WATCHING LIKE A GIRL
A few years ago, I was at a Blue Jays home game at the Rogers Centre when a kindly usher took it upon himself, unsolicited, to explain to me how many strikes make up an out, and how many balls are a walk. While I’m sure he had the best intentions at heart, the trouble with his instruction was that he assumed I needed it—I’ve been going to games for more than thirty years.
Men tend to make these assumptions, but like most female baseball fans I know, I actually have a specialized knowledge of the game that my male counterparts may not. For example, I know which sections of the ballpark are the safest for me to sit in, where I am least likely to be harassed or to overhear sexist, homophobic, or racist remarks from the male voices around me (at the Rogers Centre, 515, 204, and 113 are all good sections). I know that weekday evening games tend to be the most comfortable for women, that Sunday afternoons are generally calmer than Saturdays, and that Friday evenings are usually rowdy boozefests that should be avoided all together. I know that the centre-field porch on the 200 level—although equipped with a beautiful view—is generally out of the question if you’re interested in avoiding spectators who are far too intoxicated to care about their fellow fans.
Most women I know simply want to have the same stadium experience that men enjoy, but they have to navigate baseball differently by necessity, as media messaging and an occasionally toxic ballpark environment consistently tell us this is a male space that we’re being “allowed” to enter. In fact, I would say that I am a devoted fan of the game despite—and not because of—the culture that surrounds it.
According to a 2014 Nielsen study, women make up 35 per cent of sports fandom across North American professional sports leagues, and yet men hold an overwhelming majority of the power when it comes to creating mainstream sports culture—whether as a fan, or by being a sportswriter, on-air personality, or member of an MLB front office. Male athletes also dominate sports media coverage, leaving many female leagues with very little coverage at all. As a result, female sports fans are often left out of the conversation, and we find ourselves being told what we want and will enjoy, instead of being able to articulate it ourselves.
Though Major League Baseball wants to profit off its growing female fanbase, it would seem the powers that be still haven’t found a way to include women in a way that isn’t patronizing, idiotic, or downright offensive. Nowhere is the sad result of this rampant exclusion more apparent than in the ill-conceived initiatives that are designed to “cater” directly to us. While I’m sure they are dreamt up with the intention of being more inclusive, female-targeted events (“Girls’ Night Out!”) and merchandise (“Pink It and Shrink It!”) have a tendency to rely on reductive preconceptions of what it means to be a woman and love this game. Walk into almost any ballpark’s official store and you’ll see a women’s section littered with sequins, sparkles, and shades of pastel. The Texas Rangers offer a “Fields of Fashion” night to their female patrons, something that includes a Q&A with players’ wives, a fashion show, wine tasting, and a Mother’s Day celebration. (The connection between motherhood and female fandom is fierce and pervasive, best encapsulated by players donning MLB-enforced, pink-accented uniforms during the annual North American celebration of moms.)
In other misguided attempts to meet the needs of stereotypical femininity, female Atlanta Braves fans got a complimentary feather boa during their night out at Turner Field, while the Philadelphia Phillies marketed a Phillies Wives recipe book with healthy-cooking options, and a “Baseball 101 for Women” that assumes that only women, and never men, are confused by the nuances of the game. Sometimes it really feels like Major League Baseball believes its female fans consist solely of baseball knowledge–impaired, wine-drinking moms dressed in pink.
A piece that I find myself referring back to when thinking about these issues is a July 2013 column in the Globe and Mail, titled “A new generation of baseball fans in Toronto are young, hip and cool.” In it, the author offers a breakdown of the results of an in-stadium survey of 2012 Blue Jays game attendees conducted by Ipsos-Reid, and in doing so reinforces the condescending and hostile attitude that is the reason why I have to so carefully select my seats in the stadium. He attempts to explain an “astounding” 30 to 50 per cent jump in the attendance of women aged 18 to 34 at the Rogers Centre between 2010 and 2012 by lazily hypothesizing that these women aren’t really baseball fans at all.
Through some rather biased quotation choices (“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”; “we can ‘watch’ the game—in quotations”), the column paints a singular portrait of a woman out for a night of drinking beer and gawking at boys. “Along with a number of other women interviewed for this story, she indicated the club’s eye-appealing roster has enhanced her interest,” it says of one subject. By cherry-picking comments and manufacturing conclusions, the writer does his part to contribute to a long-standing image problem that many female fans rail against.
While that article is from a few years ago, for me it’s long epitomized how, to the media at large, baseball fans of the female persuasion tend to be seen as vapid, bored, and distracted. They’re either dragged along by boyfriends or only there to party and pick up, whether for a ladies’ night or a bachelorette party, all the while wearing their Hello Kitty accessories and Victoria’s Secret Jays tees and drooling over Josh Donaldson. Women certainly can’t be at the ballpark for any “real love” of the game, yet they do come in handy as the occasional pretty face for Sportsnet to zoom in on during a break in the action.
I in no way deny that these kinds of fans exist, nor do I think that they’re a problem. The issue here lies in how both the media and Major League Baseball consistently portray a very limited and skewed depiction of women’s relationship to sports, fostering all those pesky, mainstream assumptions that there’s only one kind of female fan. This does real damage to the important project of attracting a new and diverse fanbase, a mission that not only makes good economic sense for MLB, but improves the overall experience for everyone.
