Ah, the heyday of football. Leather helmets, salaries that rivaled the best that gas stations and indentured servitude had to offer, and the unfettered freedom for players to bash their skulls into other players’ craniums in the hope of achieving glory. Were we ever that great? Alas, Jim Brown, we hardly knew ye.
Steve Chapman of the Chicago Tribune seems to think differently. Chapman wants Harvard and Yale to bail on intercollegiate football. After all, “Ivy League football is no longer a big deal on the intercollegiate sports scene.” (Was it ever? ‘There goes Barnaby Farnsworth! Touchdown! Harvard wins the Pudding Bowl!’) To continue to support football at these glorious ivory institutions would render the Ivies, in Chapman’s estimation, “oblivious to growing evidence that it does grave and irreversible harm to mental functioning.”
But it isn’t quite so. In 2016, Ivy League football coaches “decided to take the extraordinary step of eliminating all full-contact hitting from practices during the regular season,” and it’s pretty hard to get a concussion if someone isn’t allowed to tackle you. But putting that aside, there’s the larger question of character. What would it do to young men to stop football programs? My guess is that is doesn’t make them manlier. And, in the first place, Harvard isn’t exactly churning out Übermenschen; the “Future is Female” in Crimsonland, folks.
Let them bash each other, I say. Why? Because in a society where men are at the rear-end of every dangerous enterprise and in the stew of every mélange of social scummery, we need to keep the boys strong. And, because the marshal spirit isn’t something we ought to let go of so soon, rationalism and trendy contemporary politics notwithstanding.
Hey, Alex, but aren’t men treated like the cream of the crop? Aren’t the boys the special privileged class—the patriarchy we’re trying to cut down to size? Maybe… if you only count salary as opposed to wages, and if you only think about the boys in the white-collar set. But, as Roy Baumeister has pointed out, this is an error:
“The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men. Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? … 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Likewise, who gets killed in battle?”
Baumeister’s point is the same one that I make every time someone slangs the ol’ patriarchy calumny my way.
Men serve a certain purpose. It isn’t always a glorious one, but it’s an obligation that Sir Modern and his garlanded superior, Mother Fem, oughtn’t reject out of hand. We’re here to bear the brunt. What does that mean? It means, in varying degrees, greater danger—men will likely always be the larger share of military forces—and a position of guardianship that modern feminism seems dead-set against.
Baumeister offered, in a speech, a retro-facing thought experiment: “One can imagine an ancient battle in which the enemy was driven off and the city saved, and the returning soldiers are showered with gold coins. An early feminist might protest that hey, all those men are getting gold coins, half of those coins should go to women.”
But the protest demanding that the women get half the gold coins isn’t the awful part. (Married men know that half the Krugerrands go to Kroger’s anyhow.) The point is that warriors need training to be warriors. And if they become warriors, showering the boys with bullion isn’t the wrong thing to do.
Alex Grass is the religion and law correspondent for The Media Project.
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