COLUMBUS — A man who grabs a woman’s hand, forcefully squeezes it, refuses to release her after being told three times, and then reminds her that she is standing in “a man’s game”, is not demonstrating strength. He is confessing fear.
Federico Higuaín was fired as the Columbus Crew 2 head coach Tuesday, and he deserved to be. According to the Professional Soccer Referees Association, the incident occurred after an August 23 match against Huntsville City FC. Higuaín squeezed a female official’s hand and refused to release it even after she told him three times to stop. He then told her, “Don’t forget, this is a man’s game.”
His conduct was not old-school toughness, competitive fire or a moment of harmless frustration. It was cowardly, sexist garbage from a man who apparently believed his job title and chromosomes entitled him to physically intimidate an official while telling her she did not belong.
Higuaín did not invent the idea. He inherited it from a culture that has spent centuries confusing physical differences with human value. Men are generally larger and stronger than women, which says nothing about who is more intelligent, capable, ethical, qualified to lead or entitled to occupy a soccer field. A gorilla could lift more than Higuaín, but nobody is asking one to coach the Crew.
Fear is the first emotion, and therefore the parent of all maladaptation. Anger, intimidation, misogyny and racism come afterward, when a frightened person decides that attacking, controlling or dehumanizing someone else feels safer than examining what threatens him, or why he feels threatened at all.
Then comes the justification. The fear needs a story, so the coward builds a fantasy world from faulty core beliefs: men are supposed to rule women; white people are inherently above people of color; immigrants, gay people or anyone else asking to stand as an equal must be stealing something that belongs to him. Every fact gets bent to protect that fantasy. Equality becomes persecution. Accountability becomes oppression. A woman exercising authority becomes threatening.
Researchers have linked threats to traditional masculinity with anger, harassment and aggression. Studies of prejudice similarly connect authoritarianism and the desire for group dominance with perceived threats to status and social order (See: Hitler). The clinical language is useful, but the plain-English conclusion is simpler: the swagger is camouflage. Show me someone who is routinely furious at women, people of color, immigrants, gay people or anyone else asking to stand as an equal, and I will show you a coward terrified that equality will expose how little exists beneath his imagined superiority. Misogynists and racists want hostility mistaken for courage. But, in reality, it is cowardice with a target.
Misogyny survives by turning strength into authority and intimidation into tradition. Women are told a field, locker room, office, courtroom, newsroom or boardroom is naturally male territory, then criticized for lacking experience in places where men spent generations blocking the door. When women enter anyway, the weakest men treat their presence as an invasion rather than evidence that the old restrictions were always nonsense because they’re even too cowardly to look in a mirror and self-reflect. Cowardice upon cowardice upon cowardice.
The consequences are not abstract. The World Health Organization estimates that 840 million women—nearly one in three worldwide—have experienced physical or sexual violence. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that more than one in five American women has experienced completed or attempted rape, and almost half of female rape survivors were first raped before turning 18. Workplace numbers are equally damning: Equal Employment Opportunity Commission research found that roughly one in four women reported sexual harassment when surveys used a direct definition, with higher rates when asked about specific conduct, while the International Labour Organization found young women twice as likely as young men to experience sexual violence or harassment at work. Only about half of victims told anyone. These numbers do not describe misunderstood jokes or failures to appreciate competitive intensity. They describe violence, coercion and the theft of another human being’s bodily autonomy.
I bring up sexual violence because misogyny is the foundation of rape culture.
Sports do not exist outside that culture. An NCAA study examining online abuse during major college championships found more than 5,000 verified abusive posts directed at athletes, coaches and officials. Eighteen percent of that abuse was sexual and 10 percent was racist. Women’s basketball players received roughly three times as many threats as their male counterparts. FIFA separately found that players at the Women’s World Cup were 29 percent more likely to receive targeted online abuse than players at the men’s tournament.
The point is not that every man is violent, predatory or threatened by capable women. The point is that too many men hear statistics like these and become more interested in defending men as a category than protecting women as people. Decent men do not need a parade for clearing the low bar of basic humanity. They need to challenge the men who keep lowering it—every time, not only when a woman is watching or public outrage makes silence uncomfortable.
That challenge must be as direct and relentless as the misogyny itself. Men who intimidate women should understand that they will not face resistance only from the women they target. They will also face it from good men who refuse to let fear masquerade as masculinity or cowardice pass as courage.
The same rotten arithmetic drives racism. A racist looks at skin pigment, ancestry or facial features and imagines that biology awarded him a higher rank. It did not. Skin color is not an accomplishment, just as a person’s sex is not a credential. A body is not a résumé, and no accident of birth makes anyone wiser, braver or more worthy than the person standing beside them. We are the same species in different shapes and shades. Anyone who needs his shape or shade to be superior has not built much else to feel proud of. Feel free to read that again if you still don’t get it.
That is what makes Higuaín’s remark so pathetic. The referee had authority because she earned the assignment and was responsible for enforcing the rules. Higuaín could not accept her decision, so he reached for the cheapest hierarchy available to him. He tried to replace her professional authority with his physical power and reduce her from an official to a woman trespassing in a male space.
Anger does not manufacture a belief from nothing. It reveals which belief a person keeps available for use. A coach who reaches for misogyny when frustrated is teaching every young player around him that contempt becomes acceptable when a woman refuses to yield. That alone made Higuaín unfit to lead a developmental team. Check that, that alone made Higuaín unfit to lead anyone, as clearly he cannot even lead himself.
The Crew deserves credit for eventually firing him, but “eventually” is doing uncomfortable work in that sentence. A professional league investigated a coach physically intimidating an official and using explicitly sexist language, then settled on two games. The organization accepted it until the referees’ union and public scrutiny made the moral failure impossible to ignore. Institutions do not earn courage points for finding their principles after checking which direction the crowd is moving. Indeed, the slow response only suggests that other people like Higuaín are in the front office making decisions.
Soccer was never a man’s game. It belongs to every person willing to play it, coach it, officiate it or love it. It belongs to the female referee Higuaín tried to diminish, the girls watching from the stands and the women who have spent decades hearing that their presence must be justified while male incompetence is treated as ordinary.
Federico Higuaín wanted to remind a woman that she did not belong. Instead, he exposed the fact that he’s a coward. The referee belonged on that field. The only person who proved otherwise was the man insisting the game belonged to him.