The solution, it would seem, would be for Major League Baseball to find a happy medium between completely ignoring that women exist and speaking to them in patronizing and demeaning ways that make clear the league assumes they’re all the same. (“The same” being a cardboard cut-out version of “femaleness” more suitable for prime-time sitcoms than the ballpark.)
If Major League Baseball is in any way invested in cultivating and profiting from its growing female audience, it would be wise to rethink how it markets the game to women, and to consider the role it plays in how its female fanbase is treated by mainstream sports media. I mean, why would you ever want to support, with your dollars or your love, a franchise that doesn’t respect your knowledge, interest, or passion for it? That assumes you are stupid, but hopes you are pretty?
The idea that women don’t really watch or understand the intricacies of sport sadly permeates a great deal of sports coverage. Writing for The Score, Ellen Etchingham astutely summed up our severely myopic view of female sports fandom in her takedown of While the Men Watch, CBC’s abhorrent 2012 Stanley Cup Final hockey feed for women. Etchingham takes issue with the CBC’s depiction of women as needing to have a separate, less in-depth conversation about the sport than men, and describes the stereotype of female viewers 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.”
Etchingham 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 her, hockey has been 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.”
When I expressed on social media my disdain for that Globe and Mail article’s flawed take, I brattily retitled the piece: “Why women go to baseball games, by a male sports journalist.” Several female fans got in touch to share my sentiment: women who attend games with scorecards in hand, who have encyclopedic knowledge of players, stats, and history, who have romantic ideals about the game’s meaning and the narrative it provides them. These are women who attend (and spend) with the knowledge that the system excludes and disrespects them, yet they try to carve out a space for themselves anyway. When it is so difficult for them to participate, when they have to work so much harder to be included, why would anyone ever doubt how much they love it?
What bothers me about that piece, and those like it, is how it reinforces the antagonistic attitude many male fans have about women being in “their” ballpark—as if a bunch of girls chatting about wedding plans instead of paying attention to the action is more off-putting than “real fans” yelling homophobic slurs and harassing the people around them. It points to an ingrained belief that women don’t belong, which is exacerbated by an appalling gender imbalance in terms of who is “allowed” to talk publicly about “Dad’s game.”
Unlike other journalistic fields, sports reporting, in all its forms, has mysteriously remained immune to open discussions about gender parity. So many mastheads and sports desks remain dominated by male voices and faces, with nary a criticism when compared to other increasingly diverse media categories. It’s as if we’ve collectively accepted that sports is a man’s domain, and so men alone should speak on it. With the success of writers like Etchingham at The Score, Sarah Spain at espnW, Kristina Rutherford at Sportsnet, and Katie Baker at The Ringer, and editors like Caitlin Kelly at Vice Sports, things are definitely changing—but it’s hard to deny that women have traditionally been offered very few roles in North American professional sports culture, most of which amount to “look pretty and say little.”
There are, however, reasons to be optimistic about the future, beyond subtle shifts in sports media mastheads. In September 2016, the L.A. Dodgers hosted a “Take Your Daughter to a Game” day at Dodger Stadium. While this empowering initiative is a big leap forward for Major League Baseball, it’s worth noting that the impetus for the event was a partnership with Fox television’s Pitch, a prime-time drama about a female pitcher who makes it to the big leagues. What was indeed buoying about the marketing for the event was that, beyond catering to daughters, it didn’t feature any noticeable gender signifiers (participants received a personalized trading card and were invited to see a screening of the show prior to its premiere date). It was a step forward, even if it was one prompted by the promotion of a feminist-minded television show and not necessarily by MLB’s own vested interest.
The people behind Pitch may have understood they were targeting a large and under-served female audience, but the mainstream media still struggled with the concept. The same month Dodgers fans were bringing their daughters to a game at Pitch’s invitation, the New York Times ran a review of the show, tweeting, “How will Pitch cater to the hard-core baseball fan expecting authenticity while still appealing to women?” The inherent presupposition that women can’t be hardcore baseball fans sparked a trending hashtag on Twitter, #ThisIsWhatABaseballFanLooksLike, where female fans posted pictures of themselves dressed in their beloved team’s gear, hanging out with their female friends and daughters at the ballpark. It was hard, grassroots evidence that baseball isn’t simply a place for men—women too have a desire to be there.
More importantly, we deserve to be.
I certainly don’t deny that some people go to games simply to have a drink or two and people-watch, and I don’t deny that some of those people are women (nor do I think there’s anything wrong with that). What is important here is to recognize and call out the emphasis we put on supposed female ignorance, disinterest, and frivolity when we talk about female baseball fandom, and the way we exclude women from the larger dialogue as a consequence. Every fan’s personal experience of the game is different, regardless of gender, and the stereotypes we reinforce only limit and harm the overall community. It surely couldn’t have been hard for a reporter to find a quotable female fan who could talk complex stats, or who had more than a passing interest in the game, instead of focusing solely on attendees who confirmed the expectations of the status quo.
Men go to the ballpark with an assumed knowledge and interest, whereas women need to constantly demonstrate how much they know and care. A radically different take on that Ipsos-Reid survey is that maybe, despite the hostility female fans encounter every time we go to the ballpark or read the sports pages, we’re making a bold attempt to secure a spot for ourselves in a culture that has omitted us. Despite what sports culture may believe, many women deeply love what has long been considered a man’s game, and the time is overdue for the gatekeepers of fandom to accept, support, and welcome this growing audience, and for sports media to report on them in a non-biased way.
In Etchingham’s brilliant words, “Don’t tell me you respect serious female fans. If you did, you’d have found some.”