From the WSJ Opinion Archives
TOE MEETS LEATHER
Gridiron Feminism
Why women should love football.
Football is still America's premier sport. While the game may never regain the mass popularity it enjoyed in the 1970s, neither baseball, basketball, soccer nor ice hockey shows any sign of displacing football from the national psyche.
In recent years, there have been escalating attacks from bleeding-heart liberals and politically correct feminists, who condemn football for its inculcation of violence and misogyny, allegedly encouraging a climate of date rape and domestic violence. Football has also been targeted by campus special-interest groups who object to its devouring of the lion's share of athletic department budgets, to the detriment of women's sports (none of which consistently draw football's massive ticket-buying crowds of both sexes).
I would argue instead not only that football is congruent with an enlightened feminism, but that football is one of the best educational tools for showing women how to advance in the "hostile workplace"--which current sexual-harassment regulations try to control through intrusive, after-the-fact legal remedies.
Football is a living encyclopedia of military strategy, the intricate patterns of offense and defense in the art of warfare first systematized in the Greco-Roman era. Ambitious young women who hope to rise in politics or business should be taking military-history courses rather than women's studies, which locks them in juvenile attitudes of self-pity and resentment of men.
Football, which I call the religion of my brand of Amazon feminism, contains abundant inspiration and instruction for daily life. Ideally, all sports teams should be sexually integrated and merit-based from grade school on, though few girls will have the brawn to succeed in football beyond the collegiate level.
Simply as a spectator sport, however, football is an American art form, a blend of practical, bone-crushing action with mental ingenuity and foxy foresight worthy of chess. Though domed stadiums and the abomination of AstroTurf (laid over injury-producing concrete) are used in many professional and some university venues, most football games are still played on grass in the open air, subject to the unpredictable elements.
Unlike baseball, with its sentimental pastoral fantasies, football does not wimp out at the first drop of rain. Like an army on the march, football forges ahead through downpours and snowstorms. It has a courageous, truthful view of savage pagan nature.
The raw material world is one of football's major themes. With its muscular masses, brute collisions, and soaring trajectories, football is a crash course in basic physics. Each play is a gamble with grave risks. Any punishing hit or pileup can permanently maim or cripple. Bloodshed is a constant.
Football is an imperialistic Western drama of the mapped grid and the tyrannical clock. It's all about masculine territory--winning it, losing it, shooting like lightning over it, or having your face shoved in the mud when you don't. Even at its best, football sadomasochistically rockets back and forth between humiliation and triumph: Each gain of a yard means a defender's defeat.
Football's elaborate, expensive equipment is its Homeric armaments, and its jumble of combatants on the field resembles the chaotic clash of warriors described by "The Iliad" before the walls of Troy. Football grinds through supplies and resources, just as it eats up men. Its huge, specialized squads and staffs of trainers and coordinators are battalions necessary to cope with the inevitable attrition of players during practice sessions and actual engagement.
Poststructuralism, that stale teething biscuit of the nattering nerds of trendy academe, cannot rival the dazzling analytic complexity of football. The massive playbooks that each professional team annually constructs and masters are continually revised in action. While coaches scrutinize opponents from the sideline or a sky box, quarterbacks and runners must "read" the defense and make instantaneous adjustments, with a score of grappling men in wild motion around them. Football demands a militant hard body and a poetically fluid mind.
I have learned an enormous amount from watching football since childhood and have usefully applied those lessons in my war against the feminist and academic establishment. I block and tackle with pleasure and love in particular to run "misdirection" plays on feminist leaders--who must be baseball fans, since they still haven't caught on.
If I could be reborn as a football player, I would choose the position of tight end--the big guy who catches the ball over his shoulder and tramples over defenders at the goal line. Or free safety--who roams at will in the open field, shrewdly hangs back as a play develops, then pounces out of nowhere to smash a fleet, franchise runner to the ground.
As the Pentagon has become infested with gender-equity propaganda, disastrously compromising military readiness, only football retains the old heroic values of excellence, fortitude and valor. "Suck it up!" gleefully hoot the announcers from the broadcast booth. To toughen up our future female leaders, we need to turn them on to football.
Football will keep us strong!
Ms. Paglia is professor of humanities at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia and author, most recently, of "The Birds" (British Film Institute, 1998). A version of this article originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal on Sept. 12, 1997.
