Michael Serazio has a nice piece on the similarities between sports fandom and religion in which he discusses Emile Durkheim and the concept of “totems”:
What totems, therefore, still survive in this culture of ours? The Red Sox. The Packers. The Lakers. And so on. The notion that sports remain our civic religion is truer than we often let on: In fandom, as in religious worship, our social connections are brought to life, in the stands as in the pews. It serves as a reminder of our interconnectedness and dependency; it materially indexes belonging. Like others, I indulge the royal “we” when speaking of my team, though there is little evidence they need me much beyond ticket sales, merchandise, and advertising impressions. Nonetheless, as Durkheim long ago noticed, “Members of each clan try to give themselves the external appearance of their totem … When the totem is a bird, the individuals wear feathers on their heads.” Ravens fans surely understand this.
Perhaps as with all dogmas, some believers take things a little too far. Nevertheless, sports fandom should be recognized for its deeper motivations. The desire to belong and to connect and to foster community or kinship. Team allegiance and a more dogmatic fanaticism is a sort of outlet of collective energy – for a desire to belong to something bigger than the individual. If religion doesn’t provide the same outlet, that energy will gravitate elsewhere.
It’s also interesting, given the commercialization of the Super Bowl, how advertisers take advantage of this instinct and our human attachment to totems. A book titled The Religious Dimensions of Advertising by Tricia Sheffield discusses that:
This groundbreaking work explores media scholar Sut Jhally’s thesis that advertising functions as a religion in late capitalism and relates this to critical theological studies. Sheffield argues that advertising is not itself a religion, but that it contains religious dimensions – analogous to Durkheim’s description of objects as totems.
Serazio continues:
The sports totem therefore gives me reason to strike up a conversation with a stranger; better still, it offers phone fodder for calls to Grandpa. We routinely speak of being “born” into a particular fandom and treat those who change allegiances to rival teams with the same alienation familiar to heretics and apostates.
The Texas Rangers and Dallas Cowboys were always a touchpoint for my grandmother and I. It’s hard for two people with 60 years between them to have much to talk about just as it’s difficult for members of increasingly deracinated communities to find common ground. Sports is an easy filler. Maybe the weather is too.
After Bill Maher’s recent attack on men, sports, and male sports fans, I promised to revisit Christopher Lasch’s chapter “The Degradation of Sport“. Lasch’s chapter was a response to people (I won’t say “like Maher” because Maher is a clown) who offered unbridled criticism of professional sports and the relationship between athlete and spectator:
In glorifying amateurism, equating spectatorship with passivity, and deploring competition, recent criticism of sport echoes the fake radicalism of the counterculture, from which so much of it derives. It shows its contempt for excellence by proposing to break down the “elitist” distinction between players and spectators.
It is that passivity, that perception of athletic cuckoldry that Lasch’s interlopers were attacking, much as Maher is today. Lasch continued:
Take the common complaint that modern sports are “spectator-oriented rather than participant-oriented.” Spectators, on this view, are irrelevant to the success of the game. What a naïve theory of human motivation this implies! The attainment of certain skills unavoidably gives rise to an urge to show them off. At a higher level of mastery, the performer no longer wishes merely to display his virtuosity—for the true connoisseur can easily distinguish between the performer who plays to the crowd and the superior artist who matches himself against the full rigor of his art itself—but to ratify a supremely difficult accomplishment; to give pleasure; to forge a bond between himself and his audience, a shared appreciation of a ritual executed not only flawlessly but with much feeling and with a sense of style and proportion.
…
The public for sports still consists largely of men who took part in sports during boyhood and thus acquired a sense of the game and a capacity to make discriminating judgments.
The same can hardly be said for the audience of an artistic performance, even though amateur musicians, dancers, actors, and painters may still comprise a small nucleus of the audience. Constant experimentation in the arts, in any case, has created so much confusion about standards that the only surviving measure of excellence, for many, is novelty and shock-value, which in a jaded time often resides in a work’s sheer ugliness or banality. In sport, on the other hand, novelty and rapid shifts of fashion play only a small part in its appeal to a discriminating audience.
