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Opinionista

STOP PRESS: Fan anatomically female; simultaneously watches sports!

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Antoinette thinks of the world and the people who live in it as a bear with a sore paw. She has a stick covered in thorns and shes poking the bear. When shes not doing that, shes watching cricket and longing for the days of the boring, boring Arsenal.

Another day, another patronising article from a well-known publication relating to women liking (or apparently not liking) sport. It’s 2014 and these attitudes are not only sad and boring, they are also doing nothing for the fight for women who have it much tougher elsewhere. By ANTOINETTE MULLER.

It’s the year 2014, more women are watching cricket than men (the limited overs, anyway), women are playing Fantasy Football, women are working in media, women are the highest scorers at cricket matches (yes, they are!) and it’s estimated that one on three sports fans are women.

Yet, far too often, women are still “othered” when it comes to being sports fans. That’s not in reference to the comments about needing to get back in the kitchen and all sorts of other things people devoid of originality (or brain cells) conjure up. In 2014, we are still subjected to lazy media perceptions of how women aren’t interested in sport. It happens all the time.

Men’s Health (the global version) are the latest culprits in all of this. This week, they published a very short post (probably with the aim of click-baiting) and ended up looking like fools. It got the clicks – but not in a good way. It was the kind of thing that was enough to make you eye-roll so much that you’d probably knock yourself unconscious in the process.

“How to talk about sports with women.” The post simply stated the following:

“Not all women share your passion for sports, in case you hadn’t noticed. The reason? They need story lines.

“’Most women don’t care about stats,’ says Andrei Markovits, Ph.D., co-author of Sportista: Female Fandom in the United States. So while you’re enthusing about Dominic Moore’s scoring record, she’d rather hear about how he supported his wife’s battle with cancer—and even took a season off from the NHL at the height of his career. Treat your heroes as people and not just players on a field, and you’ll suck her in. Just don’t expect her to wear the foam finger.”

Somewhere in tiny print there was a little blurb which read “women not interested in”, but that seems so insignificant and irrelevant in the wider scheme of things. The publication received a considerable amount of blacklash and subsequently removed the article and issued a very half-hearted apology on Twitter. But the point is that it happened and a publication like Men’s Health should know better.

While it is true that the stories behind the athletes hold an appeal, to suggest that it’s only women who are interested in the backstory is downright foolish. “Human interest” sports pieces are interesting to most sports fans with more than two brain cells and even half a heart. It’s part of what makes sport so great. But let’s not hold Men’s Health entirely responsible for this little faux pas. Let’s focus on the book that clearly also others women as sport fans.

The book quoted in this piece presents a problem in itself. The book says that it aims to “focus on women’s experiences in their constant contestation to attain equal inclusion in our extant sports space”. That’s a lovely notion and, considering how women often struggle to be taken seriously as sports fans, it had the potential to offer great insights.

Reviews of the book aren’t so great, though. Rita Liberti wrote a review in the Journal of Sport History earlier in 2014 and believes that the book marginalises females even further. A discussion on female fandom does not begin until the book’s fourth chapter. Chapter Two, called “Women in Men’s Worlds,” the authors “conduct a broader examination of the common processes of exclusion and suppression of females within male-dominated areas”.

The book constantly focuses on the fact that women are not men, instead of simply focusing on how they view sport as fans. The book asks questions like “In what way have men and women remained so different in terms of their following of sports?” or “How and why do women continue to ‘speak’ sports so differently from men?”

Later in the book it says: “Once again, the point is crystal clear: Men know women’s sports a lot better than women do, and they obviously know men’s sports a lot better as well.”

What a massive oversimplification and generalisation of how women watch sport. Even the candidates interviewed for the book were a small group (just over 30) of middle-class, white, college-educated females. There is no variation there, no exploration of the depths to which female fandom goes. That in the year 2014 this is the kind of thing that still suffices as analysis of the female sporting fan is beyond unacceptable.

Sure, not all women like, love or follow sports, but neither do all men. If everyone in the world loved sports, then sport writing would actually be a respectable career choice instead of one that led to widening eyes from parents when they heard that’s what their offspring wanted to be when they grew up (ahem).

The point is this. The “jokes” about the stereotype of women not being interested in sport are not funny because they are simply not true. This perpetuating of stereotypes also does nothing for the fight against blatant discrimination against female sports fans in other countries, where discrimination runs far deeper than “banter”.

In countries like Saudi Arabia, women are banned from attending soccer matches, and when they dare attend a match in a country like the UAE, they are questioned. Angry men have recently taken to expressing their dismay at a YouTube clip in a way that drew shocked reactions from far and wide. During Al Ain’s match in the Asian Champions League a woman, dressed in an abaya and burka, reacted to a tackle from a player and the outrage was palpable.

The BBC translated some of the comments as follows: “Women aren’t interested in football, so why go to a stadium to watch a live match?” wrote one.

“Does this woman not have a man? Her place is in the house,” another added.

So, the next time you think your comment about women not understanding the offside rule is “just a bit of banter”, think again about how these attitudes are perpetuating a myth that should have been busted long ago – and what your attitude might mean for women in a desperate struggle for equality. DM

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