In the 1970s women rebelled. They burned their bras and marched on Washington on a teat-flapping mission. They stopped shaving their legs and gave whatever frightened, cowering, leisure-suit clad man willing to fuck them a rug-burned trip to Hell, demanding the expert orgasms Cosmo promised. They saw themselves as the next formerly oppressed minority granted instant equality and tried to retrain American men overnight to become stay-at-home breastfeeding househusbands.
And for that, the sins of my mother's generation, I am being punished. What was once a weekly ritual is now almost daily, is daily if you have the right cable channels, and I am subjected to it almost constantly during Tom's days at home. I can't even protect my child from it, and in that way I have failed as a mother.
Televised football. Right now, not ten feet behind me, Tom is arguing out loud with the television. Did he drop the ball or didn't he? Did it bounce or not? Was it on the line or over it?
WHO CARES?!?!?!
Why have men lost all perspective? Why would my brother, an otherwise perfectly logical, if possibly sociopathic, man be happy with a home enema kit as long as it had a navy blue sans serif M on it? Why would Tom eagerly pay for a transvestite hooker if (s)he were wearing a University Of Nebraska jersey? Why do they forget that it's a game? It's a children's game, like tag, but it has been stolen by grown men and assigned so many rules, and so much funding.
I don't understand glorifying the athlete. Why do we have Olympics? Why do we have professional sports? And why do we televise these things? I can understand people liking to play sports. I mean, it's playing a game, by definition a fun thing. But to pay other people to play? And to have fun watching total strangers play? And the machismo!
Someone explain to me, please, how it proves your heterosexual manliness to writhe around in a pile with other men, fighting over a ball. And then on top of that, there's the whole "chase the guy with the ball till you score in the end zone" thing, and the tight pants, the butt-slapping, the group showers. I'm not gonna argue that all of these things sound vaguely bath-housey (even though they do) but they sure don't sound like the exact opposite. It's like the homophobia has looped itself, has rolled like an odometer, gone so macho that it flipped over into gay. The same sports that women aren't allowed into have spawned the most vulgar sexual terms. "Which base did you get to?" "Did you score?" And don't even get me started on wrestling. The televised folding-chair kind is bad enough (nothing gay about a 'tag team' in matching sequined unitards) but the official kind is even worse. Yeah, I know. It's ancient and Greek. Well, guess what else is ancient and Greek!
I don't care that the stuff is more than a bit homo-erotic. Hell, I gravitate towards the homo-erotic. I just don't like the Billybobs who have to watch it all the time to prove that they're straight. And by Billybob, I of course mean Tom. Because it doesn't affect me at all when other people's TVs are on for eighteen hours every day, and set to three consecutive football games every day. It only bugs me when it's my TV.
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