Superfans

by George Dohrmann

  Davis and English (unknowingly) have touched on an issue that Dan Wann and other fan researchers have long pondered: What are the differences, if any, between male and female sports fans? Answering that question is difficult because, in part, there is a dearth of research on female fans. Studies on sports fandom that broach the differences between the genders often include caveats about a lack of data and thus the need to be cautious about drawing conclusions. If there is one absolute truth about female fans it is this: they are an understudied demographic. They were perceived as watching sports only because their men do, a wrongheaded judgment that is only now being rejected by some researchers.

  Two Australian sociologists, Peter Mewett and Kim Toffoletti, are the rare individuals who have tried to gain a deeper understanding of female fans. They teach gender studies and hadn’t planned on making women fans a focus, but in 2004 they were working together at Deakin University in Melbourne when there was a rash of allegations of sexual violence or misconduct by players in the Australian Football League (AFL). Toffoletti, like many Australians, grew up supporting Aussie rules football—it is their national pastime—and she was trying to reconcile her fandom with these horrible acts committed by players. “Here I am a feminist educator and I struggled with how I could go to games and enjoy being a fan despite being upset about these things,” she says. “Peter noted that there was a lack of research on that sort of thing and suggested we start talking to female fans.” Toffoletti hasn’t stopped, working with Mewett to publish several papers about female fans in Australia.

  One of their most important studies, from 2011, looked at how women became fans of the AFL. In that paper, Mewett and Toffoletti created four categories of female fans:

  • In-the-Bloods were people who became fans because their family members were fans and they attended games at a young age. Their fandom was like an inherited trait.

  • Learners were women introduced to the sport via television or by attending games and who gradually became fans.

  • Converts were women who had no interest in the AFL but attended a game and suddenly became interested, like a fan awakening.

  • STF, or Sexually Transmitted Fandom, applied to women who weren’t fans until a partner introduced them to the AFL.

  Mewett and Toffoletti found that most women, about half of all respondents, were In-the-Bloods and that about another quarter were Learners. Approximately 14 percent were Converts, and the remainder, the smallest group, had Sexually Transmitted Fandom.

  Those results don’t fit with the clichéd image of female fans that is often portrayed in pop culture, that of the girlfriend or wife who doesn’t care about sports until she meets a guy who is an extreme fan, and then she becomes a fan for the good of their relationship. Could it be that female fans of the AFL are unique, that how and why women in Australia become fans differs from women in, say, the United States?

  Probably not. Dan Wann and others completed a study in 1996 involving 96 college students that showed that how men and women become fans is similar. They were introduced to their favorite team by their parents or another family member or they became fans when they went to a college and saw the popularity of sports teams on campus. In other words, the results of Wann’s study also leaned heavily toward In-the-Bloods and Learners. A study Wann completed in 2013 mostly reinforced those earlier findings.

  If how women and men become fans is generally the same, does that mean their level of fandom is also the same? Do they generally score the same on Dan Wann’s SSIS? “What I seem to find is that males tend to score a bit higher but not always,” Wann says. “But for one’s local college [e.g., students at Murray State], I rarely get differences.” It makes sense. At a college, where following the football or basketball team is a big part of daily life, male and female fans will identify as sports fans equally. If Wann surveyed men and women who never attended college, would the results be different? “In general, I’d say males are, on average, a bit higher in their identification with sport teams than females, but it’s small.”

  So male and female fans are mostly the same?

  Not exactly.

  Wann has found some gender differences in fan motivation, meaning the reasons people gave for why they are fans. He created the Sport Fan Motivation Scale (SFMS), which offers eight different motives for fandom: Eustress, Self-esteem, Escape, Entertainment, Economic, Group Affiliation, Family, and Aesthetic. Women were less likely to be drawn to a team because of the excitement of the games (Eustress), and in fact, when games became too suspenseful they liked them less. This could be taken as evidence that Davis and English are correct in their belief that some subset of women are drawn to sports fandom purely for social reasons and are less interested in the stress that comes with caring about who wins. Men, in contrast, were drawn to the excitement that being a fan of their favorite team injected into their lives. But the differences were small enough that it is reasonable to want more research before embracing that as a differentiator.

