There are silences that are thunderous, whose enormity rumbles louder than any sound.
There are silences that signify the present absence, the immeasurable weight of everything that comes to mind —and to the body— when trying to fill that space with what is known to be there.
Those are the silences that suffocate.
“Have you ever walked into an empty stadium?
Take the test.
Stand in the middle of the court and listen.
There is nothing less empty than an empty stadium.
There is nothing less mute than the stands without anyone.”
In
Soccer in sun and shadow,
Eduardo Galeano describes with enviable clarity the weight of some silences, the presence in the absent.
I am doing the Uruguayan a disservice by using his clear expressions to get closer to something so unpleasant and dark, but it is difficult to describe the image or sound.
Perhaps the absence of the latter is the most challenging thing to convey, how to explain a sound that deafens through silence?
Some have used the analogy of stadiums or arenas to explain the dynamics and behaviors regarding social networks and public discourse.
Ok, let's make use of it then.
In this stadium where everything is at stake: opinion, (dis)information, (dis)qualification, harassment, (dis)connection and a long etcetera,
Digital violence is a new challenge that has not come with the women's league, but it has put conversations that did not occur before at the center.
It is not that soccer players or male journalists are not attacked, it is that they simply have not given themselves the task of speaking about it, making it visible and fighting it.
The normalization of violence between men leads to the fact that when women point out these same situations, we are labeled as exaggerated or that perhaps these pronouncements attract only a first glance.
It is not surprising then that the accompaniment and understanding of loved ones, the institutional processes, the police accompaniment, the legislative paths and everything that must be taken into account to combat and eradicate this violence is so archaic and advances at a glacial step.
That is why digital violence is so cruel and paradoxically so visibly hidden.
All of us who are in this stadium -sometimes as spectators and other times as protagonists- can witness it and yet we ignore its consequences.
We see the blows but not the bruises.
Such were the blows for the footballer (now ex) of América Scarlett Camberos, who announced her departure from the club and the country.
The face-to-face and digital worlds had merged, the online bullying had moved into her physical space.
Many other of her colleagues have come out to talk about the situation they are going through.
We might think that given their participation in such a masculinized and violent environment, the case of soccer players or sports journalists who experience violence of this nature is unique.
38% of women globally have personal experiences of online violence and 85% of women online have witnessed digital violence against other women.
As I said, in the arena sometimes we are protagonists and sometimes we are witnesses, but most of the time we are both.
What pedagogy and what message are we giving to other women?
That silence is always a better option, that self-censorship is the way to not end up like the others.
What pedagogy and what message are we giving to other men?
That impunity is their great ally and that the violence they conduct towards other men can be easily replicated and intensified -without consequence- to gain status in front of other men.
I imagine the soccer players coming home after a game.
The exhaustion that does not end up in a deep sleep, too much adrenaline and the screams of the packed stadium still in their heads.
Recapitulating each movement, each outstanding moment of the meeting.
Like any person, they take their cell phone when they lie in bed and look for a bit of calm.
They enter the social network of their choice and begin to review what was said in their “absence”.
And there it is.
It's reading the lyrics in silence but listening to those millions of voices in your head.
The words that enter like knives, the voice that on the other hand tells them not to pay attention, that they are internet things, to do as they have been told so many times, that "you have to take it from whoever comes from".
The exit to the real field also brings with it an exit to the symbolic field.
In this one, unfortunately, there are no rules, no teammates, no referees, and no timer.
It is a sinister game that changes at every moment and in which, in the distance, there is a new owner -Elon Musk- who has decided to turn this space into the Hunger Games and leave everyone to their fate.
The pain is more acute when it is anticipated, when the preamble of what is already known to happen is around.
Before the game begins, emotions are lived more intensely, all the possibilities of what is about to happen bubble up inside, but there is one that cannot be erased, one that is there established with the same clarity with which one knows that there will be an initial and final whistle: the insult that ignites, the statement prepared to feed the fuse and that runs like the thread of gunpowder in cartoons until everything explodes.
The only thing we know for sure is that violence will fall once more like toxic rain.
These voices sound in the silence of the privacy of the mobile, of the journey in the transport,
the attentive look while putting the fork in his mouth or the idle time in which he waits for the person he is going to meet to arrive.
Before each new interaction, each time life resumes away from the screen, you have to restart the machine, erase the memory of the disqualification and move on.
Or at least that is what is expected, because when talking about digital violence it seems that for many things stays at “they bother her on the internet”.
Ana Paola López Irigoyen, a former soccer player in the women's league and perhaps one of the few who speaks publicly about the challenges and problems of the sport that she recently starred in, mentions that the players speak little because she is afraid of losing her position and not being those that they sacrifice their career to generate a change.
“Soccer is a bubble, even if it is in the women's branch.
You live in isolation, although perhaps a little more anchored to reality than men.
In the women's game, it is also thought that the longer you live in the bubble and the more you are ostracized, the better because it is a model that is closer to men's soccer, which is aspirational ”, she comments.
“This is a matter of preparation and being soaked with this kind of subject.
The soccer environment in this country is one of great inequality and the more international visions -generally more of the middle class- on these types of issues are scarce.
That's why the players who think like this are usually the ones who choose to go out, either with or without reflectors."
The deafening silence of this metaphorical stadium grows substantially in the face of the literal silence of an audience that has incorporated into their normality watching a match without referees, without a timer and, if they don't pay attention, possibly without players.
