Sports as safe space and the politicization of everything
Jay’s recent post argues that politicizing sports is a bad idea. His description of feeling targeted by the protests, as an NFL fan and someone who doesn’t agree with all of the protestors’ claims, and consequently diminishing his ability to enjoy watching sports made me wonder about a few things. Are sports a safe space? And is the politicization of everything a bad idea?
Sports as safe space
Not long after I read Jay’s post I came across another post about Barstool Sports. Barstool Sports is a sports website, blog, media brand, podcasting brand, pizza review youtube channel (??) helmed by Dave Portnoy. Portnoy, in many ways, is the Platonic ideal of a sports fan. He seems to sleep, eat, live, breathe sports. He’s from Boston, went to Michigan, and cares a lot about teams like the Patriots and Celtics. You get the idea.
Barstool Sports has also been accused of employing sexist and racist humor, and generally promoting a culture that feels somewhat like if the worst people you knew in high school ran a really popular sports blog.
Enter Deadspin. Deadspin is another sports blog, originally part of the Gawker Media group. If Barstool are the insufferable football jocks from high school, Deadspin are perhaps the insufferable swim team nerds. The two sites have had something of a grudge against each other for a while.
Writing in NYMag, the founding editor of Deadspin in describing his understanding of how Barstool Sports succeeds, has a useful description of sports as “safe space”:
And I do get it. I understand the idea of sports as escapism, a way to get away from your worries and your fears and the constant stresses of American life, a place to go with your friends to drink beer and eat terrible food and yell at the television and Be Dumb Guys for a while. (“Saturdays are for the boys” is one of Barstool’s long-standing catchphrases.) Having a full day to just sit and watch sports is a legitimate, underappreciated pleasure, and one I try to take advantage of at every opportunity. The problem, of course, is that space safe from the complexities of the modern world — and that is precisely what the sports bar is, a carefully designed, cocooned safe space — is in fact an illusion. Just because you want sports to be totally separate from the rest of the planet doesn’t mean it actually is. What you see as escape, others see as exclusionary. Others get to play, too. That others want to, that this safe space is seen as threatened by the inclusion of people who are different (women, mostly), is what is so threatening, and leads to the lashing out by Portnoy and the SAFTB crowd. The problem is that protectionism is increasingly becoming the whole business plan.
This captured something about sports I had long felt but hadn’t been able to capture. Whether this causes you to roll your eyes or nod your head, there is some truth to the idea that sports, and sports fandoms are generally exclusionary places. Or, alternatively, as Jay describes, sports provides its fans a currency with which they can connect with strangers who might have the same interests. I don’t think it’s bad to have spaces in society that aren’t for everyone but we should be honest with ourselves about who does and does not get to participate in those spaces.
In my experience, especially around the NFL, those spaces and experiences tend to be for men. And for a long time, for men who share certain cultural and political features in common. For example, the close relationship between the NFL and the military is less likely to be described as a “politicization of sports” because it is assumed that most NFL fans have pro-military politics.
So what happens to a safe space when a new or uncomfortable idea is introduced? Those who traditionally felt comfortable start to feel uncomfortable. And maybe that’s a worthwhile cost to pay, if the reason for doing it is important enough.
I had fallen out of the habit of watching the NFL long before the protests and am admittedly less concerned about how that experience is tainted. But, for what it’s worth, I do think it’s commendable that athletes who largely come from the kinds of communities that experience the brunt of police brutality, are risking their new found fame and fortune to address something they see as a major social problem. If that’s not the kind of behavior we want more of our cultural and social elites (however measured) to be displaying, I don’t know what is.
I also thought the protest was smartly executed but then co-opted into a flame war, and then further watered down by a Nike campaign which seemed to wash out police brutality almost entirely,.
The politicization of everything
The specifics of the NFL protest aside, Jay’s post sparked another thought in my head: is everything being politicized and is that bad?
From the Wall Street Journal’s Editorial Board, to Politico, to one of my favorite writers at The Atlantic, Conor Friedersdorf, to day-to-day conversations I’ve had with friends and family over the last couple of years, all discussion seems to head to politics. The causal mechanisms for why this is happening are complex and range from demographic change, to cultural production, to news consumption, to communication in the social media age, to the upending of global order, and probably dozens of other things I haven’t even thought of yet.
In some ways, I think this is good. The introduction of the concerns of women, gay people, racial minorities, or poor people into our political conversations is a positive development. I like that we live in a time when we can agitate for change and try to make things better for more and more people in society.
But our ability to have these conversations in a respectful way, grounded in evidence, with open minds, amenable to changing our prior assumptions is woefully lacking. That, to me, seems like the more lamentable aspect of the politicization of everything. I also have a harder time trying to come up with fixes to this problem.
