As a man, I am supposed to like sports. Specifically the subset of sports designated “manly”, but especially American football, as I am an American. I am assured of this fact by every commercial, every movie, every stand-up comedian’s laziest joke. Indeed, when a TV character needs to be flagged as a Man it’s often done by showing him Watching The Game. This is understood to be a universal male experience to which everyone can relate.
Me, I don’t get it. For a long time, I actively disliked sports for silly reasons that I want to post more about later, but in my old age I’ve learned to appreciate some of them. The complex mysticism of baseball, the fast-paced grace of basketball, the elegant simplicity of soccer. I still don’t get American football, but meh. I still don’t sit down and watch these things, but if a game is on in a bar and it’s a team I feel some dim tribal allegiance to, I can enjoy it. I feel a certain pleasure when the Portland Trailblazers are doing well, at least until someone’s knee goes out again. And yet this still places me far, far below the minimum threshold of sports fandom necessary to qualify as remotely male, according to what the TV tells me.
That’s painful. That’s marginalizing. It’s not exactly ruining my life, but it’s one more damn thing on the giant pile of ways I’m told I’m not a Real Man. And it’s so fucking arbitrary.
One of the women I’m involved with, on the other hand, is unequivocally a San Francisco Giants fan. She follows them through the course of the season, knows the names and the lore of the players (baseball is great if you’re into lore) and when they won the Series, she about shit square nickels.
She also doesn’t exist on TV, of course, except occasionally as the freakish macho girl. Real-life experience indicates that there are plenty of women who love watching or following pro sports (after all, someone’s writing all this Major League Baseball slash fiction), and I couldn’t say how erased or marginalized they might feel, but I’d imagine it’s got to kind of suck.
Not to mention someone’s playing in the WNBA and WPS, someone keeps winning all those medals in women’s events at the Olympics, and I’m pretty sure it’s not men. The world is awash in female jocks, and there seems to be a lot of cultural effort put into pretending that they don’t exist or they’re all mysterious freaks.
Commenters, what has been your experience with watching or playing sports? Has it been gender-typical, or different, and what has it meant to you? What am I missing about the issue?
I’m gonna just nitpick here (since I have a few minutes RL left and since I talked about tennis in my previous post). And please understand I am nitpicking I am not attacking!!! superglucose said, “Similarly I prefer women’s tennis because it tends to have more interesting bouts between the players: volleys last longer. ” Roger Federer changed the dynamics (or maybe is a good example of the change) of men’s tennis. Men’s tennis is, right now, and for the past 8 years or so, been much more interesting than women’s tennis. Prior to this what you says is true,… Read more »
I’m a man. I used to like sports but I have ‘grown’ out of it. I’ll occassionally watch a few minutes of football (american football) here and there but that’s about it. I’ve lost track of even what teams are now in the NFL…and hockey or basketball…I haven’t followed them at all in over a decade. A few years ago though was the last time I played flag football with my old buddies. It’s fun, and I was still pretty good (at 40) but I’m simply too afraid of getting majorly hurt so I think my official gaming days are… Read more »
I admire athleticism and never miss the Olympics. On the rare occasions when I get a chance I’ll compete whole-heartedly in an impromptu game. I have the intellectual’s exaggerated fascination with the lore of baseball, the spectator’s ability to get caught up in a crowd, the fan’s pride in and for a favored team, and the expert’s excitement at seeing a well-executed play. Hell, I can even sort of see the appeal of car-in-circle-driving. I just never seem to find the time to actually watch a game. The way I see it, most people are fans of something. Sports just… Read more »
@Hugh Tipping on July 21, 2011 at 8:14 pm : social shorthand…an “easy out” for script writers Precisely what I was thinking – also in response to NoahBrand’s Revenge of the Nerdspost. Too much acceptance and encouragement of poisonous tropes. (I’m an individual and so’s everyone else) Also at 5:33 pm : . and my kids still try to wear “Jandals” (flip flops/thongs) in winter, but at least we have the excuse of still being in NZ ! And then there’s the parochial clash of the codes – at least we’re finally easing up on the “Rugby (Union) for Real… Read more »
@Hugh Tipping on July 21, 2011 at 8:14 pm : social shorthand…an “easy out” for script writers</blockquote Precisely what I was thinking – also in response to NoahBrand's Revenge of the Nerds post. Too much acceptance and encouragement of poisonous tropes. (I’m an individual and so’s everyone else) Also at 5:33 pm : .. and my kids still try to wear “Jandals” (flip flops/thongs) in winter, but at least we have the excuse of still being in NZ ! And then there’s the parochial clash of the codes – at least we’re finally easing up on the “Rugby (Union) for… Read more »
I like college football because of the passion and traditions of the schools and rivalries, and because the lower skill level allows more variety of plays. Would Texas Tech under Mike Leach have been seen in the NFL? (Also, my NFL options are the Cowboys and Texans, and I have no affiliation with either city.) Also, the constant treadmill of recruiting and graduation helps breakup dynasties that might otherwise last longer.
