I’m reading Steve Almond’s Against Football: One Fan’s Reluctant Manifesto. There’s an interesting bit on page 98:
And I can tell you exactly what happens to any dude who dares to speak out about the moral complexities of football. Here’s a sampling of the e-mails I received after writing such a piece for The New York Times Magazine, printed here verbatim:
OMG. I am progressive on social issues but dude – you are the biggest fucking pussy on the face of the earth. Change your tampon you woman.
I read an article you wrote about football and I couldn’t help but think of a slutty girl I knew growing up. I thought she had the biggest vagina I’d ever seen before until now…congrats dude, you have a bigger one.
Why do libs have to ruin everything we do for fun or to take our minds off the world? I don’t even like the Redskins but if that kind of stuff offends the large vagina crowd, I am a fan now.
Dispiriting, isn’t it. Those aren’t people we know, people pissed off at “FTB” or “SJWs” or Anita Sarkeesian. Those are a whole different bunch of people. But there’s all the same disgust and loathing of women. It’s a miracle we aren’t all at each other’s throats every minute of every day, with that kind of thing saturating the atmosphere.
Also, that first guy? Hahaha that’s funny, what he said. No, he’s not “progressive on social issues.” It’s funny that he thinks he is.
First guy might as well have gone with the full “I’m not sexist/racist/homophoic/etc BUT …” cliche and been done with it. Nice cover there Mr. Progressive. I guess he really couldn’t be expected to open up with “OMG. I’m a complet sexist asshat and dude – …”
I really enjoyed that book. He pulls a lot of really damning information together, blowing up a bunch of myths along the way. Football is even worse than I had thought.
‘I’m not X but here’s a huge heaping helping of what, actually, exactly defines people who are X’…
I presume, somewhere, this construction has a proper name. If not, it’s well past time it did.
And yeah, it might be funnier if it weren’t so much merely cliché and more actually epidemic.
Or endemic, maybe the better adjective. This being the problem. And how it is someone can imagine such a bizarre statement could somehow even make sense. The underlying attitude is so much part of the fabric of the world in which they live, they don’t even notice it.
AJ,
Hm. The actual quotation: “I am progressive on social issues but dude – you are the biggest fucking pussy on the face of the earth. Change your tampon you woman.”
I make that as ‘I’m X and you’re Y”; I think that the implicit claim is that Y is X taken to a ridiculous extreme more so than Y is not X.
But yeah, I can’t dispute that Y is clearly an example of misogyny, which evinces the opposite of progressiveness on at least one social issue by privileging masculinity.
Dammit… Do Canadian Football fans have to put up with people acting like this? I’m guessing no.
In my final post on a certain football discussion board, I said I would no longer watch because of the concussion issue. It wasn’t the effects on pros or college that bothered me most, but the effects of repeated brain trauma on high school kids and even 10 year old pop warner players.
The responses of those on said board? “Turn in your man card”, advocations of suicide, a synonym for a cat, and insinuations that I was turning into a woman, as if that were a bad thing.
Many football fans act (and probably are) the same as pro-war fanboys. They want to see the injuries, death and mayhem, just as long as they don’t have to suffer the consequences themselves.