12/01/2023
By Kate Stone Lombardi
When I got married, I had to convert to my husband’s football team. I learned all about the game. I wore the NFL swag. I even went to the Super Bowl, back when the face price of the tickets were $40, and it was a -relatively – low-key event. When our children were born, they were gifted with little NFL onesies.
My feelings about the game began to change for a couple of reasons.
The sexism – those iddy, biddy cheerleader uniforms, the whole macho culture surrounding the game.
The brutality – the more we learn about CTE, the brain damage caused by collisions to the head, the more I feel I’m watching a snuff film. (Here’s an appalling NYT piece on CTE and youth football.)
The Military Jingoism – the partnership with the military and the NFL bothers me, with the flyovers and the America, Right or Wrong ethos.
Expressing these concerns always made me feel like an elite whiner. But then I read this Substack post by Roxanne Gay, reprinted below. She focuses on how the NFL tacitly closes its eyes to sexual assault by the players. I’m not sure that I need any more reasons to stop following the game.