PROVIDENCE – By now, we are all familiar with the National Football League’s new regulations regarding domestic abuse that involves their players.

However, rather than a zero tolerance policy, the NFL has decided that its players can beat up, drag on the ground, sexually assault and abuse their intimate partners at least once before a lifetime ban on playing in the league.

The NFL has a “first offense” policy, which gives the players a pass, since the illegal behavior will just result in a six-game suspension.

This alone is cause for real concern.

Then there is the Ray Rice brouhaha. The NFL is looking pretty bad over their handling of this case.

While Roger Goodell is insisting that he never saw the video of Rice beating his now wife in the elevator, the whole world saw the video of Rice dragging his wife on the ground outside the elevator.

Why wasn't that enough evidence for the NFL? Did they really need more proof? They were the only two people in the elevator. Why the hell would Rice be dragging his fiancé on the floor?

Missed opportunity
While the public is weighing in on Goodell’s fate, the Ravens’ decisions in handling the Rice case, and why women stay in abusive relationships, it seems to me that we are missing an opportunity to talk about some substantive issues about domestic abuse.

We need to rethink masculinity and we need to talk about gender roles.

We need to figure out a way to talk to men about women’s rights (as well as gay rights) that doesn’t alienate them.

We have to undo a ton of thinking about a culture that teaches that women and their bodies are the dominion of men. 

As director of the Hochberg Women’s Center at Bryant University, I was invited each fall pre-season to talk to the football team.

Coach Marty Fine made it a priority prior to the start of the year to have me talk to his players about their behaviors off the field – in particular, their sexual behaviors.

I always began with a discussion of what “being a man” meant to them. I asked them to share what their fathers told them about masculinity. Clearly the messages they started receiving as little boys supported the notion that as men, they needed to be strong and that being a real man meant taking care of women.

Of course, none of the messages said that being a real man involved beating up your girlfriends.

They were told that they shouldn’t show emotion and that “sharing their feelings” was not for real men.

A majority of the players never saw their fathers tear up, cry or demonstrate any vulnerability. They were also told that they needed to provide the main financial support in their families. 

Moving beyond strict gender roles
Numerous studies have found that men who batter women hold stricter and often rigid beliefs in gender roles. They view women in subservient ways, and therefore don’t handle it well when women are assertive. It also points to the need to undo this kind of thinking.

Year after year, the football players at Bryant said that the amount of sex education they got from their dads was limited to “don’t get a girl in trouble” and “use protection.”

Zero conversations about consent, sexual assault and domestic violence. No real sexuality information, either.

Contact sports teach players to be aggressive, hard-hitting, and combative. When you play football, you don’t take “no” for an answer. Winning is everything, at all cost.

What kind of training do young players need for making the transition from the field to the boudoir? Much of what I addressed with the football team was their need to make that adjustment and that their inability to do so could become extremely problematic.

In the end, talking to these young men about sexual functioning, how women get turned on with consent conversations, and what a better lover is, helped them see that it was in their best interest to leave the aggression on the field.

Men need to step it up
Many of my colleagues in sexuality education have been defining masculinity for a long time. Sometimes we’ve had the good fortune to work together as educators – men and women.

However, more often than not, this isn’t the case. And quite frankly, men need to step it up. We need more projects on campus like the MVP program [Mentors in Violence Prevention] at Northeastern University.

The spotlight this fall is certainly on college campuses as well as the NFL. We can only hope that universities will do a better job of educating students on their rights if they are sexually assaulted. Let’s hope that universities will also not shy away from the deeper, intense conversations about rape culture, masculinity and what being a real man is all about.

Men at work
However, the work to ensure boys arrive at college with a different understanding of masculinity has to begin well before college. And, who better to do this work with young boys, but men who have come to terms with their own sexuality and masculinity.

Raising boys to be responsible and respectful men requires very real and not-so-easy conversations. It helps when boys are raised in households where respect is modeled so that their understanding of gender roles is not so strictly defined. Fathers aren’t the only ones who need to be engaged in these conversations, but it certainly is important for boys to hear the right messages from men.

Misogyny is ugly. No one likes to hear that word bantered about, yet the manifestations of misogyny are rampant: sexual discrimination, denigration of women, violence against women and sexual objectification of women.

It is rampant in the NFL and on playing fields at most college campuses. But until we address these real issues head on and in painful, difficult conversations, not much will change.

And, please NFL, stop with the pink breast cancer awareness charade. Given the recent cases of domestic abuse involving your players, dressing your players in pink uniforms is a huge insult to women.