Welcome Sports Haters!

You guys are quite right in that I choose the title “Welcome Sports Haters” to be specific, direct and to the point. Also perhaps to have a bit of fun (as I often do although what would come across as vocal timbre is pretty much lost in text).

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@Chumly,

Chumly wrote:

Right, I'm not much of a spectator when it comes to sports either.

Chumly, I gotta say u r 100% right about this.
At this moment, I cannot think of anything to add to what u have
set forth because u did such a good job of it. Its just good logic.

David

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@Xenoche,

Xenoche wrote:

I understand the idolization of athletes far more than the idolization
of the vanishing anorexic 'stars' of Hollywood.

Not that I'm a major sports buff, but I do enjoy a good game of rugby.

What the hell DIFFERENCE does it make WHO wins
the "good game of rugby" ????
(unless u bet on the result)

When I was a kid in school,
I refused to participate in that nonsense.

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@chai2,

A distinction needs to be made between the game and the culture that is associatied with the game. They're not one and the same. There is a difference between watching or playing in a game and being concerned about the negative aspects of what Robert Lipsyte has called the jock culture. Both are legitimate. Some players (such as Tim Tebow in college football) excel at the game, but clearly reject the culture. The problem is that sports fans and critics of the culture don't have their attention focused at the same place. The sports fans have their attention focused on the action that takes place on the playing field. Many sports fans are indifferent to the way players treat or mistreat others off the playing field. Critics of the sports culture (most of whom do not denigrate participation in a sport as players or spectators) are mostly concerned about what happens off the playing field when the game is over.

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@Chumly,

You make my case.

In an ideal world, no child in school would be forced to take P.E. (Again, I support traditional sports-centered P.E. classes as an elective for the athletic kids and those who simply want to participate in sports. So, please, sports fans, don't even start.) But the reality of the situation is that the sheeple are demanding mandatory P.E. K through 12; so, I favor P.E. reform as a humane alternative that will actually promote physical fitness for those students who are truly unfit, instead of teaching them to fear coaches and athlete classmates. I fear that the movement to reform P.E. will not succeed and that the horror stories of the past will be repeated in a new generation (which, incidentally, will also produce another generation of "sports haters").

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@kuvasz,

I appreciate your post, but with all due respect I think you missed the point I was trying to make.

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@Cycloptichorn,

What has specifically bothered me about the viewpoint that so many sports lovers have is that they seem to believe that any boys or men who either have not participated in sports or simply have no interest in sports are somehow inferior or deficient. They frequently will have their manhood questioned. I've noticed this personally for many years. I'm convinced that this mindset is the prime cause of the bullying of nonathletic kids by some of their athletic peers. There have been many examples of nonathletic men who have shown great courage or have made outstanding contributions to mankind. During the early 1960s before the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, there were college student who participated in civil rights marches in the Deep South. They had to be courageous because the segregationists sometimes reacted violently. How many of these college students were football players?

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@wmwcjr,

wow that is a stretch. I believe that you are , on the other hand, attempting to make up some kind of mantra about those whose interests dont involve sports as a means to justify their PoVs.

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@farmerman,

I have no problem with participating or viewing sporting events as a spectator. I also have several good friends who were athletes in one sport or another when they were younger. To get a better idea of my views on sports, you could read previous posts that I've submitted. As I've said before, boys and men who have had no interest in sports have had their masculinity questioned. Even today many people believe that boys who show no interest in sports should be suspected of having homosexual tendencies. This is negative stereotyping of the worst sort. Sports have been used as a false standard of masculinity to justify the denigration of nonathletic boys. Years ago a sociology professor named Patricia Cayo Sexton wrote a full-length book that expressed this particular ideology called The Feminized Male, in which she blames most of society's problems on nonathletic males. In one of her more recent statements, she said, "Beware of scientists. They're pencil-necked geeks." This is an exact quote. See the intolerance?

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@wmwcjr,

Social "Sciences" like the real sciences, suffer from times of bandwagonism and "pet theories" that have no real long term viability when viewed under an objective light. I am sure that Ms Sextons views have been suitably discredited by others since her work. (Which on its own appears to be kind of a joke).