I want to contribute two things: 1) My mother helped get me into American Football. Her and my dad both loved the sport (though they were fans of rival teams, and in my youth I wondered if this was the reason for their divorce) and it came down to me. I’m still a rabid San Francisco 49ers fan and love playing almost every sport. Competition runs in my veins. But I promise you that I am not the most “manly” person out there: in fact, there is some question in my mind as to whether or not I fully identify… Read more »
On the female athletes as lesbians thing, I had a funny experience with that. I joined the Uni lacrose team and the first time I socialised with the women’s team was on the annual pub crawl. By the end of the night, yup, they were all lesbians (or at least bi; as evidenced by bringing a female partner or aquiring one as the night wore on). I’m guessing that was probably the reason I was the only guy from the men’s team that came. It’s just recently that I’ve considered that the team might not have actually been all lesbian,… Read more »
I think I’m a pretty standard feminist cis-gendered heterosexual white middle class male and I like sports in general. I play one and will watch just about any of them when convenient. When my teams are playing, I’ll go out of the way to watch that. Just to provide additional data that to some degree the stereotypes are not totally wrong in all respects. 🙂 In fact, in high school, I always thought that it was funny how the ‘cool kids’ liked sports, and the ‘nerds’ didn’t. Really, to me, being a giant sports fan and knowing all about your… Read more »
@Noah Brand: That was well said and something that we should print up and make a sticky note on the top of every page, or maybe in the 101 section! @Ami: I grew up playing hockey too and was pissed beyond belief that the girls were not allowed to body check, which one of many reasons I ended up playing as much or more boys’ hockey than girls’. It’s especially silly when there’s a couple of years there in middle school to junior high where the girls go through their growth spurt earlier and tend to be bigger than the… Read more »
I have recently noticed that BDSM is a lot like MMA. It usually involves two people who are playing a game that involves dominance and submission and other people tend to like to watch it. Who would have thought. 😉
I love most combat sports because of their ‘respectful’ violence parts. It is a great way to reduce stress.
I look at “cultural norms” and “everyone does that” just like I do stereotypes, myths, and legends. There’s usually a reason behind them, and a kernel of truth as well. It wouldn’t exist if a lot of someones didn’t reinforce it. They’re not that good of a predictive model, but you’re not going to find one for human beings. Maybe it’s the best fit model we’ve got, maybe it was truer a long time ago. I don’t know, and I don’t really care that much. Life has shown me time and time again that while going into a situation with… Read more »
@TomeWyrm: I don’t know that cultural norms are a particularly good predictive model. I think that what they are is social shorthand. Everyone “gets” them before they have a chance to react more consciously to relate with them or not, and so they’re an “easy out” for script writers who are too lazy (or strapped for time, or emotionally uinvested in the tripe they have to work on for a buck, or whatever) to characterise their characters more deeply.
