Football is back, which means millions of people are now being forced to sit through television ads. Did you know they still make those? For all the advances in streaming technology, live TV is still impossible to fast-forward, so watching a game also means returning to the funhouse-mirror world of the commercial break.
In current-year America, the profit motive has mingled in a kind of unholy throuple with post-George Floyd racial politics and whatever wave of feminism we’re now surfing. So for one or two minutes at a stretch, helpless viewers are flung out of the game and into a fictional universe. Call it adworld: the alternate dimension in which social dynamics are what corporate executives think we should want them to be.
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Since the delirium of 2020 has subsided, game-day political stunts are no longer quite so extravagant or relentless. NFL viewers don’t have to endure the regular spectacle of millionaires kneeling through the national anthem to protest their unfair treatment. But the agitprop hasn’t gone away. It’s simply been absorbed into the background as a set of largely unspoken assumptions, which neither advertisers nor financiers dare transgress.
In adworld, this means white men must always be buffoons and criminals. If a joke needs a safe target, they are it. Even before the Year of Our Floyd, women were pretty invariably portrayed in commercials as the superior sex. But for today’s NFL, this is not quite enough. Despite vigorous messaging, there is still what one observer amusingly calls a “lack of female representation on NFL rosters.”
The embarrassing fact remains that professional football is a man’s game, played by huge dudes who careen into one another at brain-rattling speeds. Perhaps in the future, some brave transgender linebacker will rectify this crying injustice. For now, though, it falls to the imagineers of adworld to dream of a universe in which women love football just as much, and in the same ways, as men.
Previously, advertisers were guilty of trying to reach male audiences by showing them things they enjoy, such as women in bikinis. This was based on the reactionary assumption that men in general are allowed to have preferences. Now we know better: Women, too, love dressing like slobs, sitting with other women on the couch, and grunting at the TV. In any commercial in which men are grilling, fist-pumping, or roaring in triumph, the girls are right in there with the guys — they are even, according to State Farm Insurance, in the locker room.
The NFL’s managers are also eager to increase their brand appeal among women. But to do so in the present environment, they must cater to female sensibilities without admitting that those sensibilities are in any way different from the male variety. This creates the absurd situation in which everyone pretends both that women are already watching football with male levels of enthusiasm, and that football needs to change its image to entice women better.
In 2020, NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell claimed the league had 187.3 million fans, 47% of them women. “Our gender balance has reached its highest ever,” Chief Marketing Officer Tim Ellis announced. But since even the record-breaking 2023 Superbowl only pulled in about 120 million average viewers, Goodell must be counting basically anyone who watched any game during the season. One game does not a “fan” make, and there’s evidence to suggest that women’s engagement with sports is generally more casual than men’s. The zillennial who turns on the Chiefs game to watch Taylor Swift watching Travis Kelce is a far cry from the imaginary jersey-clad Amazon who chugs beer with her girls in adworld.
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Which is fine. Watch football or don’t watch football, however you like. There are of course women who can rattle off stats fluently. But do even those women want to see themselves portrayed in the bizarrely unflattering light of adworld, dressed up as miniature men in service of some hair-brained theory of gender equity? The female superfans I know all love football in part because of its manliness, which is a natural feature of sports that no amount of slick repackaging can conceal.
Don Draper, the conniving ad representative of Mad Men, observed that “people want to be told what to do so badly that they’ll listen to anyone.” Something’s being sold here, but it’s not football games or life insurance: It’s a fantasy cooked up in a lab by people who hate men and women both for being how they are. They would prefer that we be how they tell us to be, so they can exploit us for power and profit. No one could be less fit to tell us what to do.
Spencer Klavan is an associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books, host of the Young Heretics podcast, and author of How to Save the West.