And the superficial male doing the judging and the leching is standing on the other side of the pitch, at that monosyllabic and self-evidently phallic fielding position, Point.

Beside him stand his nervous prophylactic companions, Cover Point and Extra Cover Point. Male sexuality has always been every bit as fearful as it is aggressive.

Do I need to remark on the suggestiveness of Third Man, with its hint of a ménage? Or on the burrowing underwear fantasy of First Slip, Second Slip and Third Slip, beyond which lies a fielding position that I shall not name for fear of giving offence?

My point is that once you have noticed all this you cannot unnotice it.

Look at batting. The names of the shots a batsman plays are drenched with male violence - Cut, Drive, Punch, then a Tickle to Leg, followed, two balls later, by a Pull. And these are all known as strokes. Strokes!

It couldn’t be more gloatingly sexual. And as for the Leg Glance! Why not come straight out with it and call it the Ogle? Or the Lech?

Bowling’s not exempt. Six balls constitute an Over, and who can fail to hear in that word an echo of the old and lecherous song?

And let us not forget who it is exactly that gets rolled over in the clover.

It’s a maiden, of course, which is a diminutive form of the word maid. A maid is a virgin.

‘She that’s a maid now,’ says the Fool in King Lear, ‘and laughs at my departure, shall not be a maid long unless things be cut shorter.’

There is no evidence that the Fool in King Lear played cricket but I wouldn’t bet against it. His tone is pure MCC.

A Maiden Over in cricket is one that has not been besmirched by runs and is therefore whole and undefiled, a usage that derives from millennia of male sexual jealousy, and the suppression of women and girls.

And so the mission is clear: to extirpate sexism from the language of cricket and make it a game that all can play and talk about with a conscience as clear as a summer sky.

It will not be easy, but good things rarely are. Will you join me? We shall overcome.