That Carlin skit was awesome. RIP George. One of the things that amuses me about this blog is how everyone’s an outlier. We’re not normal. Maybe the cultural norms are the best predictive models we have because they’re self-fulfilling prophecies (as much as they can be). They might have been put in motion because they were ideals to strive for in a different time. It could also be the vocal minority syndrome. People only see the small portion of a group that does something really really loudly, or is publicized. So they extrapolate and think everyone else is like that.… Read more »
@Ami: Awesome rambling. I find the complexity and genderfuckery of your experience kind of charming. Partly, of course, because it underscores my theory that the gender-typical model of sports fandom is useless as a predictive model. 🙂
I love sports xD I love everything about sports… incl the business and cultural impact side of them… hockey and Canadian culture is a huge interest of mine and I write about it a lot (incl how it intersects with masculinity in Canada, and how there is a macho extreme that comes out of a reaction to other parts of our Canadian “identity” like feelings of inferiority to Americans) and I can find interest in almost any sport even if I don’t particularly like it (UFC, horse racing, poker, golf, etc) :3 I particularly like reading about the history of… Read more »
@Noah Brand
That shit is profound right there. This. This. This.
I’m gonna print this shit out and put it on a bumper sticker.
See, this is what’s interesting to me. Every single time we have one of these threads about how well people’s lived experience matches up to cultural norms, we get similar results. People’s experience is all over the map. Right here in this thread, we have men and women spanning a wide range of sports enthusiasm, and taking many different shapes in people’s personal lives. It does not appear to correlate to gender very strongly. In the sex threads, we get men and women with widely varying sex drives and sexual tastes, again not strongly correlating to gender. So, if these… Read more »
When I was a kid at primary school in Scotland, the school caretaker took all the boys in the senior year for soccer on a Friday afternoon. Yep, you read that right – *all* the boys, none of the girls. There was no parallel activity for the girls. They just sat in the classroom and read or did crafts, or played a casual game of rounders if the weather was good. The boys, on the other hand, were expected to take this fairly seriously – wear proper boots and soccer kit, some even wore shinguards. No-one considered that a) some… Read more »
*that were
“Dave, if you and I meat on the street and talk about print media and one of us attacked the other person, the attacker would be put in jail.”
Theoretically, yes, but that’s often not how it works.
And my objection was not to your arguing that ROTW football was warlike, but your method of pointing to a clip of a rare occurrence (I played soccer for years without ever getting into a fight), as if that was a substitute for a convincing argument.
LOL @ “meat on the street”
My bad. Freudian slip?
@Dave (regarding the headbutt) Dave, if you and I meat on the street and talk about print media and one of us attacked the other person, the attacker would be put in jail. When two players attack each other – they get a time out – MAYBE a suspension. They might be kicked out of the league – but they won’t go to jail. That’s because we, as a society, insulate ourselves from what’s happing on the field. “It’s just a game,” we say. When I headbutt another player, it’s not assault – it’s a “foul.” Bullshit – it was… Read more »
@Dave: I agree that RotW Football is less warlike than American Football or Rugby, but any game that involves “offense” or “defense” is going to be warlike. There are concepts of territory, of using the placement a person’s body to “block the advance” of another person’s body (like troop movements) all with the goal of getting close enough to the goal (Capitol City) to deliver your ball (bomb). Whoever can position their players close enough to the opposite team’s goal to score more goals will win. Whoever can position their troops close enough to the enemy’s capitol city to drop… Read more »
@EE: George Carlin said it best:
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=om_yq4L3M_I&w=425&h=349%5D
Pointing to a clip where a fight happened to break out at in ROTW football doesn’t prove that the game itself is warlike. Just because a fight breaks out at a wedding, or a dance club, doesn’t make those activities warlike. Fighting isn’t really an accepted part of the game in ROTW football. If I were to meet you in the street and we were engaged in a discussion on, say, the merits of print media, and if one of us insulted the other so drastically as to provoke the other into attacking, it would not mean that print media… Read more »