  Another difference between the genders that emerged from Wann’s work centers on one of the most essential concepts in the study of fandom: the impact it has on self-esteem. If step one in understanding sports fans is coming to terms with the fact that fandom is a huge part of a person’s identity, step two is understanding that fandom and self-worth are intertwined. If you are a highly identified sports fan and your chosen team wins or signs a top free agent, your self-esteem improves. If your team loses or if the star quarterback gets arrested, that is a blow to your self-esteem.

  In Wann’s work, self-esteem factored into why men chose to follow a sport more often than women did. It makes sense then (though has not been proven) that men’s self-esteem would also be more impacted than women’s when their teams win or lose. Recall what Laura Lindemann, Pat’s wife, said: “If the Packers win everybody wins. If they lose, then, well…” What she is really saying is that when Pat’s self-esteem bottoms out after a Packers loss, that is no fun for anybody. When his self-esteem jumps after a Packers victory, however, everybody gets to bask in his reflected happiness. Laura would qualify as a Convert; she attended a Packers game and enjoyed it so much that she became a fan. She watches games. She wears Packers gear. She wants Green Bay to win. She would likely score pretty high on the SSIS. But her self-esteem isn’t tied to the Packers the way Pat’s is. It is not even close.

  There are, of course, plenty of women who are highly identified fans and whose self-esteem rises and falls with the fate of their favorite teams. Julie Partridge, the psychologist at Southern Illinois University, loves North Carolina so much she ponders punching holes in doors when the Tar Heels lose to the hated Duke Blue Devils. She is also a huge Kansas State fan and roots for the Kansas City Chiefs and Royals. When those teams lose she feels it, that blow to her pride. When they win, she feels that as well, the (figurative) puffing out of her chest.

  But no one can say whether there are more Laura Lindemanns or more Julie Partridges in the world, as researchers have yet to zero in on female fans enough to draw those kinds of distinctions.

  What then, if anything, can be said about the distinctiveness of female fans?

  Partridge and Toffoletti have unearthed one trait, though they came about it differently.

  Partridge inherited her fandom from her mother, Sherry. During baseball season, Sherry and Julie would sit together and listen to radio broadcasts of Royals games from their home in Coffeyville, Kansas. Sherry was a home economics teacher at the local high school and loved going to high school football games, continuing to go even years after she retired. She is particularly fond of college baseball and has traveled to the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska—636 miles round trip—every year since 1992. Julie became an equally passionate sports fan, an In-the-Blood, but because of her mother she never thought this made her different. “I had a subscription to Sports Illustrated when most of the girls I knew subscribed to Seventeen, but that was normal to me,” Partridge says.

  Then
she went off to college at Kansas State. Some of the men there treated her “like I had a sixth toe or something. I was the circus freak.” She recalls one day sitting with a male friend at a fraternity house watching SportsCenter and some freshman students walked in and said to Partridge’s friend, “Oh, so she is letting you watch SportsCenter.” Partridge was insulted, even more so when the younger men didn’t believe her when she said that it was her choice to watch sports highlights. They started quizzing Partridge, and their first question was: Who did the Royals beat to win the 1985 World Series? “I just said, ‘Are you kidding me?’ ” Partridge says. “We are in Kansas and you ask me that question? At least ask me who made the final out of the series.” She answered that and several tougher questions, and by the end the boys were clapping.

  Partridge’s friend started challenging people to test her sports knowledge at parties. “It got to a point where I was like, ‘Not this again,’ ” she says. “I was this oddity he would show off.”

  Partridge has always been comfortable sitting around with the guys, watching games. She has a wry sense of humor, which works well in that setting, and she often delivers the perfect quip that cuts someone down to size. But even today, she remains something of an oddity to her friends and those with whom she works.

