Sports Fanatics; Feminism
I was having this conversation once with someone, I forget whom, about feminism, and the feminist's need to escape from the house and go to work. "Why is working inherently better?" my interlocutor asked. "Why don't women think it's worthwhile to stay home and raise children?"
Keeping house is an ignoble occupation, I responded, by the very virtue of it's being associated with women. Everything good men have already claimed for themselves, like being independent and career-oriented and smart and 'having balls'...while women are de facto left with the opposite attributes, such as being clingy and unambitious and ornamental and conservative. Is it necessarily a good thing not to be in your children's lives so that you can go out and make money? Of course not. It seems desirable only BECAUSE men do it.
In general, it's natural that women would want to act more like men - cf. the saying 'be a man about it' - because it basically means bettering themselves in every way; whereas it's extremely rare to find a man (except for queens; and sometimes not even them) who would assertively try to be more 'womanly.' This holds true even when 'womanly' connotes something good, like kindness or sensitivity.
I thought of this conversation again last night when I was talking to my brother, and before him to a friend at school on the same subject, about how I don't understand sports fanatics. It seems so weird to take such an active interest in another person's life just because he plays football, say. On Saturday, you organize your whole social life around this one Dude, and on Monday you're taking Sociology 101 with him - he has no idea who you are, and he will never give two craps about all the opinions and advice you have about him. My friend and I concluded that this can only happen because you don't think of the football player as a real person, but you objectify him like a celebrity.
Interestingly, my brother brought up the celebrity analogy again last night during our conversation. Following football stats, he said, is no different from following Tom Cruise's latest shenanigans. Yes, I answered, but everyone acknowledges that the latter is an embarrassing, loser, parasitic pastime. No one is proud to read National Enquirer, but it's more like a guilty pleasure when it happens. WHY IS THERE NO SIMILAR GUILT IN OBSESSING ABOUT FOOTBALL? Nay, people are even proud of it, and if you're a dude, you can't be considered normal/manly unless you engage in it to some degree.*
It occurred to me why these two guilty pleasures are so asymmetrical in their receptions: it's because men are associated with the sports hobby, while women are associated with the celebrities hobby. Had women started liking sports before men did, way back at the dawn of time, we would have all agreed that it's a totally silly thing for grown people to do.
*ps - IMO, celebrity gossip is actually MORE excusable and understandable than sports stats, because at least with celebrities, it's sort of a sexual fantasy. What is the motivation with the sports? I do not know. It just seems weird.
Keeping house is an ignoble occupation, I responded, by the very virtue of it's being associated with women. Everything good men have already claimed for themselves, like being independent and career-oriented and smart and 'having balls'...while women are de facto left with the opposite attributes, such as being clingy and unambitious and ornamental and conservative. Is it necessarily a good thing not to be in your children's lives so that you can go out and make money? Of course not. It seems desirable only BECAUSE men do it.
In general, it's natural that women would want to act more like men - cf. the saying 'be a man about it' - because it basically means bettering themselves in every way; whereas it's extremely rare to find a man (except for queens; and sometimes not even them) who would assertively try to be more 'womanly.' This holds true even when 'womanly' connotes something good, like kindness or sensitivity.
I thought of this conversation again last night when I was talking to my brother, and before him to a friend at school on the same subject, about how I don't understand sports fanatics. It seems so weird to take such an active interest in another person's life just because he plays football, say. On Saturday, you organize your whole social life around this one Dude, and on Monday you're taking Sociology 101 with him - he has no idea who you are, and he will never give two craps about all the opinions and advice you have about him. My friend and I concluded that this can only happen because you don't think of the football player as a real person, but you objectify him like a celebrity.
Interestingly, my brother brought up the celebrity analogy again last night during our conversation. Following football stats, he said, is no different from following Tom Cruise's latest shenanigans. Yes, I answered, but everyone acknowledges that the latter is an embarrassing, loser, parasitic pastime. No one is proud to read National Enquirer, but it's more like a guilty pleasure when it happens. WHY IS THERE NO SIMILAR GUILT IN OBSESSING ABOUT FOOTBALL? Nay, people are even proud of it, and if you're a dude, you can't be considered normal/manly unless you engage in it to some degree.*
It occurred to me why these two guilty pleasures are so asymmetrical in their receptions: it's because men are associated with the sports hobby, while women are associated with the celebrities hobby. Had women started liking sports before men did, way back at the dawn of time, we would have all agreed that it's a totally silly thing for grown people to do.
*ps - IMO, celebrity gossip is actually MORE excusable and understandable than sports stats, because at least with celebrities, it's sort of a sexual fantasy. What is the motivation with the sports? I do not know. It just seems weird.
posted by Rex at 11:34 AM
5 Comments:
Well, I should clarify. Following sports isn't the same as following Tom. Like I was saying yesterday, with sports there's this community pride aspect to it, which I think goes along with a sense of human achievement. In sports it's physical. (Doesn't that go back to the Greeks and the Olympics?) Say you take community pride in being a Yale or Oxford grad. A lot of it's based on achievement (i.e., careers of alumni, regard for faculty, popular reputation). Similarly, sports fans take pride in the achievements of their city or school team.
So in sports, you have a stake in how well your quarterback does; it's connected to achievement and community pride. With Cruise I have no connection whatsoever to how well he does career-wise, or whom he romances. No one has a stake in that except Cruise. So that's truly pathetic.
That still only explains high school and college sports, for the most part. By that logic, only two regional sets of people should care about the Super Bowl. Such is not the case. Apparently, Everyone cares about the Super Bowl, except me.
I guess my problem is that I don't consider excellence in sports to be all that important of an achievement. It's about on par with a chess or a Scrabble tournament, for me personally. Hence, it doesn't bind me much closer to my community.
I think the Super Bowl IS regional for the most part; for the rest of us it's just entertainment. Isn't that what Americans are all about? Europeans, I think, place more importance on the community aspect of it (England v. Ireland in rugby, Spain v. Italy in soccer), even though I'm sure they find it entertaining as well. For most Americans, soccer isn't entertaining enough.
There's only one explanation... Sports fanticism is sublimated sexual desire for the athletes, on the part of the fans!!! Come on... why else would they wanna watch men dance around in tight-ass (or ass-tight) spandex?!?!!
(I'm 80% joking...)
Good theories, all of them. But I'm still sticking to my first one, which is that sports are popular because it's a Guy Thing. If there's any community that gains solidarity through sports, it's the community of Guys. And like going to strip clubs, any kind of guy-bonding activity is bound to be slightly homoerotic.
Girls also get into sports, subconciously, because it's a Guy Thing: feminism, etc etc.
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