Male Domination and the Superbowl of 2013

Well, the spectacle of the Superbowl 2013 happened last night. I love the game. I even own a well-worn terrible towel…but I have to say this was one of the most disappointing, disturbing, and vacuous mega-sports and media events of recent memory.

I don’t have my thoughts worked out for an intelligent reflection and commentary, but I was referred to this article by Matthew Vos and it’s worth your time to read it, especially if you are a parent:

Prizes and Consumables: The Super Bowl as a Theology of Women

The way we consume iconic national events like the Super Bowl better depicts what we really believe about women than does anything else. For in the invisibility of normality, there we find our idolatry. [February 1, 2013 – By Matthew Vos]

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Spark My Muse

Lisa Colón DeLay writes often on matters of the attending to the inner life, creating a beloved community, spiritual formation, and consciousness. She is also a designer, teacher, speaker, and host of the weekly broadcast Spark My Muse since 2015. Lisa is Latina (born in Puerto Rico) and holds an MA in Spiritual Formation and is the author of "The Wild Land Within" (Broadleaf Books) and other books.

2 thoughts on “Male Domination and the Superbowl of 2013”

  1. wow, that was really powerful stuff, Lisa. I haven’t really watched much of the Super Bowl in recent years, but it was annual fare in my family growing up. Even though I am not a parent, I have thought long and hard about how I would raise children in American society. Even if I as a parent could set a perfect example, teach my child all the right values, answer all the child’s questions perfectly and always set an impeccable example, I would still have the seemingly insuperable problem of the subtly destructive values that permeate our culture. Our natural culture permeates everything, just as water fills the ocean. Even if a chid never watches a split second of television, never sees a movie, listens to a radio program, or reads a magazine, that child will still learn subtle lessons about life from teachers, from friends, and even from passersby on the street. Your little girl sees that most women in public dressing a certain way, so she may grow up to view the lessons you taught her about modesty as old fashioned; your son sees men and friends at school pursuing women as sexual trophies, and so he absorbs this maladaptive value and rejects what you have taught him about valuing and respecting women. This is not an easy subject to think about it, and I definitely don’t have all the answers. But in my own experience, I have seen what doesn’t work: Condemning children when they fall prey to the temptations of the world doesn’t work; moralizing and preaching at them doesn’t work; screaming louder and inducing more guilt definitely doesn’t work. I’m not sure that withdrawing from the world and becoming an insular little Christian community is the answer, either. Whatever the answer is, I think that it has something to do with knowing Christ, learning through Him what love and sacrifice really are, and learning that our lives, our pleasures, and all that we are is really empty until we lay it all down for His sake.

    -Jack

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