This piece was originally published on the Good Men Project as part of a special series on the End of Gender. This series includes bloggers from Role/Reboot, Good Men Project, The Huffington Post, Salon, HyperVocal, Ms. Magazine, YourTango, Psychology Today, Princess Free Zone, The Next Great Generation, and Man-Making.
It has been almost a year since Hanna Rosin penned her provocative and controversial essay entitled, “The End of Men.” This week, many other writers on The Good Men Project and other sites will be capably discussing the various issues of manhood that Rosin raised in her piece.
As a sports fan who enjoys writing and talking about sports, there was one particular part of Rosin’s essay that struck me. Toward the end of the essay Rosin writes:
The Marlboro Man, meanwhile, master of wild beast and wild country, seems too far-fetched and preposterous even for advertising. His modern equivalents are the stunted men in the Dodge Charger ad that ran during this year’s Super Bowl in February. Of all the days in the year, one might think, Super Bowl Sunday should be the one most dedicated to the cinematic celebration of macho. The men in Super Bowl ads should be throwing balls and racing motorcycles and doing whatever it is men imagine they could do all day if only women were not around to restrain them…the commercial abruptly cuts to the fantasy, a Dodge Charger vrooming toward the camera punctuated by bold all caps: MAN’S LAST STAND. But the motto is unconvincing. After that display of muteness and passivity, you can only imagine a woman—one with shiny lips—steering the beast.
I was struck by this passage because it demonstrates that Rosin is operating under a false assumption that afflicts so many when it comes to discussing why men are so drawn to sports. For these people, it appears that men watch, embrace, and discuss professional sports because they somehow speak to our manliness. The prevailing thought is that there is some kind of natural, ancestral bond between manliness and sports, and so we as men must pray at the cultural totem that sports represent because doing so is part of what being a man is all about.
Although false, it’s an easy assumption to make. One only has to open the sports section of a local newspaper or listen to a pundit on a sports studio show to be convinced of the veracity of this assumption. When LeBron James makes a careening drive to the basket, absorbing fouls as he goes before converting a difficult layup, you are likely to hear Mark Jackson declare that the action was a “grown man move,” with all the bravado that his vocal chords can muster.
A standard NFL Live broadcast is likely to feature no less than three men, their stark crew cuts reflecting in the studio lights, extolling the virtues of teams that are willing to face down their opponents and “hit them in the MOUTH.” This will be followed by a montage of manly football players doing manly things while the men in crew cuts howl their approval.
And what of players who fail to live up to the expectations of manliness placed upon them? Players like Jay Cutler, who failed to play through a debilitating injury, have been called weak by sportswriters around the nation. If Chris Bosh fails to throw elbows and growl at his opponents, a hack like Jason Whitlock will call him soft and give him a snarky nick-name like Ch Bo (which, by the way, is the least-imaginative snarky nickname of all time. It’s just the worst).
So it’s no surprise to me that Rosin views the relationship between men and sports the way that she does. What she fails to understand, though, is that all of this bravado and constant harping about manliness has very little to do with sports. Manliness isn’t constantly linked to sports because the two are a natural pair, but rather because it helps to push forward the billion dollar entertainment apparatus that has been built around professional sports leagues. Writers and pundits continue to spew hyper-masculine rhetoric because they want to convince us that we, as men, have to watch sports if we want to be taken seriously. The best way for them to accomplish this is to appeal to our most basic insecurities. If we don’t like sports, we aren’t real men. If we don’t think that Jay Cutler and Chris Bosh bitched out on their teams, we are just as weak and soft as they are.
None of this is real, it’s no more than a shrewd marketing tactic. Just look at how closely such rhetoric resembles the messages that are delivered by the companies that most aggressively sponsor sporting events. It’s impossible to watch a football game these days without being exposed to half a dozen beer commercials imploring the men who are watching to “man up” or be a “real man” by declaring their allegiance to a particular brand of light beer.
The message is the same: You’re a man aren’t you? Well then, you better watch this game and drink this beer, bro.
Rosin’s mistake lies in the fact that she seems to believe that we, as men and sports fans, have bought into this rhetoric. She thinks that the Dodge Charger commercial described above rings false because we have already lost our ability to be “real men.” By her calculation, there is no last stand to be made. Yes, the commercial rings false for me, but not because I imagine a woman to be driving the hulking, powerful car. It rings false to me because it so misunderstands who I am as a man and a sports fan.
The most ironic thing about the constructed association between manliness and sports is that there is very little about being a sports fan that makes one feel manly.
Think of the average emotional arc that a dedicated fan experiences as he watches his favorite team play throughout the season. Unless you’re lucky enough to root for a team that dominates throughout the entire season and goes on to win the championship, being a sports fan is most often a maddening experience, full of desperation, impotent rage, and sulking pleas to a higher power. These are not things that “real men” are supposed to do. “Real men” are supposed to be conquerors, treading over all obstacles with a beer in one hand and their testicles in the other. When their team wins it all, a small percentage of fans get to feel this way, I suppose. The majority of us, however, end up sad and alone, crying into our beers as we wait for next season.
But that is precisely why I like sports, because they are a cultural experience that can afflict me with a limitless range of emotions. Just as a novel, song, or movie can reveal to me feelings that I didn’t know I had, so too can sports. Every year I spend as a sports fan is a year that I am forced to confront so many of the things that define my condition not as a man, but as a human. I learn to deal with futility, hope, morality, success, and everything else in between.
If sports are just as personally instructive as other forms of art, they are also just as aesthetically pleasing. A perfectly timed alley-oop or devastating curve ball can be just as emotionally evocative as a beautiful painting or virtuosic guitar solo. If you’re skeptical, just take note of a sports fan’s face as he watches a slow motion replay of a pivotal in-game moment. What you’ll see is a visceral, impulsive reaction that we so often point to as evidence that a piece of art is truly great.
These are all of the reasons that I love sports, and unfortunately, most of these reasons get obscured when sports and manliness are unfairly hitched together. Every time someone like Rosin characterizes sports the way she does, and every time Miller Lite threatens to take our man card during commercial breaks, the public’s conception of sports gets molded in ways that are unfortunate to say the least. Suddenly sports aren’t a thing that can provide people with a meaningful cultural experience, they are a thing that afford bros the opportunity pound brews with their other bros and reminisce about how much fun those Elephant Walks used to be.
Such a conception sells men who like to watch sports, and the sports themselves, impossibly short.
Tom Ley is a secretary who has also written for Pitchersandpoets.com. You can follow him on Twitter at @ToLey88 and email him at leyt345@gmail.com.
Photo credittncountryfan/Flickr
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