Why Didn’t *He* Scream?

If you follow college football, you probably heard that Glenn “Shemy” Schembechler was recently forced to resign from his post as assistant director of football recruiting at University of Michigan shortly after he was hired.  This occurred after news emerged that he had liked  numerous racist tweets.  Glenn is the son of “legendary” Bo Schembechler, who won 13 Big Ten championships as coach of UM football from 1969–1989.  Apparently it wasn’t enough to prevent Glenn’s hiring that he denied that his brother Matt had told their father that UM team doctor Robert Anderson had sexually assaulted him during a physical exam.  Glenn insisted that “Bo would have done something. … Bo would have fired him.”  Yet law firm WilmerHale had already issued a report confirming that Bo had failed to take action against Anderson after receiving multiple complaints from victims about Anderson’s abuse.  Matt has testified that his father even protected Anderson’s job after Athletic Director Don Canham was ready to fire him.

Women are often asked why they didn’t scream when they were being raped, or why they didn’t immediately report the rape to the police, as if these inactions are evidence that the rape never happened.  This post is about why Bo didn’t scream after his own son complained of sexual victimization by his team’s doctor.  The answer offers insight into the political psychology of patriarchy, which is deeply wrapped up in the kind of denial of reality that Glenn expressed, and that Bo enforced.  It also illuminates why women don’t scream when they are assaulted.

Glenn’s reasoning in defense of his father expresses the self-understanding of those committed to a certain form of patriarchal ideology.  In the U.S., college football is the premier sport in which coaches are represented as experts in training up young men to be real men, exemplars of a certain version of estimable masculinity.  In this version, plays for domination must take place on the field within the rules of the game, and real manhood comes with responsibilities.  The syllogism implicit in Glenn’s reasoning is clear:  Real men protect those for whom they are responsible.  Bo was a real man.   So, if Bo knew that his son or his athletes–those for whom he is responsible–were being harmed, he would have protected them by firing Dr. Anderson.

The heartbreaking and deeply disturbing testimony of Matt Schembechler, along with two of Bo’s former football players, Daniel Kwiatkowski, and Gilvanni Johnson, tells a very different story about how Bo understood the demands of real manhood.  When 10-year-old Matt told his father that Anderson had sexually assaulted him, Bo got angry with him and punched him in the chest.  When Kwiatkowski complained that Anderson had digitally raped him, Bo told him to “toughen up.”  When Johnson complained of the same abuse, Bo put him “in the doghouse,” suddenly started demeaning his athletic performance, and barred him from playing basketball although he was recruited for both sports.

“Bo knew, everybody knew,” said Kwiatkowski.  Players joked about seeing “Dr. Anal” to Johnson.  Coaches would threaten to send players to be examined by Anderson if they didn’t work harder.  Victims stayed silent out of fear of losing their scholarships or chances to play football.

Bo didn’t appear to be angry at Anderson.  He was angry at his son and his players for complaining.  He was teaching them a different set of rules for real manhood from the official patriarchal ideology:  1. Real men don’t get raped.  More generally, they don’t get humiliated by others.  2. If they do get humiliated, they had better not whine about it.  3.  Instead, they should “toughen up,” which is to say, bear up under the abuse, put up with it, act like it didn’t happen.  In other words, submit silently.

These are bullies’ rules–the rules for real manhood that protect bullies at the expense of the subordinates they are ostensibly supposed to protect.  They are reflected in the stiff upper lip of England’s elite boarding schools, notorious for enabling bullies to terrorize other students.  In the code of Southern honor satirized by Mark Twain in Pudd’nhead Wilson, where it was unmanly to settle disputes in court rather than duking it out.  In the 2016 GOP Presidential primary debates, which were all about who could prove they were the bigger bully.  In Mike Pence’s refusal until recently to blame Trump for Jan. 6, even though Trump had repeatedly humiliated him and set a mob out to lynch him for refusing to overturn the election.

