The NFL sells this fantasy without really admitting that it sells it. Which is a problem, because when the league encounters circumstances that compel it to stand against, say, rampant, horrifying abuse, what results is often something like the confusion of the Rice scandal. There is the familiar theater of inadequate contrition, the risible effort to explain real tragedy through the medium of sports clichés (“a heck of a guy,” “failure is not getting up”). There is the reaction-driven media shouting.
5 There is the total disconnect between fans who want the league to do more and fans who resent the league for doing anything at all, because to do anything is to interrupt the smooth operation of the illusion of male power that the NFL is supposed to represent.
And it’s this illusion that, unacknowledged, breaks the machinery of conversation. Internet comments defending Rice and the NFL are — well, many of them are genuinely and chillingly misogynistic, but I think more of them are primarily concerned with protecting football from mainstream cultural norms:
Don’t take this away too. Men who post smug explanations of league suspension policy may be secret domestic-violence enthusiasts, but more likely they’re simply trying to keep any trace of sensitivity from softening their cartoon war game. What they’re talking about isn’t precisely what they’re talking about. They don’t support the problem; they just don’t want to think about it. They refuse to be collaterally enlightened.
I think guys like this are wrong. I think guys like this live on the tectonic fault between insufferable and ridiculous. But it’s also true that when I criticize the NFL for the absurdity of its suspension policy, I, too, am not saying exactly what I mean. My real, unspoken target is that fantasy of middle-class male superpower. What I really want is not merely to decrease drug-suspension minimums while increasing minimums for domestic abuse, as reasonable a goal as that is.
6 What I really want is to save football, a game that I love, from the men who think it should work like this. I want to dispel the illusion; I want that hypertrophied caricature of male prerogative to have no place in American life.
if only people dished out beatings for people writing stuff like this
fire holloway then hire a manager that's even more risk-taking, brehs
