The Plight of the Female Sports Fan

In the run-up to this year's Super Bowl, two of our regular contributors, Alyssa Rosenberg and Hampton Stevens, will be discussing the challenges that face female sports fans, who are perhaps in greater number than ever. Alyssa begins the conversation today with a note to Hampton about sexism at the stadium and in sports journalism.

NBC

Dear Hampton,

Under normal circumstances, I'd be jealous of you for heading off to the Super Bowl next week. But after the Patriots' ignominious collapse against the Jets, I'm still in a fog of grief that makes trying to enjoy football seem like a fool's errand. And trying to find a secondary rooting interest is particularly difficult this year. I find both Aaron Rogers and Troy Polamalu quite winning.

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But it's not really a matter of deciding between two good options. Players on both teams—Ben Roethlisberger of the Steelers and Green Bay's Brad Jones, Clay Matthews, Josh Sitton, Khalil Jones, Korey Hall, Matt Flynn, and Brandon Underwood—have all had serious sexual assault allegations made against them recently (the most recent allegations against Roethlisberger were dropped because the victim didn't want to go through a trial; Jones, Matthews, Sitton, Jones, Hall, and Flynn were cleared; Underwood remains under investigation). As a result, I'm trying to figure out who I want to lose less: the quarterback around whom there seems to be a perpetual fug of ugly sexual behavior towards women, or a player who may have assaulted two women at a single party.

But it's not just football, and it's not just the players on the field who make me feel queasy about being a woman and a sports fan right now. I am not a casual fan: the Red Sox bind my family during summers; I emptied my bank account to see Curt Schilling throw his last pitches in Game 2 of the 2007 World Series and met one of my best friends while watching Game 4 that year; I have survived encounters with very loud, very drunk Ravens fans; I have skipped out of work to go meet sources at Sox-Orioles games in Baltimore. I recite these bona fides not because I think you need to hear them, but because I think there's a lingering perception that women who love sports are dilettantes, pursuing a game to please our boyfriends or throw ourselves into athletes' paths.

And having to prove ourselves isn't the worst of our problems. I found reading Gabriel Sherman's GQ profile of Deadspin editor A.J. Daulerio sickening, in part because of one particular incident described in the article: It took Daulerio—who runs what is supposed to be a sports site—days to recognize that perhaps it was unwise to run a video of an extremely intoxicated young woman potentially being raped in a stadium bathroom. An editorial approach like that, if that's even what Daulerio's decision-making process in that case can be called, violently excises women from the potential Deadspin audience. And it's of a piece with ugly behavior like Gate D at Giants Stadium during Jets games, where male fans try to harass women into taking off their tops.

It's not that I walk around at games with Mace in my purse, or that I think that all sports reporters are profiting off the sexual humiliation of women. But it seems to me there's something ugly in mainstream American sports and in mainstream American sports fandom, when one class of fans isn't taken particularly seriously, and in the wrong situation can be seriously at risk.

Alyssa

NEXT: Hampton and Alyssa discuss whether men and women can watch sports together

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

One day last summer, around noon, I called Athena, a 13-year-old who lives in Houston, Texas. She answered her phone—she’s had an iPhone since she was 11—sounding as if she’d just woken up. We chatted about her favorite songs and TV shows, and I asked her what she likes to do with her friends. “We go to the mall,” she said. “Do your parents drop you off?,” I asked, recalling my own middle-school days, in the 1980s, when I’d enjoy a few parent-free hours shopping with my friends. “No—I go with my family,” she replied. “We’ll go with my mom and brothers and walk a little behind them. I just have to tell my mom where we’re going. I have to check in every hour or every 30 minutes.”

Those mall trips are infrequent—about once a month. More often, Athena and her friends spend time together on their phones, unchaperoned. Unlike the teens of my generation, who might have spent an evening tying up the family landline with gossip, they talk on Snapchat, the smartphone app that allows users to send pictures and videos that quickly disappear. They make sure to keep up their Snapstreaks, which show how many days in a row they have Snapchatted with each other. Sometimes they save screenshots of particularly ridiculous pictures of friends. “It’s good blackmail,” Athena said. (Because she’s a minor, I’m not using her real name.) She told me she’d spent most of the summer hanging out alone in her room with her phone. That’s just the way her generation is, she said. “We didn’t have a choice to know any life without iPads or iPhones. I think we like our phones more than we like actual people.”