Yet this explanation doesn’t quite answer the question of why Bo didn’t just fire Anderson from his position as team doctor, or let Athletic Director Don Canham do so, when Matt’s mother complained to Canham, taking up the duty to protect that Bo abandoned.  Why did Bo put up with his son and his team being abused?  To understand this, we need to dive deeper into the relationship between humiliation and shame.

People feel humiliated when someone else forces them into an undignified position or treats them as someone who doesn’t count, as contemptible or even beneath contempt.  Humiliation is a response to how others treat oneself.  People feel shame when they fail to measure up to social standards of esteem that they have internalized.  One might feel ashamed for “allowing” another person to humiliate oneself, even if one had no way to avoid it.  In that case, humiliation precedes shame.  But there are many other causes of shame not predicated on humiliation.

Everyone agrees that a characteristic response to shame is to want to hide from the gaze of others.  There are at least two characteristic responses to humiliation. (1) Getting even: restoring oneself to a position of (at least) equality with respect to the bullying party, often by means of violence.  It took social change for lawsuits to provide a respectable nonviolent alternative.  (2) Submission: like the dog who loses a fight and slinks away, tail between its legs.

According to the bullies’ patriarchal rules of real manhood, one’s manhood can be demeaned and one can thereby be humiliated by the humiliation of associates under one’s authority.  This is explicit in honor cultures, where the honor of men is embodied in the sexual purity of their female relatives.  A man can humiliate another man by raping or seducing his wife, daughter, sister, or niece.  Female relatives humiliate the men responsible for them by choosing to have sex outside of an approved marriage.  Others mock men for failing to protect and control their female relatives.  Manly honor is thus deeply wrapped up in totalitarian control over their female relatives’ sexuality.

The same general logic applies in the U.S., but by somewhat different rules about who is responsible for whom and how they may respond.  I think Bo felt humiliated by the fact that his son was raped.  But he was a prisoner of the same bullies’ rules he enforced on his son and his team.  So, instead of getting angry at Anderson, he got angry at his son.  Instead of getting even with Anderson, he submitted, as called for by bullies’ rules.  For, under the bullies’ rules of patriarchy, there is no real recovery or restoration of real manhood after such extreme humiliation (at least short of murdering Anderson in revenge).  Once humiliated in such an extreme way, Bo felt he had no other option than to pretend that it never happened.  And to avoid shame being heaped upon humiliation, he had to hope that no one discovered otherwise via the complaints of those whose victimization humiliated him.  So he had to enforce the bullies’ rules of silence on them as well.

Johnson testified to the unrecoverability of a confident sense of manhood due to Anderson’s multiple sexual assaults throughout his football career.  He said that he tried to prove to himself that he was a man by being excessively promiscuous.  But penetrating countless women could never make up for his having been penetrated against his will, and thereby forced into a position of feminine submission.  He destroyed two marriages in his futile attempts to restore his sense of manhood, and was unable to establish stable intimate relationships.

Rape culture is the popular enforcement of bullies’ rules against those traumatized by the sexual humiliation of bullies.  Bo didn’t scream over his son’s rape, because he didn’t want shame heaped upon his humiliation.  And that is often why women don’t scream either.  Although Bo’s “toughen up” reprimand implies that he thought silent submission was a specifically manly way to respond to rape, in reality bullies’ rules prescribe the same conduct for women–silent submission.

I draw two lessons from this analysis.  First, many men are victims of rape culture too.  More generally, they are victims of bullies’ rules of patriarchy.  Bullies’ rules are the actual rules by which patriarchy operates, in contrast with the legitimizing patriarchal ideology that Glenn believed in.  Second, and more generally, Bo’s response to the numerous rapes of his son and his athletes strongly supports Robin Dembroff’s analysis of patriarchy.  According to Dembroff, patriarchy does not place all men above all women.  It places “real men” above everyone else, at everyone else’s expense.

Trumpism is another manifestation of the popular enforcement of bullies’ rules against all varieties of humiliation inflicted by Trump against his enemies and associates.  If you want to know why so few GOP officeholders, party officials, and Trump aides and associates scream even when Trump humiliates them or the people they love, just remember why Bo didn’t scream when his son was raped.  Bullies can’t enforce their own rules all by themselves.  They need support from others.