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The marketing minds behind the XFL, Vince McMahon and Dick Ebersol,
have clearly demonstrated their lack of respect for women. But
few critics of the embarrassing new football "league"
have noted that these two wealthy, white, middle-aged
businessmen have equal contempt for young men.
McMahon insists that the XFL's detractors "don't know
the first thing about our demographic." He likes
to boast that he knows what young men want to see, and if the
World Wrestling Federation's ratings are the only barometer,
it's hard to argue with him. In an era when young men
are facing challenges from their female peers in areas that
their fathers and grandfathers weren't - in education, athletics,
and the blue and white-collar workplace, he has built the WWF
into a highly popular cartoonish male fantasy world where men
are men, might makes right, and women are unthreatening, highly
sexualized playthings. When the Smackdown starts,
it's as if that annoying women's movement never even really
happened.
The XFL marketing strategy assumes that young men will tune
in for the same reason many of them watch pro wrestling - for
the soap opera theatrics of macho bluster and exposed female
flesh, all under the guise of a "populist" version
of professional football.
It doesn't take a marketing genius to realize that a significant
number of adolescent males will tune in to see scantily clad
strippers in hot tubs. But as many commentators
have predicted, after people's initial curiosity fades, and
the football proves uninspiring, to keep viewers' interest the
XFL will have to resort to increasingly graphic displays of
on and off-field violence, and ever more obvious sexual titillation.
Why is this contemptuous of young men? For one thing,
the XFL policy of not providing players with health insurance
coverage clearly sends the message that they are expendable,
interchangeable parts who can easily be discarded. (While
it insures its players, the NFL is guilty of this as well.)
If the league doesn't respect its own adult male employees,
who thinks it respects its young male fans?
But the league's lack of respect for men can also be measured
by its portrayal of their sisters, girlfriends, mothers, and
daughters. For a generation, discussions about pornography
and the stripping subculture have focused, rightly, on the exploitation
and degradation of women. But men and boys are the primary
consumers of sexualized images of women. What they're
turned on by says more about them than it does about the women.
In the first few weeks of XFL telecasts, the announcers
shamelessly hyped the paired themes of violent masculinity on
the field and silly, submissive, sexually available femininity
on the sidelines. As a former adolescent male who played
football, I was saddened and angered by the assumption that
this was all it takes to attract young men and keep their attention.
Contrary to McMahon and Ebersol's cynical vision, millions
of young men today -- cutting across socioeconomic class, race,
and ethnicity - are groping around for ways to be better human
beings than the stereotypical roles the popular culture incessantly
offers up as examples of "real" manhood. An
ever-growing majority of their girlfriends and wives simply
expect this of them.
Unprecedented numbers of young men study, work, and socialize
alongside their female peers, taking for granted a degree of
gender equality unknown to previous generations. And in
spite of the bright spotlight focused on hypermasculine tough
guys in the WWF and XFL, or misogynist bullies like Howard Stern,
Dr. Dre and Eminem, a growing number of young men are finding
the courage to speak out in support of women, not against
them.
It might be wishful thinking, but wouldn't it be a sign of
progress if when the XFL goes out of business due to bad ratings,
opinion makers around the country attributed Vince McMahon's
flamboyant failure to the fact that young men were embarrassed
to be seen watching it not because of the inferior football,
but because of NBC's insulting caricature of 21st century manhood?
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