Football season has started, apparently. Professional football, of all of the so-called sports, is perhaps the clearest example of successful corporate exploitation of male fragility. But civilized males are not fragile by nature. They have been rendered fragile by intentional design.
Marketing 101: create the perception of a deficit and then offer your product as the needed solution.
But the culture industry goes one step further than mere perception. It actually creates the deficits to be filled. It emasculates in ways both physical (e.g. the powerful phytoestrogens in beer) and psychological (the many narratives of masculinity that are embedded from earliest childhood). It then offers up testosterone replacements in the form of highly commodified professional sports, sponsored by products that acquire a potent masculine aura through association (“Dodge trucks are ram tough”).
The mojo-dojo bro-verse will claim that football is about competitive skill and strength and strategic intelligence. And this is probably true in terms of explaining the vicarious fascination and obsessive attention it elicits from fans, the majority of whom display a demonstrable deficiency in all of these things.
An interesting contrast: compare what a running back is required to do (or choose your favorite sport and player position) with a hunter-gatherer climbing 130 feet up a tree freestyle in order to pull a honeycomb out of a massive and occupied beehive. When the hunter-gatherer hangs out with the other guys later on, he is very unlikely to be engaged in any competitive sport involving tests of skill or strength or strategic intelligence (despite Yanomamo-inspired myths to the contrary). It is much more likely that he will be engaged in games of chance, where luck plays the deciding role. After all, there is no need for him to demonstrate his skill or strength or strategic acumen because he just climbed 130 feet up a tree and pulled the honeycomb out of a massive beehive.
