This has been a very interesting discussion which I have to say I personally have found really challenging. People often tell me that I’m more like a man than a woman, in character, which maybe “helps” in this scenario. I have been especially thinking about Jennifer’s question above: why is it so hard to accept that gender is the issue? I haven’t really got any answers for that other than a wholly unsatisfactory visceral reaction of my own which I can only imagine rings even more true for people who are actually male. I have been brooding on this all week now! Perhaps I shall try to write a follow-up post.

The fact that I write for a soccer blog is not something I discuss when I’m out and about. I’m married. I’m a mom. I’m an American. People just don’t get it. Only a tiny portion of the people who know me know what I do, and even fewer know the name of the site.

A somewhat related story: A few weeks back I was in Heathrow with my husband, sitting in a little pub-type-place to kill a couple of hours. Portsmouth was playing West Brom on the TV, so we moved our seats to sit where I could see. A forty-something guy sits down at the table behind us to have a pint. He and my husband start chatting. He goes off on how Americans don’t know football. My husband asks him who’s playing. He says, “Oh, it’s Portsmouth and…” He hesitates.

“West Brom,” I say, quietly.

“What?”

“West Brom. It’s the FA Cup semis.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think… I believe it’s just…” He loooks at the field, where the words “FA Cup” are everywhere. “Well, perhaps you’re right.” Grudgingly.

My husband starts to say, “Yes, she writes for a soccer site,” but I cut him off. There is no point to bringing this up. I have already violated some sort of unspoken rule, and continuing the conversation won’t accomplish anything. I’m not upset by this. It’s just the way things are. The two of them continue chatting, the game ends, the man leaves.

When I go to games, I drag along family members as shields, because women alone at sporting events are…odd. Nobody understands that we can just…love the game.

And so I think we miss out on a lot of the social aspect of the game that guys experience. And not necessarily by choice.

Looks like I’ll have to change my social group! My wife is definitely not a football fan, but we do have some interesting conversations about the wider issues surrounding the game, such as its history and culture. She even came with me to watch the Barcelona derby a couple of years ago. Perhaps some men have made the mistake of centering their football conversations solely around what happens on the pitch.

I strongly agree with Sam’s comments about the football culture in the UK (and Ireland). The majority of fans in this part of the world are passionate about their teams, but generally have little appetite for discussing the game in its wider context. For example, one friend of mine can recite all the latest team news and developments at Man Utd, but as soon as I bring up a relevent point from the club’s history, then his eyes glaze over and the conversation soon reverts back to the latest injury scares.

If you mention to folks that your hobby is football history, and that one day you’d like to make a living from it, then after a few minutes chat, that avenue of conversation often peters out. I have noticed a gradual change, but only very slowly.

The television broadcasters must share some of the blame for reinforcing the stereotypical view that females don’t get football in its own right. Why else, for example, did viewers have to put up with David Ginola’s punditry during the 1998 WC in France? The ‘female factor’ of course! Women would never dream of watching the WC solely for footballing reasons would they?

You can info about here.

http://www.footballshirtculture.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=1296&Itemid=145

The reality is, like jazz, he would probably would have dismissed the whole enterprise as kitsch.

While I do maintain the belief that much of what goes on in the halls of university arts departments in North America and Europe amounts to sophistry, a view not entirely foreign to some prominent writers on the left (Terry Eagleton comes to mind), I don’t mean to tar everyone with the same brush: I really enjoyed reading through your blog Jennifer, and I find your passion for football has a universal appeal…

The incident I described was limited: it was the eurostar, and all the people involved in this little scenario were solid middle class university educated types - so I’m not talking about walking up to strangers on the tube, or inserting myself into a conversation at the Holloway Pub in the middle of an Arsenal match. I’m refering to guys engaged in small talk about something they consider their territory. It could be guys in a pub talking sports, it could be, as I said above, guys in grad school talking about Marxist theory, or film buffs talking about Quentin Tarentino. It’s a form of male bonding - and it transcends class.

