Happy Fourth of July divas!! 🇺🇸 I’m Canadian, but I love this country enough to have chosen a career that mostly consists of thinking and writing about it. To celebrate, I’m offering a Fourth of July discount on my newsletter. If you’ve been meaning to subscribe, I’d love your support. Independent writing isn’t always the easiest job, and every subscription helps me keep doing it.
Every four years, the world transforms into a sports bar.
Every normal bar is taken over. Every office TV finds a higher purpose. Every man with a calendar invite suddenly discovers the importance of flexible work culture. Meetings get rescheduled because there’s a match on. TVs are suddenly on at work. Where were these TVs? Who was hiding them? Productivity becomes optional because apparently this is a cultural event, and I tolerate it because who am I to stand in the way of culture!!? And honestly, fine. I get it. Billions of viewers, national pride, grown men weeping into flags. It’s really lovely stuff.
But here's my question. If I suggested we all gather around that same conference room TV to watch Love Island, I'd be escorted out by HR. If I walked into a bar and asked them to put on the recoupling ceremony, people would look at me like I'd lost my mind.
Whenever you question the absolute ubiquity of men’s favorite pastimes being completely and unreasonably tolerated by society, someone always says, “Well, one’s a sport.” And before anyone gets too smug about that, that’s exactly the point.
“Sport” is not some neutral category handed down from the heavens with objective cultural value attached. It’s a label we collectively decided makes certain entertainment serious. And we decide which entertainment counts as culturally important based largely on who enjoys it. And it’s really funny how that works. Funny how the stuff men love gets stadiums, billion dollar broadcast deals, and office viewing parties, and the stuff women love gets eye-rolls. Men’s interests become events. Women’s interests become guilty pleasures.
Think about the language for a second. Nobody calls fantasy football a guilty pleasure, even though it's literally grown adults doing unpaid homework on the hamstrings of men they've never met.A man can spend an entire sunday watching other men chase a ball around some grass, and make how they played his whole personality the next day at work and people will listen and it’s appropaite. Being a fan is respectable.
Meanwhile, if you watch Love Island, you’re legally required to open with a disclaimer. “It’s trash, I know.” “It’s my turn-my-brain-off show.” “Don’t judge me.” We have trained an entire gender to apologize for their own hobbies as a condition of admitting to them. Women pre-shame themselves before anyone else gets the chance, because we learned early that the things we love are silly by default and the things men love are important by default.
Here’s a simple experiment. Nobody questions a guy having a second screen in the middle of a workday to watch a match. It’s normal. It’s charming, even. He’s passionate. He cares. What a guy!
Now imagine blocking your calendar for Casa Amor. Imagine a manager rolling a TV into the kitchen and announcing, “Big night tonight, folks. There’s a new bombshell in the villa.” You would not survive it. The looks. The little smirks. The “oh, you watch that?” delivered by a man wearing a replica jersey of a team he has never geographically been near.
It’s the same two hours. It’s the same emotional investment. It’s the same deeply parasocial thing. The same pleasure of caring, with complete sincerity, about the fate of strangers whose lives have no bearing on your own. Litteraly someone please explain to me the difference!!
Somehow we’ve built an entire cultural hierarchy around which forms of escapism are respectable and which require a disclaimer. We’re remarkably good at distinguishing between something we call “culture” and something we call “brain rot” when the only meaningful difference is who we’ve decided is allowed to take their entertainment seriously. We've built an entire cultural hierarchy where men's entertainment becomes culture and women's entertainment becomes evidence of societal decline.
The joke isn't that Love Island deserves the same prestige as the World Cup. The joke is how easily we accept one kind of obsession as legitimate and dismiss the other as embarrassing, despite both involving millions of people becoming deeply invested in strangers performing extraordinarily difficult skills under immense pressure. We've just decided that being exceptional with a ball is more culturally valuable than being exceptional at navigating other human beings.
Because let’s actually line them up. A group of extremely fit twenty-somethings, selected through a brutal audition process, live together in close quarters under constant surveillance. There’s alliances. there’s fighting, injuries, there is crying, also lots of shouting. Someone makes one catastrophic decision in a moment of passion that the public will discuss for years. Careers are made and destroyed dpending on what happens on national television.
I have just described both shows.
One group is fighting for a trophy. The other is fighting over love. Why the fuck is the second one treated with less respect and importance!?
The only meaningful difference is that one competition rewards the ability to put a ball exactly where you want it to go, and the other rewards the ability to navigate one of the messiest, most psychologically demanding things human beings ever attempt: relationships. Somehow we’ve decided the first is evidence of discipline and mastery, while the second is frivolous entertainment.
As if emotional intelligence, charisma, social strategy, persuasion, resilience, and reading other people aren’t skills. We’ve just chosen to treat one kind of expertise as culturally significant and the other as embarrassing.
Tell me a man screaming at a referee through his television is fundamentally more dignified than a woman gasping at a recoupling because the man she’s been sharing a bed with walked back in holding hands with someone else. If you think women are too emotional, ask a man how he feels about a referee. Men will say reality TV is brain rot and then develop a parasocial relationship with a left back.
I don’t buy it. They’re both people becoming emotionally invested in strangers whose decisions have absolutely no bearing on their own lives. We’ve simply decided one form of investment deserves respect and the other deserves embarrassment.
He’s watching strangers play a game. I’m watching strangers play a game. His has offside rules. Mine has a firepit. We are not different!!
To be clear, I’m not coming for the World Cup. Keep the TVs, keep the sweepstakes, keep the suspiciously long lunches. Office football fever is genuinely one of the more fun things that happens at work, and solidarity with anyone dodging deadlines to watch television. That’s truly the dream.
I just want us to notice the double standard. Notice which passions get institutional support and which get eye-rolls. Notice who gets to be “a fan” and who has to be “embarrassed but honest.” Because the difference between a cultural event and a guilty pleasure was never about the content. It’s about who’s watching.
And of course, to be clear, men watch Love Island too!! And we love that about them. And nearly half the people watching the World Cup are women. The point is not that these interests are biologically assigned. The point is that once an interest is coded as feminine, even loosely, it becomes easier to trivialize, mock, or treat as something people should be slightly embarrassed to enjoy.
Anyway, if the World Cup final and a recoupling fall on the same day, I'll be watching both. The only real difference is that one is considered having interests and the other is considered having a problem.
Need a little permission to be completely unserious this Fourth of July weekend? Our latest episode of Boy Problems with Zach Noe Towers has you covered. Just do yourself a favor and don’t listen while operating heavy machinery or taking a sip of your drink because you will be laughing the whole way through!!!!!
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