I was commenting on your previous post which, counter to ascribing great things to athketes, was an attempt to play " sports non enthusiasts" as much more caring and socially responsible. Thats what my comment re: being a "stretch" was refering to.

A Course, I frequently question my colleagues as to whether "Social sciences" are even a real discipline. Wink

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@farmerman,

You and I seem to be in agreement about the "soft" sciences. I've had some personal experience in that regard which I will not burden you with.

I assure you, though, that Professor Sexton was deadly serious. She was not joking, and is just as much a bigot as a racist or an anti-Semite.

I was not saying that nonathletes were more caring and socially responsible than athletes. I was simply defending nonathletic males, who have been denigrated for generations. I'm sorry, but some in the sports world consider nonathletic males to be inferior. I've either heard or heard about this mindset many times. Nonathletic boys (who are often bullied in traditional sports-centered P.E. classes) are often called sissies, wimps, and fags. When I was 15 years old, an incompetent psychologist sent me to a white judo instructor who formerly had played football at a university. I always felt like an outsider in his judo classes. I quit taking the judo lessons from this guy when I was a junior in high school. Eight years later I paid him a visit at his home. I heard him express some rather peculiar views. He claimed that he had "saved (me) from homosexuality," even though I had never had any inclination in that direction. When he first saw me as a 15 year old, he stereotyped me as supposedly having "latent" homosexual tendencies simply because I was physically weak and didn't like sports! (At that point I wish I had been able to tell him to go soak his head, but I didn't dare to do that because he was violent.) He considered only athletes and men in certain blue-collar occupations to be "real men." He denigrated Dr. Andrei Sakharov, the "father of the Soviet H-bomb" who became a courageous human rights activitist, simply because he apparently wasn't an athlete. Sexton's Feminized Male was an official expression of this man's mindset. So, my whole viewpoint is defensive.

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@wmwcjr,

wmwcjr wrote:

In one of her more recent statements,
she said, "Beware of scientists. They're pencil-necked geeks."
This is an exact quote. See the intolerance?

SO WHAT?? Assuming that their necks are narrower,
and assuming that thay are geeks (i.e., bite off chicken heads)
what danger woud thay constitute except to chickens ???

David

1 Reply

@wmwcjr,

wmwcjr wrote:

You and I seem to be in agreement about the "soft" sciences. I've had some personal experience in that regard which I will not burden you with.

I assure you, though, that Professor Sexton was deadly serious. She was not joking, and is just as much a bigot as a racist or an anti-Semite.

I was not saying that nonathletes were more caring and socially responsible than athletes. I was simply defending nonathletic males, who have been denigrated for generations. I'm sorry, but some in the sports world consider nonathletic males to be inferior. I've either heard or heard about this mindset many times. Nonathletic boys (who are often bullied in traditional sports-centered P.E. classes) are often called sissies, wimps, and fags. When I was 15 years old, an incompetent psychologist sent me to a white judo instructor who formerly had played football at a university. I always felt like an outsider in his judo classes. I quit taking the judo lessons from this guy when I was a junior in high school. Eight years later I paid him a visit at his home. I heard him express some rather peculiar views. He claimed that he had "saved (me) from homosexuality," even though I had never had any inclination in that direction. When he first saw me as a 15 year old, he stereotyped me as supposedly having "latent" homosexual tendencies simply because I was physically weak and didn't like sports! (At that point I wish I had been able to tell him to go soak his head, but I didn't dare to do that because he was violent.) He considered only athletes and men in certain blue-collar occupations to be "real men." He denigrated Dr. Andrei Sakharov, the "father of the Soviet H-bomb" who became a courageous human rights activitist, simply because he apparently wasn't an athlete. Sexton's Feminized Male was an official expression of this man's mindset. So, my whole viewpoint is defensive.

