A review by tjlcody
Against Football: One Fan's Reluctant Manifesto by Steve Almond
2.0
You know, it's not often that I get so pissed off that I can't finish a book that's just short of 200 pages.
Let me clarify my position:
I am a woman. I am not a football fan. Not now, not never. I am at best tolerant of the game, and at worst I deeply resent the annoying, die-hard fans and the NFL's glossing over of the concussion issue. If I ever have a son, it will be a cold day in hell before I sign a permission slip for him to play football whilst still a minor, knowing what I do about how injuries are handled in football culture.
Not a fan.
So this book- I should love this, right?
For a bit I did: When the author was talking about the facts, about the medical realities of CTE and the men that are suffering from depression, memory lapses, paralysis, and all sorts of things related to the injuries they received while playing football, that was all great. The money bit threw me for a bit of a loop because math isn't my strong point, but I got the gist of it: The NFL is obscenely rich.
It was when we started getting to the issue of homophobia and women that I started to take issue.
First, the remark that was made about women and football: Namely that football is still firmly in the "pre-Suffrage" era and that women are either cheerleaders or football wives. In football, we're either "sex objects" or passively cheering on "our men".
Well excuse you, but that's bullshit. The author spends the whole first half of the fucking book railing about the evils of the NFL, concussions and major injuries that leave players paralyzed, but then suggests that it's "sexism" that women aren't... IDK, on the field with the male players getting the shit knocked out of them?? He also, interestingly, neglected to mention that adult female football teams and leagues exist in their own capacity, outside of the NFL.
Second, the author does way, W A Y too much projection and assumption when it comes to homophobia. In addition to being a woman, I'm also bisexual and I am repelled by the notion that homophobes are all just secretly closeted gays that need to come to term with their feelings, struggling with their own homoerotic confusion. I don't doubt that some are, but it's a gross simplification of an attitude that could have a lot of different roots: Some people grow up in religions that teach them that gay people are evil; some people have been molested by adults of the same sex as children, and haven't dealt with the trauma.
Homophobia is wrong regardless of motive, but reducing it all to "lawl you've just thought about fucking men and you don't want to admit it" is idiotic.
It's the author projecting his understanding, his view onto a wider and nuanced subject, and consequently oversimplifying it to the point of making a mockery of it. It's especially idiotic when speaking in reference to a man that the author does not know (Richie Incognito) and suggesting that he's participating in pig-tail pulling: He suggests that Incognito is harassing this other player because he secretly has feelings for him. Don't even fucking ask me to start on the stupidity of the "he's only picking on you because he likes you" argument; we don't have time for that here and I will get 100% more heated than I already am.
(BTW, If someone was sitting next to me and trying to point out how homoerotic football is- like the author's old girlfriend at the beginning of this chapter- I would be just as irritated and tell them to stop viewing everything through sex-tinted glasses. I get doing it as a joke, but there are people who see sex Literally Everywhere and will demand that you see it too.)
I had to stop around the part the author started talking about rape, because I'm already getting that Feeling that I get when I read books and the author is handling sociopolitical topics with all the delicacy of a fucking sledgehammer. If he couldn't talk about homophobia (and sexism, from that bit I mentioned above) without obnoxiously and obliviously projecting his own biases onto it, I am terrified of how he's gonna talk about rape and racism.
I'm out. If the author had stuck to reporting the facts- accounts from football players who have faced homophobia, the support and backlash they've faced in coming out, how it's affected their careers- I would have a totally different view of this, because it would be first-hand accounts from the people themselves.
But instead he decided to start lapsing into tired, biased, outdated understandings of what homophobia is and why people feel it, and as a result I have just got zero faith in his ability to discuss the other topics remaining in this book with even a semblance of grace.
Let me clarify my position:
I am a woman. I am not a football fan. Not now, not never. I am at best tolerant of the game, and at worst I deeply resent the annoying, die-hard fans and the NFL's glossing over of the concussion issue. If I ever have a son, it will be a cold day in hell before I sign a permission slip for him to play football whilst still a minor, knowing what I do about how injuries are handled in football culture.
Not a fan.
So this book- I should love this, right?
For a bit I did: When the author was talking about the facts, about the medical realities of CTE and the men that are suffering from depression, memory lapses, paralysis, and all sorts of things related to the injuries they received while playing football, that was all great. The money bit threw me for a bit of a loop because math isn't my strong point, but I got the gist of it: The NFL is obscenely rich.
It was when we started getting to the issue of homophobia and women that I started to take issue.
First, the remark that was made about women and football: Namely that football is still firmly in the "pre-Suffrage" era and that women are either cheerleaders or football wives. In football, we're either "sex objects" or passively cheering on "our men".
Well excuse you, but that's bullshit. The author spends the whole first half of the fucking book railing about the evils of the NFL, concussions and major injuries that leave players paralyzed, but then suggests that it's "sexism" that women aren't... IDK, on the field with the male players getting the shit knocked out of them?? He also, interestingly, neglected to mention that adult female football teams and leagues exist in their own capacity, outside of the NFL.
Second, the author does way, W A Y too much projection and assumption when it comes to homophobia. In addition to being a woman, I'm also bisexual and I am repelled by the notion that homophobes are all just secretly closeted gays that need to come to term with their feelings, struggling with their own homoerotic confusion. I don't doubt that some are, but it's a gross simplification of an attitude that could have a lot of different roots: Some people grow up in religions that teach them that gay people are evil; some people have been molested by adults of the same sex as children, and haven't dealt with the trauma.
Homophobia is wrong regardless of motive, but reducing it all to "lawl you've just thought about fucking men and you don't want to admit it" is idiotic.
It's the author projecting his understanding, his view onto a wider and nuanced subject, and consequently oversimplifying it to the point of making a mockery of it. It's especially idiotic when speaking in reference to a man that the author does not know (Richie Incognito) and suggesting that he's participating in pig-tail pulling: He suggests that Incognito is harassing this other player because he secretly has feelings for him. Don't even fucking ask me to start on the stupidity of the "he's only picking on you because he likes you" argument; we don't have time for that here and I will get 100% more heated than I already am.
(BTW, If someone was sitting next to me and trying to point out how homoerotic football is- like the author's old girlfriend at the beginning of this chapter- I would be just as irritated and tell them to stop viewing everything through sex-tinted glasses. I get doing it as a joke, but there are people who see sex Literally Everywhere and will demand that you see it too.)
I had to stop around the part the author started talking about rape, because I'm already getting that Feeling that I get when I read books and the author is handling sociopolitical topics with all the delicacy of a fucking sledgehammer. If he couldn't talk about homophobia (and sexism, from that bit I mentioned above) without obnoxiously and obliviously projecting his own biases onto it, I am terrified of how he's gonna talk about rape and racism.
I'm out. If the author had stuck to reporting the facts- accounts from football players who have faced homophobia, the support and backlash they've faced in coming out, how it's affected their careers- I would have a totally different view of this, because it would be first-hand accounts from the people themselves.
But instead he decided to start lapsing into tired, biased, outdated understandings of what homophobia is and why people feel it, and as a result I have just got zero faith in his ability to discuss the other topics remaining in this book with even a semblance of grace.