The chapter provides many more interesting insights including Lasch’s response to the argument that sports foster militarism and are used for purposes of indoctrination. Also, he acknowledges that sports are a release for men in our pressure-cooker society.
The connection between Durkheim and Lasch is that they recognize that participation and spectatorship have deeper causes than mere superficial fandom for fandom’s sake. A larger, if not higher, purpose is served. It coheres, glues, provides common ground. For all those who take it too far and get their leg tattooed or seem like they’re submitting their entire being to one athlete or one team, sports fandom is still an invisible wire that connects us in a meaningful way.
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And for men, sports are the perfect metaphor for life. Always under scrutiny, competing, subject to instant accountability (something American women just don’t get), not staying safe…always taking risks that sometimes pan out and other times backfire.
Sorry for this OT, but this deserves publicity in the alt-right…hot Argentine chick delivers nuclear alpha neg Tweet against sentimental illegal-alien propaganda.
Translation: “#MoreImbecilicThanAnArgentine: A Bolivian illegal immigrant in Argentina who says he’s from here and that he works, doesn’t steal.”
For American men, who have become accustomed to walking around with a steak knife between our shoulder blades, courtesy of our disloyal. Inane women who will believe anything (as Roosh V observes), it’s truly amazing to see a chick casually and confidently nuking illegal alien propaganda which is treated like holy gospel here.
How much of a difference would it make if our hot young women’s natural superiority complex was retargeted against airheaded political correctness? This is clearly a nurture, not nature, question. Any American girl who publicly noticed something like this (e.g. about Mexicans – see the recent Pennsylvania sorority brouhaha) would be crushed by the Thought Police and forced to recant publicly. So many people have been made examples of, that most restrain themselves before even thinking of questioning the liberal dogma.
But this Argentine girl can say it to the world and still go on about her happy, hot life…good for her!
(n.b., The tweet’s hashtag – “more imbecilc than an Argentine” – started out as an attempt by Mexicans to mess with Argentines that quickly backfired and took on a life of its own)
Young women will start having issues with immigration when they can’t find work. It has already happened in some fields, for example, nail salons are entirely run by Asian immigrants and they never hire white women.
Maher’s tribal hatred of normal people is identical to sports fandom.
Incidentally, I saw him walking around my town a couple years back. Off camera, he’s an angry little midget. I’ve got a pretty good guess why he resents normal men.
The connections it spawns can work in different ways in different contexts.
I have found that professional sports teams tend to foster connections between family members and friends in a certain locale (people getting together to watch games and so on), and, for some people, also foster ties to a certain geographical region where they may have grown up, but where they no longer live. One thinks of all the “expatriate” Yankees, Sox and Steelers fans who seem to crop up everywhere, things like “Red Sox Nation” and the like. The ties are weaker, but broader, and are often associated with childhood memories.
In contrast, I have found that collegiate sports tends to spawn tighter and narrower bonds, because the fans of the team tend to actually have something in common with each other apart from having grown up in one metropolitan area. Of course this isn’t the case for some collegiate sports teams, which are supported by the local population regardless of their school affiliation (like, say, Alabama or Oregon), and their support tends to mirror that of professional sports teams. But for the smaller, private schools, the fanbases are small and tight and represent a different kind of bond than the one shared by Red Sox fans.
Sports are also one of the last things left that men can do together as men without too much societal condemnation (some, but not overwhelming), or that hasn’t been twisted into seeming gay or creepy (like the Boy Scouts are unjustly treated) or weird (any kind of hobby like trains, etc.). The Progressive Media Edifice has corrupted all the decent things men used to be able to do together and marginalized them, leaving them with nothing but sports.
OT, but hilarious:
It also isn’t necessarily all totemic. Again, here I think there is a distinction, perhaps, between collegiate and professional athletics, but in any case, there can be bonds and connections formed in interesting ways that are not only one-way:
The excerpt from Lasch is good. I’ve long wondered why so many in the sphere get so huffy about watching sports. “I’m going to do something, not indulge my desire for homoeroticism! I’m cool.” The arguments have always reminded me of ones I heard young progressives make in college, though they’d make exceptions for “real football,” ie soccer.
