Stacey May Fowles pushes back against a Tom Maloney article making light of a surge in female fandom at Blue Jays games. From Maloney’s piece:
The percentage of women within the Gen-Y group at Rogers Centre jumped to an astounding 50 per cent from 30 per cent over a two-year span. … “It’s fun, like a concert,” says [game attendee Emily] King, 29, who works in advertising and lives within an easy stroll of the stadium. “I’m not sure we’re actually watching the game, to be clear. … It’s the best patio in the city, the best people-watching in the city.”
“It’s outside, it’s social,” says [Olivia] Polak, 30, in ophthalmology and living 30 minutes away. “We’re here with like eight other girls for a bachelorette party instead of just sitting in a bar. It’s not expensive and we can ‘watch’ the game – in quotations.”
Fowles counters:
I certainly don’t deny that these kinds of fans exist—but I cannot agree that they’re a problem. … The actual problem lies in consistently putting this very limited depiction of women’s relationship to sports into the world. It does real exclusionary damage in terms of attracting new fans, a project that both makes good economic sense and goes far in improving the overall experience for everyone.
This idea that women don’t really watch permeates sports.
Last year, The Score Blog’s Ellen Etchingham brilliantly summed up our severely limited viewpoint of female sports fandom in her reaction to While the Men Watch, CBC’s abhorrent hockey feed for women. In it, she describes the dominant stereotype as follows: “Women don’t understand sports. Women don’t care about sports. If women watch sports, they only do so because a man pushes it on them. Women are interested in fashion, cleaning, shopping, and men.”
She further articulates how offensive it is for female fans to have this heteronormative femininity constantly pushed on us by the media, as many use sports to actually escape that very thing. For Etchingham, hockey has acted as a haven, a break from strict societal norms. “For many of the so-called serious female fans, watching the game is one of the best social avenues for meeting people and hanging out in a relatively ungendered way,” she explains. “Being into sports allows us to be guys, not in the sense of men, but in the sense of participants in a laid-back, friendly, easygoing social milieu that doesn’t feel defined by gender lines. Many female fans explicitly resist the category ‘female fans,’ because for us part of what is great about being a fan is the sense that female or male doesn’t matter so much.”
The Dish 