  She regularly meets with male athletes as Southern Illinois’s faculty representative to the athletic department, and occasionally she will say something that conveys an understanding of sports that shocks them. They start quizzing her, wanting to know if she is really knowledgeable or if she just parroted something she heard from her husband.

  “This is based on the anecdotal. I haven’t done research on this. But it seems as a female you are always being asked to prove you are a real fan,” Partridge says. “If some guy says he is a Bears fan, everyone just accepts that he is one. No one says, ‘Prove it.’ But if you are a woman, you have to prove it.”

  In Toffoletti’s work, she encountered the same. “Again and again, and often unprompted, women felt they had to affirm the idea that they are real fans,” she says. They would explain that their interest in a team or sport was not purely for social reasons or to objectify male athletes or just because they liked to eat the food at the stadium or show off their new dress to the men in the crowd. In their experience, their fandom was perceived as illegitimate until proven otherwise.

  In one of her papers, Toffoletti writes about what feminist scholars call the falsifying lens, a reality that has been “constructed through men’s eyes.” Partridge (and others) have never fit the female fan reality that men created. They have long hoped that reality would come to resemble their reality, that men would toss the lens and see them for who they are. But, if anything, men seem to be so rooted to a perception of the female fan they created that they are working to preserve it.

  In 2009, the England’s Rugby Football Union partnered with a British publisher of romance novels to create “eight raunchy tales from the touchline.” It was billed as a move to get more women and their families involved in rugby, but, as the authors of a report for the International Centre for Sports Studies noted, “Judging from the uninhibited titles of some of these books, the RFU might be a little misguided in targeting families with this initiative.” There was The Ruthless Billionaire’s Virgin and The Prince’s Waitress Wife, neither of which “gives the reader the impression that female rugby fans are a knowledgeable bunch.” One excerpt: “ ‘Oh no, the poor guy’s tripped. Right on the line! Why is everyone cheering? That’s SO mean.’ ‘He didn’t trip, he scored a try,’ Casper growled, simmering with masculine frustration at her inappropriate comment.”

  In the United States, in 2015, the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers created a women’s outreach program, RED, touted as an opportunity for women to learn “how to blend personal Buccaneer pride with the latest NFL fashions; as well as tips on sharing their experiences and ideas via social media platforms such as Pinterest….RED members will also have access to exclusive networking events throughout the year designed to encourage interaction while providing practical advice on how to express their love for the Bucs into original design projects, fashion-forward team apparel and creative culinary creations.” A Washington Post editorial on RED noted, “Nothing says ‘empowerment’ like ‘Women, get into that kitchen and cook me up some Bucs brownies.’ ”

  Colleges have invested big in seminars to teach women football and, in some cases, shown serious blinders. In 2016, at a University of Kentucky football clinic for women, an assistant made a joke that each Wildcats practice has thirteen periods “and women only have one.” The room of more than two hundred women responded with stunned silence and then a chorus of boos. But that response was mild compared to what happened at a similar event for women at Texas A&M that same year. The school invited a large group of women to a “chalk talk,” so they could learn the finer points of football from some Aggies assistant coaches. Two of those coaches showed the women a series of PowerPoint slides that were so offensive it is hard to fathom. One was a rewrite of the “Aggie War Hymn” for the women, which included lines like “Put down our dish towels” and “No more Lysol or Cascade” and “No more thong.” Still, that was nothing compared with what came next: several slides that purported to explain different aspects of the game with language such as Spread your legs. Enter front/Not behind. Push hard. Finish. On top. Don’t let him inside. Keep your hips down. Don’t go down. On the slides dealing with pass blocking, the coaches counseled the women that it was necessary to Spread them again. Get erect. Stay erect. Bang him hard.

