How Deep Does the Conditioning Go?
This visual — originally posted by Terre des Femmes in partnership with Miami Ad School — is a powerful tool for gauging just how deeply Manbox conditioning has permeated your team room.
As a coach, you will need to set up anonymity for the individual responses you collect in this session if you want real answers from your guys. A Google Form, Poll Everywhere, or even handwritten responses on equal-sized slips of paper could all work.
There are deeper reflection questions you can ask from this graphic:
What does this visual want you as a man to realize?
What Manbox-inspired ideas is it challenging?
What does it reveal about how women are judged before they even speak?
But I think those questions need to come after a harder one.
Ask them first:
There are 8 “notches” of judgment on this scale. How many of them do you think accurately reflect what a group of male athletes your age would say if they saw that much leg on a girl based on what she wore to school that day?
That’s the question you might be tempted to avoid.
Because if you ask it honestly, you may hear things you do not want to hear.
And not wanting to hear them is exactly why the question matters.
Their responses will reflect not only the work you still have to do — but also what you may have been allowing, intentionally or unintentionally, to grow in your spaces.
That’s the uneasy pain we have to be willing to process as coaches.
Because if we want to combat the symptoms, we have to be willing to face the roots.
Coach Prompts
What question are you most tempted to skip because the answers might indict your culture?
How do you create anonymity without creating distance from accountability?
What might your players’ answers reveal about what has been normalized in your space?
Player Prompts
What assumptions do guys your age make about girls based on clothing?
Why do you think those assumptions feel so normal?
What does this graphic expose about how women are judged?
