Collegiate Times

Image: 2013-01-31 22:05:06

He said: Ignore all gender stereotypes

Because this is titled “He said, she said,” and because I am assuming I am the token male — although I haven’t discussed this point with Victoria — and because the Super Bowl is this Sunday, I imagine that you expect this to be some column about how awesome I think the Super Bowl is.

I should expound upon the nobility of the great American pastime of football. I should discuss how I’m looking forward to devouring overpriced, mass-produced, flash-prepared wings at some chain bar somewhere and washing them down with light beers advertised by scantily-clad, malnourished women who have probably never touched a beer in their lives. I should write about how exciting it is to watch grown men who get paid millions of dollars to chase a ball around. Right?

Well, I’m not going to — at least not the part about the football game. Maybe I gave that away. I have voiced my concerns before about how having a column based on binarily gendered persons doesn’t really sit right with me in my happy little postmodern-graduate-liberal-arts-student bubble. I resent that it seems necessary that, because I am a male, I must like football. I do, however, enjoy light beer and deep-fried chicken as much as the next “He said” writer.

Regardless of whether I actually like football or not — and I admit that I do, especially college football — I begrudge the implied societal obligation of liking it. It actually diminishes my enjoyment of the game itself. How postmodern is that? 

No, seriously, someone tell me. I have no idea.

At any rate, I think there are plenty of reasons not to watch the Super Bowl.

Maybe it’s because of how dangerous the sport is becoming. I would have loved to make some humorous analogy here about how the NFL has devolved into 22 400-pound men — pumped full of enough performance enhancing drugs to turn a three-toed sloth into a Triple Crown winner — running full speed into one another.

But I’m afraid that if I made a steroid reference like that, Roger Goodell would show up at my apartment complex with a bus full of lawyers and slap an injunction on me so fast, my head would spin. And I wouldn't have a leg to stand on in court — just between you and me, I don't even have his expressed written consent to write this column. I don’t think my editors would go for a lawsuit. It's too bad, because I think that sloth line would have been a pretty funny comparison. But in all seriousness, how can humans be that big and that fast? I don’t buy it; it’s not natural. Just ask Ray Lewis.

Or maybe I’ll pass on the Super Bowl because of how commercial the game has become. If anything can ruin a storied and noble American pastime, it’s corporations. A Wall Street Journal study revealed that the average football game contains all of 11 minutes of football. What’s happening during the rest of the three-hour broadcast?

Besides shots of guys’ butts in the huddle, players talking on the sideline, and, this year, the Harbaugh brothers vehemently demanding more cake, it’s commercials — and by a wide margin, according to that same study. More than half of the broadcast is corporations trying to get you to buy erectile dysfunction pills or server space maintained by a naked Danica Patrick. I didn’t even know she was MCSE certified!

Or maybe, just maybe, you’re like me and you just wrote a column detailing various reasons not to watch the Super Bowl while avoiding the obvious explanation that the only NFL team you have any real interest in is the New England Patriots even though they lost to the Ravens two weeks ago.

There, I said it. Enjoy your drugged-up, tantrum-filled, commercial-laden Super Bowl. I’ll be in my apartment with the lights off, drinking light beer and eating take-out wings, crying.

That’s not manly, right? 

Maybe I’ll deconstruct a few stereotypes after all.

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A version of this article appeared in the Feb 1 issue of the Collegiate Times.