This column may contain strong language, sexual content, adult humor, and other themes that may not be suitable for minors. Parental guidance is strongly advised.
So, Superbowl. Yawn.
I’ve never understood the appeal of American football. It has always seemed to me a sport without grace or poetry. I couldn’t care less about any of the teams or the players (except for Colin Kaepernick and the others principled enough to take a knee) but didn’t mind tuning in at half-time to watch the likes of Beyoncé and Bruno Mars perform.
This year, as usual, I made no plans to watch whatever those two teams were called, and didn’t bother to check Maroon 5’s performance at half-time on YouTube. I heard that neither game nor concert were particularly impressive. Ditto for Adam Levine’s shirtless episode.
At any rate, the best comment to come out as a result of Superbowl was from actress Jenny Mollen, who posted on Instagram: “Remember when we first met and I pretended to like football and blowjobs?”
How many women have pretended to enjoy sports of all kinds, including those often performed in the bedroom just to please their boyfriends? I have, through the years, affected a liking for Formula 1, squash, basketball, working out at the gym, rugby, and cricket for heaven’s sake, to name a few, just to find a common interest to share with a boyfriend or husband. I admit that football—the beautiful game that’s played everywhere else, and not the barbaric sort so beloved by Americans—and tennis, I’ve always enjoyed, with varying degrees of rabid fandom depending on who was playing. I did have a boyfriend, though, who was with FIFA and understandably lived and breathed the sport, and after I broke up with him, I was perfectly content to confining my devotion to football only when Barça was playing. Apart from that, I was frankly relieved not to have to sit through Bundesliga on Wednesdays and La Liga on Saturdays.
But why do we do that? Why do we pretend to love the sports our man follows, cheer for the teams he supports? The reverse rarely ever happens. Over a period of three years I was a football girlfriend, and the one time I asked my boyfriend to take me to Art Basel whilst in Switzerland, he told me to take the train from Zurich. WTF?
Needless to say, the relationship was pretty much doomed after that.
Part of pretending to like sports for the sake of a relationship is obviously a genuine attempt to find other levels of connection with someone you love or are attracted to. But it’s often a one-way street where the woman tends to make more of an effort and the man rarely bothers. Sport is always portrayed as sacred to men, and watching a game is framed as a masculine bonding ritual, replete with beers and chips. As many a sitcom has demonstrated, the worst thing a woman can do is to interrupt her man while he’s watching his favorite sport on TV. But then again, unless it’s a life and death situation, why feel insecure about one’s boyfriend watching rugby or football? I’d welcome the “alone” time and catch up on things I like to do. Now if the sport were cricket, well, I might get annoyed as those matches can last for days.
As for taking up the sport your man is into, there’s no harm in finding out if you like it, too, but you shouldn’t force yourself to keep at it if you really don’t enjoy it. By the same token, ask him to join your Zumba class and see how he likes it, and maybe he’ll understand why you’re not too keen on, say, baseball practice.
That same ex-boyfriend insisted I work out at the gym with him—and he was a hardcore bench press type of guy who could spend two hours in the gym. I would do the treadmill and maybe the elliptical machine for 30 minutes and decide I was done, and he’d be so upset I wasn’t taking fitness seriously. I think if I had been more into him I might have actually done more at the gym, but the more the red flags screaming “control freak” came up, the more I resisted.
And because I was less and less into him, I had less and less enthusiasm for blowjobs. Don’t get me wrong, blowjobs are great—as long as you’re into the person you’re blowing. Otherwise, as Tiffany Haddish says in her stand-up comedy routine My Body is an Expensive House, men may love it, and any woman who’ll give her man a blowjob every morning is a keeper, but it’s still a job requiring hand and mouth coordination and rhythm, with its own built-in hazards to boot, such as “carpal tunnel of the throat.”
Her grandmother advised her, she recounts, that she was “gonna have to kiss that banana every day.” She then asks the men in the audience: “If you could receive oral satisfaction on a daily basis, if you could wake up every morning and your woman was sucking the wrinkles out of your balls, would you be a happier man, would you be more willing to provide?”
Of course the answer from the audience is a resounding yes. And then she hits back at men saying they don’t realize “how hard it is to suck d*ck every f*cking day? It’s a lot of work for your jaws.”
Once again Tiffany scores points for the women when she sheds light on the inequality of it all—it’s less of a chore for a man to go down on a woman than it is for a woman to go down on a man.
And yet, there are men who won’t return the favor to their women. Just ask DJ Khaled.
B. Wiser is the author of Making Love in Spanish, a novel published by Anvil Publishing and available in National Book Store and Powerbooks, as well as online. When not assuming her Sasha Fierce alter-ego, she takes on the role of serious journalist and media consultant.
For comments and questions, e-mail [email protected].
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are solely those of the author in her private capacity and do not in any way represent the views of Preen.ph, or any other entity of the Inquirer Group of Companies.
Art by Marian Hukom
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