Morgan Rielly's Unfortunate Wrong in Disparaging Women Followed by Many Rights

Twenty-year-old Toronto Maple Leafs defenceman Morgan Rielly found himself at the centre of a social-media fiasco on Friday for comments he made earlier in the day. Had he uttered a racial epithet, disparaged a minority group or said something in favour of/opposition to the NHL’s move into enhanced statistics?

No. He’d said the Leafs had to work hard and not be girls during a tough time for the team. TSN.ca's Jonas Siegel provided Rielly's statement:

In the hubbub that followed, there was an immediate backlash from hockey fans who found the comment sexist. There was a backlash to the backlash, as many commenters felt the initial reaction was over-the-top. And, finally, there was the inevitable apology from Rielly.

All of that sounds terrible. In fact, a lot of it is encouraging.

Let’s start with the common practice among young men in pretty much any sport to make this kind of comment. “You throw/hit/shoot like a girl” is a pretty common taunt from the school ground on up, and its pervasiveness both provides a built-in excuse for Rielly and an important argument in favour of speaking out against its use.

Jim Rogash/Getty Images

This is a brief column on a sports website, so it’s significantly beyond the scope of this piece to examine the issue of gender in society. Suffice to say that gender-based discrimination is a real and important problem, and that it’s all too common.

The kind of culture that assumes as a given that to do something like a girl is to do it worse than a boy is the kind of culture that has a systemic bias against women. It’s the kind of culture that, among other things, discourages women from playing hockey.

That’s why the immediate backlash to Rielly’s comments is encouraging. Somewhere along the line, a sizable number of hockey fans decided that when sexist comments were made they were going to challenge them. How long ago would a comment like Rielly’s have been ignored? Not very far at all in the recent past.

It’s a positive sign for the culture surrounding the game that there was a negative reaction to Rielly’s comments.

Also encouraging was Rielly’s response: a quick apology. The same day he made his insensitive comment, he backtracked in an interview with TSN:

"

I’d obviously like to start by apologizing to any people that I hurt this morning with my words. It’s a phrase that has to be taken out of today’s society and I know that I can’t be using that with the media. It was just careless by me and I didn’t mean it the way it was taken at all. Again, I’m sorry for the way that it came across.

"

It’s unfortunate that Rielly said something sexist. It’s understandable that he did; the culture he lives and works in is rife with this stuff (the unconvinced should feel free to do an internet search for “Sedin sisters” or “Cindy Crosby”) and it’s incredibly easy to pick it up simply through osmosis.

But the response from hockey fans will surely encourage players to think a little more carefully before making that kind of comment. It certainly made Rielly think about what he said; a few hours after casually dropping the comment, he talked about the necessity of taking that kind of phrase out of society.

It is not perfect, but it is progress.

Jonathan Willis covers the NHL for Bleacher Report. Follow him on Twitter for more of his work.