I was trying to describe the very subtle unwritten, unspoken codes about what men in general consider appropriate ways of thinking and talking about men. Looking at Yrsa’s watercolors, I found myself thinking that they seemed in a way to represent a different point of view on the men who play this sport than the one offered by sports journalism, and also by sports photography. That’s why I like them. I don’t know why she paints those images the way she does - but it’s hard to imagine that gender (esp. the gender of the people in the paintings, and the people looking at them) would be irrelevant to such a discussion.

I’m sorry, but guys here read about football - mostly histories of teams - and they sure read the newspapers, and they buy those books. Not comparative economic analyses, but they read things like David Peace’s excellent ‘The Damned UTD’, a best seller I saw on the tube I don’t know how many times in the hands of I don’t know how many different sorts of people. And maybe ‘lads’ don’t talk about whatever books they might read, and acknowledging that you’ve read ‘a book’ can be a real wet blanket in certain conversational settings - but it’s not quite right to say that in England, guys don’t read about football. There is, though, as Sam says very tight social regulation on how you talk about it, and how you present yourself publicly - definitely not as an intellectual, and not as a leftist: there’s that whole graeme le saux thing, for instance - showing that what happens when you do present yourself like this, is that people ‘accuse’ you of being gay.

Back though, to the idea that when I got here I might have been rosy in my ideas about English football. I have had few illusions about that - I didn’t follow the Premiership much at all until I came over here in fact.

I was shocked, though, by the intensity of sexism in the UK when it comes to sports. Let me make that case more plainly: Walk into the Nike and Adidas flagship stores around Oxford Circus, and ask them where you can find football boots for your sister, your daughter, your girlfriend.

Answer: Nowhere. In fact, there are no products in either store - or in Footlocker or in Lillywhites - for women who play football. (Plenty for gender appropriate sports like yoga and tennis.)

Ask them why, and you may get as a reply (as I have), ‘Who would we sell them to?’, or ‘Why do women need women’s football boots?’ To which I ask ‘Why do men need to wear football boots designed for their feet?’ (Answer: because in 90 minutes, you can run anywhere from 2 to 6 miles, and your feet - your sense of touch and lightness of foot - are everything!)

Nearly 150,000 women played last year in FA league games - more women than that play. Women’s football is by far the fasted growing sport (for any gender) in the UK (and probably Europe). From the FA’s website: ‘The Active People survey in 2006 highlighted that 250,000 women and 1.1 million girls play some form of football [in the UK] and there are 26 million females playing across the world, of which 4.1m are playing affiliated football.’

Nike, Adidas, Lotto, Umbro, Kelme, Nomi, and Puma all manufacture football boots for women but as far as I can tell in the whole of London not one store carries a single pair by any of these companies - including the company stores! (A salesman at Lillywhites phoned up a friend of his who played on the English NWT and asked her where she gets hers - answer - ‘the internet, because nobody in London sells them.’) Why is this? Because there is a willfull blindness in the UK to women’s interest in the game.

And on this next point, I don’t write about football to compensate for some sort of professorial shame for my love for something fun and popular, or because I need to convince others it’s a ’serious’ subject (as RW suggested) in order to be taken seriously. I write about football *because* it’s fun and popular, and I love it. I write about all of my subjects with the same enthusiasm - be it Melville, Thomas Eakins (a painter), Tracey Emin’s drawings, Andy Warhol’s films, or my favorite soap opera General Hospital (see http://ohindustry.blogspot.com/2007/12/special-guest-stars-jasbir-puar.html for me in dialgoue with a Rutgers professor on this last topic).

It’s important to me that people understand that not all scholars devote their lives to sucking the joy out of their subject: A great number of us are closer to evangelical preachers - we are moved by the spirit, and can’t help sharing our passion with anyone who’ll listen. I indeed can’t imagine why anybody would become a scholar or teacher with any other attitude.

Thank you Spangly Princess for getting this crazy discussion going with your most excellent cross, and Ursus - I am still reeling from your comments re: Kristeva! In general, like Spangly Princess, I’ve found this conversation really engaging and challenging.