Male Bostonians are glued to their TVs these days thanks to a series of baseball games between our Red Sox and the New York Yankees. This reminded me of a section from The Importance of Being Lazy, a book by Al Gini that was on my summer reading list:
Mariah Burton Nelson, athlete and author, has written a brilliant and blistering book on sexism and the culture of sports titled The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football. Nelson believes that the more power women have acquired–athletically, economically, and politically–the more threatened men feel, and the more they cling to football and other manly sports… Men may have to deal with assertive wives and daughters and take a back seat to a female boss, but football remains the last bastion of mythical male domination.
Gini proceeds to trace the fantastic growth in attendance, player salaries, and the general budgets for macho gruntfests from the 1960s, when feminism took hold, and the present. He also notes that attempts to hook females into becoming massive consumers of professional sports have been failures. It is the guys who like sports and they especially like the ones where women aren’t competitive.
So do we believe this? It seems plausible. Horse racing, for example, which has no feminism-backlash angle, doesn’t seem to be substantially more popular than it was prior to World War II.
[People often seem curious to know my personal preferences in these areas. In this case it seems that I must be gay because instead of watching the Red Sox (I attend one game every 10 years and never watch on TV) I watched the last season of Absolutely Fabulous on DVD (from netflix.com). It is funny that we value movies more highly as culture than TV shows. All of my friends surveyed agreed that they’d much rather own AbFab on DVD and watch episodes repeatedly than own Lawrence of Arabia or Citizen Kane.]
Nelson’s views seem entirely dubious.
1) I don’t see the correlation. Why is the rise of power for women the causality for the rise in populatiry for football? Why isn’t it the rise of the internet? The centralization of media control? The investment by cities in mega sports complexes? How can one prove any correlation?
2) Why is the rise of popularity of football not caused exactly by the rise of women (and families) watching the games? Seems as though making football accessible to 50% of the population could be a reason. Even if womens professional sports are failing, they could be failing under the competition from mainline men’s sports. My anecdotal data would show that more women are attending and watching traditional men’s sports than going to womens professional soccer and basketball. To few dollars, too many sports outlets.
3) College womens sports is getting quite large now. Doesn’t it take a generation or two for the professional versions to take hold? Or were men’s football, basketball, hockey and basebal instantly successful? I think women’s professional sports are only failures due to the expectation for revenue generation. If a particular entertainment idea does not generate huge $$$s, then it is labeled a failure. Nothing can incubate in that environment.
4) And really, do guys really select a sport because it is fun or because it is macho-guy-thing? If it is the macho thing, then why is golf so hugely popular (your horse racing example is lame – how is that an athletic competition)? Why not weight lifting? What about all the tough man competitions? How about tractor pulls? Seems as though those have a huge dose of testosterone, yet they don’t seem to have the draw.
I love it when someone draws a causal connection without any data other than proximity in time frame.
Isn’t it a worn-out cliche that the rise in popularity of football and basketball is primarily due to televising of the games?
Hey guys, lighten up, who cares whether the sports-feminism connection can be proven or not? Sweeties, the quite essential point here is that Philip is an AbFab fan! Well done, and cheers, thanks a lot, as Pats would say.
Sports is a remarkable combination of ballet and drama that is written as it is performed, creating history. I’m about as feminine as a man can be without hormone treatments, but I’ll be watching the NFL on Sunday afternoon, and I love it.
Horse racing has, I think, declined in popularity – at least as a live-spectator sport. At least into the 1970s it was the largest spectator sport in the United States. I have no idea if betting on horse races has gone up or down, though I expect that OTB and the web have resulted in continued growth in betting. But I suspect that live attendance is stagnant or down. There’s also the tie between gambling and football. I suspect that gambling is a major reason for football’s increased popularity, along with TV.
We want to see a senior citizen get beaten down – that’s why we watch the Red Sox.
Hahahaha really funny posting…. but i’m a girl… i’m not agree with everything but
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