Rolling Maleness and Masculinity Discussion Thread

There is a lot of chicken/egg. Do sports always provide a release valve for preexisting aggression, or do they sometimes stir it up and create it where it wouldn't otherwise be?

For starters, we'll never know, because "though shalt be a sportser" is thrust on many American boys from birth. I'm not in a sporting family (to put it mildly) but still found that it was impossible to avoid football-themed onesies, pajamas, sheet sets. Every weekend, nearly every square inch of suburban grass is covered with preschoolers milling around a soccer ball. Many fathers do not give their sons a choice; they've already picked out a fandom and a sport and sometimes even a specific position. In much of our culture, woe to the boy who says "Uh, Dad? I'd actually rather be on the chess team."

Mandatory sports culture suffuses every high school, where you're required to go to the Pep Rally before the Big Game, in which the Anyhigh Whatevers are supposed to "stomp" and "punish" the Otherhigh Fightin' Thingies. Rah, rah, school spirit.

If the aggression and/or drive to excel is innate, why do the sportsers need a cheering crowd, banners in the hallway, constant "Go Team" exhortations? (And why, for the love of god, do we need to provide them with a dozen cute girls in short skirts, clapping and cheering them on to victory? To remind them of exactly why they need to crush the opposition?) Surely they could just use their inner reserves.

still don't think it makes sense to see it as "sports fans murdering each other en masse" - the sport doesn't seem to be anything like the key factor in the riots or the murder.

the sport is why they were where they were and the rivalry was why the ones who were killed were killed, idk how much more you could want really

this is not necessarily an argument that would go unremarked across a wider sphere

so what?

darra, I know it's not the only argument for sport - I'm not suggesting sports should be interrupted before this is sorted out! But it's the case that's being made for it itt.

Wide swathes of the wider sphere see aggression as awesome by definition, which is surely part of the problem being discussed here.

Yeah no argument with either rejoinder daniel

™Mandatory sports culture suffuses every high school, where you're required to go to the Pep Rally before the Big Game, in which the Anyhigh Whatevers are supposed to "stomp" and "punish" the Otherhigh Fightin' Thingies. Rah, rah, school spirit.

Again, how to extricate, idk- but this post screams AMERICA at me, not SPORT

it's definitely a different culture to ours

it was impossible to avoid football-themed onesies, pajamas, sheet sets

made me think how the range of default cheapo birthday card designs for sons and dads in the UK comes from the limited pool of Sport, Fishing, Cars and Beer

I mean I was getting birthday cards with photos of random unrecognisable lower tier football action on them long before I really knew whether I liked football or not

fair point darraghmac - I am speaking here from a USian context.

However, I suspect that even in Europe, athletes are exhorted to do well rather than poorly. I am told that Irish sports teams have fans who encourage them to win rather than lose.

Or is it all "Just try your best, lads! Just go out there and have fun!"?

mostly at school it is, I've never heard of pep rallies outside of the US tbh

Ha

We scald the poor fuckers whatever they do tbh

It is imo an entirely different context tbph and maybe again a subthread

I've had basically nothing whatsoever to do with sports ever in my life but I can say that probably 75% of the times I've been physically assaulted (with intent) in my life were in high school gym class while being forced to do sports.

Yeah, the whole Friday Night Lights pep rally stuff is definitley a US thing. But how good you are at sports (or how interested you are in them) is still super important in Europe*, especially in more rural areas. I'm sure if I'd have grown up in Lisbon or Porto I'd have had some friends in the "lol fuck sports" camp, and the sporties wouldn't have been quite as obnoxious about it.

* This also unsatisfying shorthand I'm sure, things probably quite different in Poland than they are in Belgium or whatever, but whaddyagonnado

leaving the USA and moving to France with children in school, you notice the differences in sports culture. there's nothing like the organized sports of usa here for school kids, where schools compete against other schools and all's organized by the schools, with excused absences for athletes, cheerleaders, pep rallies, practices everyday, etc. Schools tend to have an organization for kids who want to swim or play tennis etc but it's all done in house, not against other schools. Otherwise you join a club outside of school. I think this is pretty standard in Europe.

of course people here can go wild for OM or PSG but imo (having lived in both Marseille and Paris for year+) it's not like college or professional sports fandom in the USA (like in the home of the FITIN' IRISH where the entire town shuts down for gameday and the population doubles for the day)

re. sports, I've long thought that when our glorious revolution of universal basic income comes, that the government should organize lots of sports leagues so that people can spend their time goofing around playing whatever. sure, include video games, no problem. not gonna force people to join but this seems plainly better than just having nothing to do (cf opioid crisis)

basically mixed pétanque will be our salvation

Très bien

the rivalry was why the ones who were killed were killed

The rivalry was the way in which the rioters were divided, not *why* they were killed, at least according to my reading of the page you linked: they were killed because they rebelled against Justinian. If your argument is that sport can, and often is, be put to horrible ends in the exercise of power, I agree with you. If your argument is that in that case sports was the cause of the massacre - why those people were massacred - I wouldn't: that would be letting Justinian and his troops off the hook.

leaving the USA and moving to France with children in school, you notice the differences in sports culture. there's nothing like the organized sports of usa here for school kids, where schools compete against other schools and all's organized by the schools, with excused absences for athletes, cheerleaders, pep rallies, practices everyday, etc. Schools tend to have an organization for kids who want to swim or play tennis etc but it's all done in house, not against other schools. Otherwise you join a club outside of school.

