How Men Can Talk with Other Men About Misogyny: A Reflection on the Drama in the US Men’s Soccer Team
Julia and I supporting the US Men’s Soccer team in Amsterdam
I’m an enormous soccer football fan. I await the day when the USMNT matches what the US women’s team has done and be an international football force. I’m keeping my fingers crossed that a home 2026 World Cup, combined with the fact that the US was the youngest team in this winter’s World Cup, will be what it takes to at least get to the quarterfinals in 2026.
It appears that the USMNT will have a new coach in four years. Gregg Berhalter, whose contract expired after a decent showing in the 2022 World Cup, is now under investigation by a legal team hired by the USMNT, following a disclosure of a domestic violence incident in 1991 (31 years ago) from the family of former USMNT legend Claudio Reyna and his wife Danielle.
In summary, Berhalter refused to play their son, Borussia Dortmund star and former future of US soccer football Gio Reyna, claiming publicly that he hadn’t fully recovered following a significant injury, and also suggesting that Gio had been causing some problems in training. Danielle contacted the USMNT leadership and told them about the domestic violence incident between Gregg and Rosalind, who lived with Danielle at the time, essentially suggesting “Gregg, when you were 18, you were a little shit too. How dare you not play my son.” Claudio has alternated between denying he knew about communication between Danielle and the USMNT and aligning with his wife’s position.
The Guardian wrote a scathing review of US soccer football (and for that matter, most youth sports) culture, suggesting that the entitlement of parents, especially wealthy parents like the Reyna’s, and the ways that the entitlement leads parents to abuse coaches, referees, and parents of opposing teams, is interfering with youth development, and more importantly, the evolution of team sports, such as football (American and non-American).
“In other words, the Reynas acted like typical soccer parents in the US.”
That’s a whole other blog post, one written by a staff member at ESPN earlier this week.
Berhalter, according to a CNN article, “issued a statement through his Twitter account on Tuesday, signed by the head coach and his wife Rosalind. Berhalter described the violent 1991 moment Danielle Reyna says she reported to US Soccer. Berhalter said he kicked his then-girlfriend, now wife. He described it as a “shameful moment” that he “regrets to this day.”
“ ‘People can make mistakes and learn from them; people can also be forgiven for their mistakes,” Berhalter wrote in the joint statement. ‘Thankfully, Rosalind forgave me. The intention of this statement is to provide transparency and to reinforce that a single bad decision made by a teenager does not necessarily define him for the rest of his life. We will not hide from this. We didn’t then, and we won’t now.’”
We’ve seen this pattern happen before in the larger media; perhaps this is best summarized as “callout culture”:
1. Powerful person, typically male, gets outed for abusive relational behavior, sometimes recent behavior, sometimes from a generation ago.
2. Said powerful person publishes a rationale, often with the help of a legal or public relations team.
2a. Sometimes this can take the form of apology and a nod to some form of evolution, as in the case of Berhalter.
2b. Sometimes this can be a flat-out refusal of behavior, such as Trevor Bauer and DeShaun Watson. (Sports are my entry way into pop culture, by the way.)
3. We move onto the next thing. There are a growing number of people who lose their jobs and hireability following the callout culture cycle. Also, DeShaun Watson, whose legal team settled 23 sexual crime lawsuits against him out of court, started Sunday’s game for the Cleveland Browns.
I don’t know Gregg Berhalter. I don’t know Rosalind Berhalter. (I’ve observed far too many parents who behave similarly to the Reyna’s, but as stated above, that’s a different blogpost, fueled by the fact that I’m not particularly athletically gifted, nor do I come from a rich family.)
So let’s do an experiment.
Let’s take Gregg Berhalter at his word.
Let’s assume that by “people can learn from their mistakes”, he’s referring to himself.
If I was a reporter, I might ask the following questions:
Coach Berhalter. What’s one way that you’ve practiced solving problems in the early stages of your relationship that you no longer practice? How do you resolve conflict now?
What is the individual work that you do to solve problems in the ways that you align with your current values? What are relational processes that you and your partner have in place that allow you to solve problems more effectively?
Coach Berhalter. What’s one assumption that you had about women as an 18 year old that you encourage the 18 year olds who play for you not to have? What’s another assumption? How has your view of women changed over your 25 years of marriage?
Or, to change up the script a bit.
Jeremiah. What’s one way that you’ve practiced solving problems in the early stages of your relationship that you no longer practice? How do you resolve conflict now?
What is the individual work that you do to solve problems in the ways that you align with your current values? What are relational processes that you and Julia have in place that allow you to solve problems more effectively?
Jeremiah. What’s one assumption that you had about women as an 18 year old that you encourage the 18 year olds who play for you not to have? What’s another assumption?
How has your view of women changed over the last 25 years?
Let me answer these questions in reverse order. I, like every other man in the United States, have learned some, to use a scientific term, “pretty fucked up shit” about women.
I learned that women need protection, and as such, are less capable (if not entirely incapable) of defending and advocating for themselves. I learned that women use emotional manipulation to get their needs met; after all, happy wife, happy life. I learned that women, though hypersexualized by our capitalized culture, are less likely to be interested in sexuality.
And these messages that I learned about women informed the ways that I was not a good partner in my marriage. (For those of you who are new to SV, I’m divorced, and Julia and I aren’t married.) Obviously, the reasons for the dissolution of my marriage are way more complicated than this. But the following dynamics didn’t help.
I did not communicate my own needs out of the assumption (partially rooted in experience, partially rooted in gender expectations) that if I did, my ex would become emotionally overwhelmed, and that it would then be my job to assuage her emotional experience. (Or, to use a more sexist tone, “calm her down”.)
I did not collaborate well with my ex around administrative tasks in the first half of our marriage, because I bought into the gender roles that women spearhead home-based administrative tasks, and men’s primary responsibility is to work outside the home and contribute as they could.
I made a host of decisions for the relationship, from being the primary driver to deciding what church to attend and how we would spend the holidays, in response to intense emotional responses from her regarding these topics. I either said “I’ll take care of it” or “We’ll do it your way” without further or ongoing conversation.
Some men respond to sexism by making themselves bigger; other men respond to sexism by making themselves smaller. I chose the latter, and lost myself, the marriage, and community in the process.
What are relational processes that you and Julia have in place that allow you to solve problems more effectively? Well, we talk more, for starters. We talk about the people that we want to be. We schedule time to have important administrative and emotional conversations. Individually, I’m unlearning the message that women use emotions politically; in fact, Julia’s emotional experience is a rich window into the intense beauty and pain and grief of human experience. I daily practice not “rescuing” (read: interrupting or overfunctioning) Julia from her emotional experiences. Some days I’m better at this than others.
What if, rather than the depending on callout culture to “put men in their place” or demanding that men who behave badly step down from their positions of power (though that’s sometimes necessary), we were to invite men to reflect, in public spaces, in virtual spaces, in support groups, in father-son dynamics, in locker rooms, on the questions that I posed above?
And what if our response to men who do this was not to shame or judge them, either for being “too effeminate”, or worse, “too honest”, but was to create formalized apology processes, centered around the honoring of the pain that these systems cause women, and then the invitation for men and women to work together to build more gender equitable systems. Systems that paid men and women equally. Systems that visually represented men and women around the nuances of human experience and moved away from staid gender stereotypes. Systems that allowed for men and women to equally participate in the rearing of children.
Sexvangelicals is committed to providing that space specifically for folks who were impacted by the gender-obsessed structures of American organized religion, namely Evangelical and Pentecostal Christianity. We’re excited to have you join us in this process.