Thread: What are we to tell our kids about the Travis Kelce ScreamFace meltdown?
I keep thinking about the merger of the Swifties and the NFL, and I do not love it for them
I’m in the middle of writing a long thing on the NFL. It wasn’t meant to be a Long Thing, but now it is, in part because there’s a lot to say about the NFL as a “rich text” as the academics say. And by rich text I mean rich text of American toxic masculinity, pretty much!
I’ve had an uneasy feeling about The Most Powerful Woman in the World ending her year of total world dominance by falling into the arms of the NFL, aka Bastion of American Male Violence. Especially as I think of all my baby Swifties watching it unfold.
My nieces AND some of my nephews are coming off of a year watching a woman on stage, and they are eating it up and feeling joy and idolizing her. It has felt like a year of joy and triumph for a lot of young people who really needed some of that, and it especially feels like that for tween and teen girls.
And now, as of last Sunday, they are also watching this.
This is the guy that America is supposed to ship for? This is the face of every guy that I’ve been warned not to date, and have warned every woman that I know not to date since…forever?
I’m not saying that Taylor Swift shouldn’t date or fall in love with whoever she wants, or even that this is evidence that this guy is the worst (I am saying it’s a big red flag, though! It’s gotta be said!)
What I am saying is that young women and girls and boys around the world are watching—and now they are seeing this, and that Red-Scream-Face Guy is the one who gets the girl. It feels culturally significant, and not in a good way.
Are the Swifties in your life talking about it? What do they say? What do you say to them?
I find myself wanting to say something more nuanced than look, the world would generally be better off without the NFL, and run from any guy who plays football and/or loves football, because even if he has managed to avoid its messages of white male supremacy and glorification of violence (with a sideshow of female objectification), you will be bored I tell you, bored to tears every time a game comes on or you have to talk to him about it and pretend to care. (Lady fans, feel free to disagree).
But so far I haven’t come up with it!
My husband and I were talking about this and wondering if there is privilege part where a Black player wouldn’t have been allowed to yet like this? I don’t really know but I always appreciate digging critically into this ritual of “Americanness.” Men screaming at each other with millions of people and dollars invested in this violence is just quintessential USA.
The repeated trauma to the brain has been documented and continues to be researched. It does horrible things to the players, who often die young, have radical personality changes, anger issues, and more. Some former players are now leaving their brains to science after they die so that research can be done. No helmet design that exists, prevents this. I actually used to like watching football but I can't watch it at all anymore.
I'm not saying this is the cause of the rage display, btw. Just that it's a reason not to participate in football as a viewer or especially as a player. Pro football takes young people who may not have a whole lot of other hope of changing their circumstances and starts them destroying their brains as children. Only a small percentage even make it to the NFL or anything close to it, but they've already done damage by that point.
Chronic traumatic encephalopathy - https://www.nih.gov/news-events/nih-research-matters/how-football-raises-risk-chronic-traumatic-encephalopathy
"The team then looked at the relationships between these estimated impacts and CTE in 631 male brain donors who had previously played football. Results were published on June 20, 2023, in Nature Communications.
On average, the brain donors had played about 12 years of football and died at age 60. About 28%, or 180 of them, didn’t have evidence of CTE in their brains. Another 163 had low-stage CTE, and 288 had high-stage CTE. As seen in previous studies, the number of reported concussions wasn’t associated with CTE incidence or severity."