The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football.

Just in time for the O.J. Simpson media wave, a new book is out called The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football. The author, Mariah Burton Nelson, cites many ways football and other sports equate masculinity with violence and contempt for women. Since the 1970s, as feminism has taken hold, the number of male spectators at football, baseball, basketball, and hockey games has risen dramatically, Nelson reports. As male superiority is challenged in other areas, she theorizes, men are clinging to an ideal of physical dominance that pervades sports and extends to rape and battery of women.

That might help explain why people were so quick to overlook the fact that O.J. Simpson beat his wife (being a wife-beater didn't hurt Simpson's endorsement deals or his television and movie career) and why he continues to be treated as a hero even after his arrest for allegedly murdering Nicole Simpson and her friend Ronald Goldman.

Our football culture idealizes violent men and fosters indifference to the women who are their victims. Male athletes learn early to treat women as inferiors and objects of conquest. Some of the athletes Nelson interviews in her book describe locker-room rituals in which teammates bond by sharing derogatory stories about their sexual partners, and coaches humiliate athletes by handing out tampons and calling them girls. In a recent article in Glamour magazine, Nelson describes how, in the spring of 1991, Boston Red Sox fans tossed around inflatable, anatomically correct female dolls during home baseball games. Despite protests from the women in attendance, men in the stands would cheer each other as they took turns pretending to rape the dolls.

This sort of behavior is purposely designed to make men feel powerful by denigrating women's bodies and women's pain. It helps sustain a culture in which women are beaten by their husbands and lovers. Domestic violence kills 1,400 women each year. But it only makes the news when it affects a football star.