Camlost, that video is hilarious! I love how the little kid is screaming “that’s why you gay!”
And to think, the only thing keeping them from being doctors, lawyers and architects is the white man’s repression.
And when pastors supplicate in their sermons or side comments to the greater event of The Game that Sunday, I cringe.
Re: comlost’s video. Notice that the mothers invoke the power of their babies to advance their own agenda. At 0:03 and 0:46 the mothers demand, “don’t yell at my M..F.. babies.” At 4:03 at male does the same, “my babies.” All mothers do this; I’ve done it myself. We use our babies as sock puppets to advocate for our own desires. Very effective.
Pussies like Bill Maher are the kind that complain about lack of unity.’ The same that he and his douchey ilk seek to break down. But are we supposed to unify around douchiness Bill?
When I read Lasch’s CoN, it seemed like he viewed liberalism and the push for liberation of the post-WW2 era to have been exhausted by the time of CoN’s release. It is interesting the jump to lightspeed that the forces he saw as declining or exhausted in the late ’70s could perform after that book’s publication. He was critical of education from top to bottom, but I doubt he saw that the education system could affect or infect so many young Americans.
I enjoy sports. Always played them. I buy the civic and community bit, and attending live, stadium events reinforces that feeling. They are a good thing my dad and I can discuss regularly and at length that does not lead to elevated blood pressure.
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http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/01/26/bill_maher_rips_takers_there_are_a_lot_of_dirtbags_in_this_country.html
In defense of Bill Maher, he’s thinking well in this segment.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2013/01/26/bill_maher_rips_takers_there_are_a_lot_of_dirtbags_in_this_country.html
In defense of Bill Maher.
” It’s hard for two people with 60 years between them to have much to talk about”
Absolute bullshit.
The important issue is that all that fanaticism is really white racial group feeling. It’s just been transformed to worship the negro sport hero of the moment. You do not see chinks or negros with the level of white sport worship.
Rollory:
“absolute bullshit”.
Such a strong reaction to one passing sentence. If that is absolute bullshit then it is like a small fleck of absolute bullshit on the side of the toilet rather than, say, a huge steaming pile of absolute bullshit.
Lara’s comment reminded me of something. I’m in China, teaching how to do (my profession) to a small group of talented university students. It’s a change for me. Very invigorating.
However, three of the students are foreign exchange students, who appreciate having a class in English; two are from the US, one from the city I live in, a 20-something liberal, and quite attractive woman, by NE standards. She’s noticed that most, if not all, of the foreign Bois are dating local girls, often quite pretty ones, most of them a size 1 or, at most, 2. She’s not skinny, but if she lost about 15 lbs, would be about a solid 7.5.
She’s been here for a year and has been more or less celibate. Her dislike for Asian women – from a competitive standpoint – is powerful. She couches it in the “well, western women are more worldly/better educated (a very long stretch) / more stylish (not at this school) / have more taste (quesitonable). What it boils down to is that she’s celibate in a place, surrounded by foreign students and Chinese, and the only attention she gets is from foreign guys looking to score and move on (behaving towards her the same way they behave towards white women back home) and Chinese guys, who she won’t date – for reasons that amuse me even more. Not attractive. No status. Even if they’re richer than she is. Too effete (and in this town, the Chinese guys are extremely effete, to put it bluntly).
Her resentment is wholly from interpersonal cbitterness as a result of sexual competition. THere’s nothing else to it. It echoes what one of the Chinese women said to me during an office hour when I advised her to make foreign friends and practice English before going to school in Boston next year. She said, point blank, white women seemed to really hate Asian women, and were impossible to become friends with. The prettier the Asian girl, the more the white women detested them.
This was echoed by my time in NYC, in NE and in Korea and Japan.
Women seem to have an almost inexhaustible supply of rivalry and competitiveness.
If this woman had a different background, I’d think I was listening to the complaints of a white nationalist or some small-town conservative complaining about miscegenation.
