Until two Sundays ago, I hadn’t made a point to watch an NFL game in years. Aside from the Super Bowl and the games that were on in the background when I was visiting home, I had gone from a football obsessive to a sporadic viewer. But, the Chiefs were playing the Ravens — and Taylor Swift would be in attendance — and at this point, even my friends who had never watched football wanted to check it out, so we went to a beer hall and stood in the back corner.
I never wanted it to happen, but the NFL and I have a very fraught relationship. As a female football fan, it was often hard to find a place in the sport. When I looked on-screen, there were few women working (aside from the criminally underpaid cheerleaders, who let’s face it, were historically partly there to be objectified by the NFL’s rowdy male audience), and when I talked to my male peers about football, I was belittled or excluded. I wasn’t alone in experiencing this. When one reporter asked former Carolina Panthers quarterback Cam Newton a question in a post-game conference, instead of responding to her, he laughed and said, “It’s funny to hear a female talk about routes.”
