Online public shaming of professional athletes: Gender matters

Abstract

Public shaming – a common practice with historical roots – is defined as an individual’s public communication of disapproval or contempt for the behaviour of another individual. Previous research has explored fans’ engagement in public shaming of professional athletes in response to athletes’ transgressions and found fans withdraw support and provide extensive descriptions of their desired psychosocial, physical, and career-related consequences for the athletes. The existing literature also questions the extent to which public shaming of professional athletes online may be influenced by athletes’ social identities. Therefore, the purpose of the present study was to explore the ways in which fans’ public shaming practices may be influenced by the gender of professional athletes. A social constructionist perspective guided our qualitative thematic content analysis, which examined 7700 comments by sport fans on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter directed at professional athletes in response to their legal, social, and sport-specific norm transgressions. We implemented methodological pluralism to analyze the dataset through a gendered lens. The findings suggest fans’ public shaming practices illustrate contentious views on gender through explicit objectification of females, promotion of hyper-masculinity, and victim blaming on social media. The findings are interpreted in light of the extant literature related to rape culture in sport and the broader societal implications of fans’ online behaviours are discussed. Ethical issues embedded within research of this nature are also explored and recommendations for future research are proposed.