I’m convinced beta males and most women are the ones that contribute to the most rampant forms of tribalism.
@Gorbachev – Great comment. The interesting bit, for me, is the part where you typed that if she lost ‘just’ 15 lbs she’d be a 7.5. Has it not dawned on her that she could lose weight and compete better or does she just assume her package of aesthetics are unalterable and men must square their tastes to her? Also, she can’t bend her tastes for the crowd around her. Play the hand your dealt.
When I was abroad, all the US guys hooked up constantly with the local girls while all but one of the American girls went involuntarily celibate. They got desperate enough to try to get a random hook up if an American was in-between flings. It was first a weight issue, and then an attitude issue. Foreign guys hated the buddy vibe US women sent.
Exactly. It’s not so much that the locals are just more attractive; they are. It’s that their attitudes are so much better. Not necessarily compliant. In fact, they may be tougher and more demanding. It’s just that they’re more feminine and much more agreeable, generally, not just as women, but as human beings.
What struck me was the level of competitive resentment. It’s also apparent all over campuses back home. Asian girls all over the US constantly complain that white girls, specifically, more or less detest Asian girls, and black girls treat them like competition in another way – because asian girls get the free pass due to racism, while most black students don’t see “racial discrimination” as applying to Asians, as well as blacks – only blacks are due compensation. Asians are just interlopers who claim the same benefits but aren’t worthy enough.
So much of this is female privilege. It’s one of the reasons I detest the current incarnation of ethnic identity. It’s largely a tool used by beta males to bitch about being betas and females for controlling men and other women.
I remember reading stories written by female expat business people and so on living in Asia and they were filled with bitterness. Male colleagues mostly hooking up with and in some cases marrying local women. No attention from the male expats, who preferred the locals. And the women themselves weren’t interested in Asian men (Asian men are apparently too “feminine” for American women — we see that also here in the US where the number of AW/WM relationships hugely outpaces the number of AM/WF relationships). So, yep, stuck. They could get sex if they wanted, but of course that’s anywhere. Getting sex from men whom they wanted it from and on the terms they wanted was nigh on impossible. Europe is much less like this, because the cultural differences are less, but East Asia is a hellish place for most female american expats.
Has it not dawned on her that she could lose weight and compete better or does she just assume her package of aesthetics are unalterable and men must square their tastes to her?
Thanks to the Oprah-ization of our society, American women are imbued with the “you should love me for who I am” attitude when you point out that they’ve gained 25 pounds since you first got together.
Asians talk of being triangulated. They get used by white libs when needed (voting) but shunned or forgotten in all the areas they perform well in (everything else).
I dont think in shape or petite white women have this complex. It’s knowing they have something that the taller or bigger white gals can’t duplicate; that cute petite look.
Gorb,
I’m not sure why a white woman, who hated Asian women, would go to school in China. It doesn’t make sense. That woman may be having trouble adjusting and is upset about it. Not sure why she decided to confide in you, though.
SOBL,
Women don’t generally travel with the idea of having sex, the way many men do. American women have a reputation for being rich. I would be wary of any foreign man’s attention for that reason.
Lara, Every American college student studying abroad is trying to get laid. Women can earn some notches and since it is unknown to their social circle, they don’t earn a reputation from it.
This is just the best I can come up with. You seem to want to say it’s about power, I can accept that, but that doesn’t tell me why the one side wanted the power role of the other. Simply saying it’s about power with no reason as to why implies that the power was inherently unequal, which I don’t subscribe to.
Eh, Lara, the blogger grerp, who traveled extensively as a student in Eastern Europe in the 90s, described female classmates as bringing pillowcases full of condoms with them. Women most certainly DO travel for sex — just not to Asia. Heck, even beyond that “extracurricular” sex (ie, didn’t go there specifically to get laid, but came prepared to fuck a lot), there’s now female sex tourism growing as well (see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Female_sex_tourism).
Sport is the only realm left where men decide their own hierarchy. Elsewhere, men’s utility or desirability to women is used. I just thought about that and thought it was relevant here.
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