DECEMBER 5, 2025 | OPINION | By Olivia Link
Few people love hockey more than I do—I’m Canadian; it’s in my blood. I grew up watching it, always caring more about the Stanley Cup than the Super Bowl. I have my team’s games saved in my calendar and have been known to bail on plans to watch them. A not insignificant part of my monthly paycheck goes toward my ESPN subscription so I can watch one team (go Habs go!) play one sport. I love to antagonize the other team, to yell “sieve!” and to tell their goalie that he’s ugly.
In between chants of “Let’s Go Tigers” and swearing at the other team, we find a third, more sinister refrain. It goes like this: someone finds the goalie’s name and looks him up, determines if he has a girlfriend; if not, any woman related to him, such as his mother or teenage sister, will do. This information is then broadcast to the crowd in the form of “I fucked your girlfriend/mom/sister/cousin,” or something to that effect. Maybe they tell the goalie his girlfriend is cheating on him, or that they were up all night with his mom.
At first, I laughed along, vaguely impressed that some guy in the stands took the time to do his research—I must admit, it shows a masterful command of the goalie’s tagged posts. There was also one time the mother’s name was used only in reference to the opposing goalie being a disappointment to his parents; it seemed harmless enough, right?
However, the more I thought about it, the more uncomfortable I became, and I’ve now spoken to several other women who find these chants demeaning as well. Maybe I am too sensitive, taking it too far, too personally or too out of context, but the fact of the matter is that these cheers are upsetting. They reveal something disquieting about the culture of masculinity and sex at CC that I haven’t been able to stop thinking about. And if someone can give me a better justification than what boils down to ‘boys will be boys at sports games,’ I would love to hear it.
While it is tempting to brush such phrases off as banter, as the natural result of fans getting heated in a competitive environment—and especially one where alcohol is involved—I think it is time we interrogated why the impulse in heated moments is one of misogyny.
These kinds of targeted jeers cannot be looked at as anything other than sexist, as anything other than playing into normative ideas about masculinity. The whole point of saying “I fucked your mom” is that there is nothing that can hurt the goalie more than an attack on his manhood, that is, an attack on his ability to own or to protect the women in his life. We aren’t chanting that his friends hate him; we are chanting that his girlfriend is cheating on him. Categorically, these are saying similar things, but the emotional weight felt by the goalie is understood to be different. Why? Because the second statement implies a failure on his part to secure singular sexual control over a woman, a failure more profound than the mere loss of friendship. It is the assertion that we have gained access to something that he is supposed to own. If that isn’t sexism, I’m not sure what is.
Although it is less common, I have also heard chants that have homophobic undertones as well. Chanting that the goalie is a bottom and that he “takes it” is problematic in that it turns penetration into something inherently debasing, something demoralizing. The goalie is meant to be humiliated—it is meant to be an accusation. The insinuation here is that it is shocking or dysfunctional for a man to choose to put himself in the degraded position of “taking it,” that is, the position of the woman.
This is not, of course, to say that the people who start these chants are thinking through their exact patriarchal foundations to intentionally perpetuate problematic gender norms. It is precisely the opposite. Because sexism is so ingrained in our culture, especially in our sports culture, misogyny is the heuristic most available to people who want to antagonize the opposing team. In other words, the goalie’s girlfriend is low-hanging fruit.
We also know from psychological theories like groupthink and deindividuation that people feel more comfortable expressing extreme views in large groups. Most of the guys who yell it at the top of their lungs in Robson would never be caught dead joking about having sex with someone’s sixteen-year-old sister. And yet, there is something about being at a hockey game that turns an otherwise crude and predatory remark into “harmless fun” or “competitive banter.”
This is not an issue unique to CC, as Denver University administrators have wrestled with similar chants. Nor is it unique to hockey, as the recent anti-Mormon refrains by Cincinnati fans show. It is easy to point at these facts and shrug our shoulders. It is convenient to shake our heads and say that this is an undesirable but ultimately unavoidable part of the game, that it’s the way things have always been done. It is especially easy to do so when you’re not the person in the firing line: misogyny is always going to be more palatable to men than women.
But as someone with an admittedly unhealthy obsession with the sport, as someone for whom the magic of watching a hockey game is dimmed every time we start talking about the goalie’s sex life, I want us to do better. And I hope that men at CC want to do better as well. Masculinity is socially constructed and is constantly being reshaped by changing definitions of acceptable behavior.
These chants sustain and reproduce toxic ways of relating to one another as people, of relating to ourselves and our bodies—are they worth it? Do they accurately represent the kind of man you want to be? If so, then by all means, chant on. If not, maybe it’s time we found some more constructive ways of tearing our opponents down.