I must deny your factual allegations, upon the basis of my own experience.
I always refused to participate in "P.E." and from ages 12 to 16,
I was very interested in nuclear physics, and ofen discussed it in school.
I used to challenge the science teachers; it was fun.
I was admired n praised by the other students; thay loved it.
No one else was challenging the teacher, but I had a big mouth.
I considered a career in nuclear physics and openly said so, until I decided to become an attorney. I had no trouble.
I was NEVER bullied, nor were there any attributions of homosexuality toward me, nor was my masculinity questioned.
(I was a little bit aggressive by temperament; not a lot.)

David

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@farmerman,

Quote:

A Course, I frequently question my colleagues as to whether "Social sciences" are even a real discipline.

It is quite common that those who work with non-human and inorganic matter to question the validity of the social sciences. Whether it is because they are concerned about what the social sciences might reveal about themselves is a moot point but the non-human and especially the inorganic sciences are quite safe in that regard.

Also, there is plenty of suspect social science which can be pointed to in order to support such questioning but there are aspects of social science which are as objective as the physical sciences. For example--studies of the geographical distance between the birthplaces of married couples or proportions of income spent on categories of products or the relation between property prices and such things as educational qualifications, illness and mortality rates. The consumption of alcohol, which can be accurately measured , is seen as a guide to the level of perplexity and confusion.

The advertising industry puts its money down on the studies and conclusions of social scientists. The physical scientists beg at government's door for funds.

I think there is a correlation between the sporting temperament and conservative viewpoints and barbarian propensities which it is reasonable to assume is reversed in the opposite case which generally leads to an emphasis on sedentary activities associated with the refinement of the mind if only for a want of alternatives.

It is therefore to be expected that when emphasis in recruitment is given to educational excellence a progressive, liberal, left-wing drift in the orientation of society will result. Hence institutions of the higher learning are hot-beds of dissidence and revolution the world over and particularly in those where sport is not given much, or even any, attention. College sports may well exist solely for the purpose of holding this drift in check as a humane method of preventing the domination of the "modern woman" who finds the unsporting male particularly easy to manipulate in the service of her undeniable and quite understandable needs.

Interested viewers here might profit from reading Veblen's essay The Belief in Luck which is Chapter 11 of that masterpiece of American erudition The Theory of the Leisure Class. It can be read on the internet in full.

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@spendius,

spendius wrote:

I think there is a correlation between the sporting temperament and conservative viewpoints and barbarian propensities which it is reasonable to assume is reversed in the opposite case which generally leads to an emphasis on sedentary activities associated with the refinement of the mind if only for a want of alternatives.

R u accusing me of being a liberal?

I have always voted against them, so far as I remember.

David

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@OmSigDAVID,

I'd like to know what part of the country you grew up in. Sounds exceptional, meaning not common. Perhaps that would account for the difference in our personal experiences. (Believe me, I'm not lying about my own.) I've never heard of a high school where the "jocks" didn't rule with the attendant putdown of "nerds." Well, except for only two years, I did grow up in the state of Texas. I'm sure that accounts for a lot.

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@wmwcjr,

Phoenix, Arizona and NYC

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@OmSigDAVID,

The word "geek" has more than one meaning. You were using the older meaning to refer to a particular circus performer. A more recent meaning is synonymous with "nerd." Some people resent scientists out of a spirit of anti-intellectualism. Her point of view (which I think is shared by more than a few coaches and participants in certain but not all sports) is that men who aren't active in sports are deficient and effeminate ("sissies" or "fags"), and she includes scientists in this group (as if all scientists are alike). She picked up a resentment of sedentary men from her blue-collar father; so, what does she do in choosing a career? She chooses to become a sociology professor, just the sort of vocation that will bring her into contact with the sort of men she so despises. Go figure.

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@OmSigDAVID,

I'm mystified as to what accounts for the differences in our childhood experiences. I believe what you've said about your own, just as I hope you don't think I'm lying about mine (not to mention those of a few friends of mine which I've alluded to in previous posts in this thread).

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@OmSigDAVID,

A thought just occurred to me. One very important reason why you were not bullied is because you were never forced in school to take sports-centered P.E. in which sports were crammed down your throat, often without any instruction since many P.E. coaches simply did not teach (as opposed to honest-to-goodness physical fitness classes, which are still an innovation today). You were very fortunate. I don't know how you escaped mandatory P.E.

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