I was excited to go to the first football game of the season, yet I found myself not enjoying it. As it neared time for the game to start, the seats quickly filled up with fans dressed in orange. Minutes in and everyone was standing on their seats, cheering on the players as our team scored the first points. Throughout the game, a guy standing behind me and my friends continued to shout insults at the other team. He was covered in body paint but was still wearing a T-shirt with the sleeves ripped off. All of the slurs had a common theme: femininity. “He is such b****!” and “How can such a c*** even play college football?” was yelled between casual sports talk with his friends. These insults were directed at men yet they made me, a woman, feel unwelcome.
I know that he wasn’t calling me b****, but that doesn’t justify his actions. His sloppy insults, thrown around so inconsiderately, caused me and my fellow women harm. I know this isn’t an isolated incident. I’ve been to football games before. There is always that guy screaming sexist insults at the other team. I believe that this behavior is commonplace at any sporting event. Women can be made to feel alienated by the unwelcome behaviors of aggressive, male, sports fans. Some problems that sports culture has that excludes women includes the fetishization of cheerleaders, the romanticized masculinity of the male “sports star”, and the reinforced heteronormativity of the subculture. In reality, sports are created for and by men. The audience they are appealing to is a man. This does not have to be the case; all types of people enjoy sports and want to feel welcome. Female sports fans are being rejected by the preconceived ideas of what it means to be a “fan.”
However, this does not only affect women as men are often made to feel emasculated. Men are told that they have to worry about coming off as effeminate and that it makes them look weak. Unfortunately, I can think of a few times that I’ve contributed to this issue. Every time I’ve made a joke about a guy doing something “girly”, I was really just playing into society’s idea of what a “real man” is. This just causes men to fear femininity. That fear creates a vicious cycle where that sexist behavior derives from. Not allowing men to do things that our contrived social construct tells us isn’t for men is not fair to anyone.
As I stood in front of someone who screamed, “Did you forget your tampon today, p****?” while literally on my period, I felt as if my life was being made into a joke. I ended up leaving the game at halftime. Once I got home I thought back about the other times this happened. This is more than just one jerk at the last game I went to; it’s a much bigger societal issue that can be seen in many other circumstances. I don’t know if he even realized that he had ruined that game for me, but as I walked home I felt the effect of his toxic behavior slowly fading away.