It’s a bunch of kids playing a silly little game.
You know what the real problem is?
Men don’t act like MEN.
I hope you know this feminist point actually evidence my point about feminism. From the most objective and egalitarian point being a man is biological and contingent on having a Y chromosome. That it. Nothing else.
The social constructs of being “a man” or being “a lady” are social constructs and not something biologically heritable.
In general–at least culturally in the United States (I can’t speak for every country on earth)–a female becomes “a woman” when she has her first menstruation. Her womanhood can never be lost or ever taken away from her.
It is different for males in U.S. culture. Being “a man” is attained only through social and economic accomplishments. It’s also contingent on not being raped by a man or other sexual humiliations. Every boy on earth learns–repeatedly through explicit messages
from females and males–that they can lose their manhood at any point and time.
We usually term this process and phenomenon as “emasculation.”
But my point about the use of
combat sports like football in developing young
boys, is that life is Darwinian, and that means violence is apart of life. Discrimination as well. Sexual selection is discriminatory in its process and not egalitarian. But its kind of like a gun. When and how you use a gun is a question. We can teach young boys that you shoot males and females in mass shootings. Or we can teach them you only use a gun to shoot one or more persons that are attempting to gravely injure you or another person etc. So, like wise combat sports like football can be used to teach and develop young boys about things like perseverance under physical pain and under challenging weather conditions. It can be used to teach them a particular cultural conception of “fair play” when meeting another male in violence and competition. Male chimpanzees for example, routinely beat female chimpanzees, and when two or more male chimpanzees meet in battle it can by human conceptions be quite barbaric.
So, you can teach boy football players to win by gouging other players eyes while they lay tackled (some NFL players have been known to do that actually). Punching or kicking other males in the testicles as hard as you can. You can create a football sport like that. Just like you can create life and death gladiatorial games for the entertainment of a nations citizens.
In American football certain rules have been created. So too in boxing at gyms in communities and folk-style wrestling organized in high schools. Martial arts often instructs in more life and death barbarism that would be more applicable to a chimpanzee fight (ripping testicles off, biting etc.) or gladiatorial fight were your losing means you die. But even martial arts instructs with a philosophy and goal that tries to instil in pupils a respects for life (of others) and avoiding and/or declining battle when possible. Football, wrestling, and boxing not so much.
I would agree football is a “stupid sport” in the sense it is Darwinian and earthly and created on ideas of gender constructs of what being “manly” is (e.g., enduring pain, clobbering other successfully etc.), and not when contrasted with heaven, a promotion of peace, serenity, freedom from violence and aggression, the community of saints.
And that last paragraph really underpins all the
base philosophy that are behind my comments in this thread. And I’m used to violence. My former social worker (very bright and strong woman I might add–American as well and reared Catholic, though I suspect pretty liberal and non-practicing like myself) surprised me when in in response to my comment to her,
“I can’t imagine never living the rest of my life not under the threat of violence.” And I’m rather nonchalant about it as I’ve made my peace with it. To some degree at least.
I trained in boxing motivated out of fear. Just about everything I’ve ever done has been motivated by fear of something or another. Fear of starvation, fear of violence, fear of social exclusion, fear of A, B, C, D…Z. I was too small to play football. But I played it because I wanted to do “a manly” thing and better position myself for a chance of some social popularity. Life is Darwinian like that. Females have in general–not in all environments of the U.S.–and I’m not talking about gritty Bronx chicks, have been given the grace and blessing of the escape hatch males don’t have. Because their womanhood is permanent and can’t be taken away. Society does not ask girls (in general again) to be violent and play violent things like football or boxing to better position themselves in sexual selection.
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Continued below.**
)doesn’t mean they should be allowed to do the job. These jobs you think women should do have made women cruder, ruder, and courser. Women in male dominated fields invariably feel compelled to be “one of the guys” and normally act in a way that is quite un feminine. Men, for their part, almost always give these women the easy jobs, such as flagging traffic instead of the jackhammer in construction. Is that fair to the men as they have to pick up the slack? Hardly.