This is also how it is in American schools below high school, fwiw. I think our middle school might have one or two teams? Cross country, maybe basketball? But that's it. Kids who want to play sports in competition (tennis, soccer, baseball, hockey, whatever) do it in leagues outside of school.

xp sure, but justinian was a blue, and it was only blues who were allowed to leave (& in the end the sporting rivalry trumped anti-justinian sentiment amongst the blues). obviously there's a lot going on there, but sport provided the structure & crucible for it all to go down the way it did.

as I write there's a mob of feyenoord fans being kettled in the middle of manchester, singing incredibly loudly and seemingly drunk at 2pm. there have been a few incidents of fans trashing the city centre in recent years (Rangers take the prize). it's not letting alcohol off the hook to point out the common link of footer

You don't need to go back to the reign of Justinian to find examples of European sports riots.

policing obviously a huge issue too wrt fan violence, I'm not justifying kettling at all

ultimately flags and badges were invented for armies to rally around and sport has military connections almost as far back as it exists

but the sensible conversation is about strands and trends and histories and in lots of respects reaching back to Justinian or medieval archery or the Bodyline tour or the weird pro-bullying culture in American High Schools (the extent of my actual knowledge of that being as far as it's expressed in US movies and TV shows but hey let's run with it) is a very tangential way of thinking about the modern sports-entertainment complex and its massive presence across multiple cultures and economies.

and the meaning of sport to different individuals and communities, to different polities and cultures, to the innate (? nothing's innate but let's run with it) ludic instinct in human beings

sport can be, has been and is weaponized. can't think of a cultural artefact that this doesn't apply to.

> there have been a few incidents of fans trashing the city centre in recent years

around here (QPR) it seems to manifest itself as stickers stuck on bus stops and lamp posts.

Not sure if this is significant, but sports culture in UK private schools appears to be closer to the US culture? At least as far as schools play competitively with other schools, boys who are good at sport get special recognition ("colours"), rugby is a real man's game, rugger lads bully nerdy kids in the same way as "jocks"?

plenty of state primary schools have inter-school competitions

ah the post I was taking that from was referring to France not UK, fair enough.

tbf my state primary didn't have inter-school competitions, but that was 30 years ago so

yeah I only vaguely remember this; I was too busy playing wargames, which are ofc a more male pursuit than sport

Football brings twenty thousand ppl into a city centre

Calling the ensuing chaos 'sports related' isn't imo meaningful

Again, attack music concerts on same ground or call it the effect of crowds

eh not really the same imo since there is no competition involved in a crowd all gathered to see a musical performance

honestly in the post Gamergate post Reddit post doxxing post alt right etc etc as I've said before the Internet's great lesson was that given a chance nerds would act worse than jocks

xxp there's only a few hundred afaict. music fans haven't trashed the city centre. this is nonsense

How soon we forget the epic 2004 throwdown of Luna fans vs. Ok Go fans in Pittsburgh, both concerts were letting out at the same time and harsh words were exchanged about the quality of production on Pup Tent.

As many as two dudes got their glasses slightly scuffed in the ensuing melee.

Big gigs over here routinely involve more trouble than much better attended sporting events- I'm thinking specifically the events in the phoenix park (which is not usually an event venue)

LL's point is fair, you have to manage opposing fans in many sports so there's a heightened risk there

Here it's the norm to have mixed seating at rugby and gaa events and even soccer doesn't seem to need this type of management. Very rarely any trouble.

Ogmor you'll offer your Manchester events, fair enough. Maybe there's a major cultural divide between even there and here.

i wish i could say that musical performances are free from hostility but that wouldn't be true. they're just not the same as sporting events.

irish sports seem so charming and wholesome compared to football & english sport culture, chatted about this to a (completely unsporty) friend who moved to dublin about how much more appealing it is

It's probably relevant that gaa/rugby attendance in particular is imo much more mixed ito age and gender than yr stereotypical footy crowd

pep rallies are deeply weird

I guess regardless of culture or geographic location, kids who are so inclined will find an outlet through which they can exercise their desire to be shitty to other kids.

boys will be boys!

With sports it's this thing where it can be deployed as an organized and validated and authority-approved method of exhibiting your superiority over other kids and maybe even getting to beat them up a bit with a hard hit or two, and no one's gonna really get in trouble for it.

I always liked sports and gym class, I mean though during square dancing weeks the latter was pure hell.

Well there's playing sport and watching sport; the Feyenoord fans in Manchester right now probably aren't feeling very authority-approved.

eh not really the same imo since there is no competition involved in a crowd all gathered to see a musical performance

I know what you mean but I still reflexively am like "this does not match my experiences with attempting to see the stage at non-classical concerts"

YOU have trouble seeing the stage? I'm 5'2" and i still don't feel competition. Hostility, yes.

struggle to remember any non-classical gigs I've attended where more than 20 people were there and a percentage of them weren't dicks

Basically, unless I am practically sitting on the stage, some (white) dude 3-5 inches taller than me will invariably elbow his way in front of me and performatively enjoy the show while I jostle around for a better viewpoint, at which point some other tall (white) asshole will cut off my line of sight. It is very much "I must show my devotion to the band by getting as close to them as possible" combined with "well you don't really belong here anyway so why should I care if I block your view" posturing.

^^^ I have stood *right against the lip of the stage* and have big muscleheads jostle me out of the way, because I'm a dumpy, 5'8", 48 y.o. dude who is not going to start a fight and they know it.

that's just a healthy outlet for aggression iirc

ever since I got called out for obstructing someone's view at a Downtown Boys show a couple years ago (I'm not tall and have some hangups about it so it generally didn't occur to me to check behind me at shows) I obsessively check to make sure I'm not in other folks' way