  Texas A&M suspended the two coaches responsible for two weeks and required them to do twenty hours of community service, a laughably light penalty, especially considering that one of the coaches suspended, offensive line coach Jim Turner, had previously been fired by the NFL’s Miami Dolphins for his role in the Jonathan Martin–Richie Incognito scandal, when Incognito was found to have bullied Martin. It came to light that Turner had given the Dolphins offensive linemen Christmas gift bags that included inflatable female dolls. That this was the person Texas A&M picked to craft a presentation to a group of women tells you that the falsifying lens remains.

  But men aren’t alone in proffering a perception of female fans that leads to sport-themed romance novels and “fanicures” and pink team apparel. Think back to Davis and English and Jersey Girls Sports. The “Hottie of the Week” and “First and Flirty” and the advice on the best boots to wear to games are for a certain kind of female fan, and those women could not be more different from, say, Julie Partridge. She wanted to be critical of the approach Davis and English have taken—her gut says they are perpetuating gender stereotypes—but then she thought about it a bit more. To judge them for their choices would be to do what men have done for decades, she concluded, and it would also be repeating the mistake fan researchers made before Dan Wann came along: viewing all fans as the same. Partridge concluded that she doesn’t have a problem with what David and English are doing. Toffoletti echoes that, both the initial unease and the acceptance. “We live in a world now where young women are empowered to express their femininity, so it is hard to criticize them for doing that,” she says. “We all have to navigate between our fan identity and our feminist identity, and we make strategic choices and we should be respectful of those choices.” Later, she adds: “We can’t just universalize women’s fan experiences. We must see them through an individualized lens.”

  That is a lesson Dan Wann recently learned, and in a manner that delights Julie Partridge. (“I am going to give him so much shit about it the next time I see him,” she says.) For the past few years, Wann has been dating a woman, Michelle, whom he met at a Murray State basketball game. She had season tickets behind his and was just as passionate about Racers basketball as he was. They began taking walks around the Murray State campus, getting to know each other, and on the second of those walks Michelle revealed that she was a fan of Ohio State football. “I am on record as hating Ohio State,�
�� Wann says. “I don’t hate them enough to stop dating her, but I really hate Ohio State.” He got past her love for the Buckeyes, however, because in his eyes Michelle’s first love was Murray State basketball, just like him. Their primary obsession was the same.

  Flash-forward to 2016, and Michelle and Wann are still dating, are in love, and Wann begins working with a female colleague on a study that, among other questions, asked respondents to name their significant other’s favorite sports team. Wann’s colleague asked him if he knew Michelle’s favorite team. “Murray State basketball, just like me,” Wann responded. But then he paused. He’d never really asked Michelle that question. He quickly texted her, and she responded immediately: “Ohio State Football.”

  “Here we are, we have been dating for a while, we are talking about getting married, and I didn’t know,” Wann says. The guy who maybe knows more about sports fans than anyone in the world laughs at the irony. “I just never asked her!”

  Inspiration struck Conor Mongan in November 2002, while he was sitting on the purple velour sofa in his apartment in the Mission Valley neighborhood of San Diego. He was watching a television news report about a court appearance by Michael Jackson when a close-up image of the pop star appeared on the screen. Mongan shuddered at Jackson’s unsightliness, at his unnaturally pointy and scabby nose, his too-white skin and bug-eyed expression. Then he thought:

  That’s it! It’s perfect!

  It is a reaction that requires some context. At the time, the twenty-five-year-old Mongan was one of the ringleaders of the student section at San Diego State men’s basketball games, a group later self-dubbed the Show. Though he stopped attending classes at San Diego State in 1999, Mongan remained one of the Show’s ringleaders, using his background in graphic design to, among other tasks, create the shirts that fans wore during games. That November, Mongan had been pondering ways the group could better distract opposing free-throw shooters. When Jackson’s face popped up on Mongan’s television, it triggered an aha moment: If I had been so stricken by Jackson’s mug, Mongan thought, imagine how a free-throw shooter would react.