The helmet-head blocked the sack and penetrated the hole for a creaming score.

January 14, 2012 12:12 PM

[Sexual trigger warning. All text pulled from article.] Into the Endzone for a Touchdown: A Psychoanalytical Consideration of American Football: I believe that a useful way to begin an attempt to understand the psychoanalytic significance of American football is through an examination of football folk speech. For it is precisely in the idioms and metaphors that a clear pattern of personal interaction is revealed. [...] I must stress that the evidence for the present interpretation of American football does not depend upon just a single word. Rather, there are many terms which appear to be relevant. [...] The object of the game is to "score," a term which in standard slang means to engage in sexual intercourse with a member of the opposite sex. One "scores" by going "all the way." The latter phrase refers specifically to making a touchdown. In sexual slang, it alludes to indulging in intercourse as opposed to petting or necking. The offensive team may try to mount a "drive" in order to "penetrate" the other team's territory. A ball carrier might go "up the middle" or he might "go through a hole" (made by his linemen in the opposing defensive line). A particularly skillful runner might be able to make his own hole. The defense is equally determined to "close the hole." Linemen may encourage one another "to stick it to 'em," meaning to place their helmeted heads (with phallic-symbolic overtones) against the chests of their opposite numbers to drive them back or put them out of the play. [...] The sexual connotations of football folk speech apply equally to players on defense. One goal of the defensive line is to penetrate the offensive line to get to the quarterback. Getting to the offensive quarterback and bringing him down to the ground is termed "sacking" the quarterback. The verb "sack" connotes plunder, ravage, and perhaps even rape. David Kopay, one of the few homosexuals participating in professional football willing to admit his preference for members of the same sex, specifically commented on the nature of typical exhortations made by coaches and others:

The whole language of football is involved in sexual allusions. We were told to go out and "fuck those guys"; to take that ball and "stick it up their asses" or "down their throats. "The coaches would yell, "knock their dicks off," or more often than that, "knock their jocks off." They'd say, "Go out there and give it all you've got, a hundred and ten percent, shoot your wad." You controlled their line and "knocked" 'em into submission. Over the years I've seen many a coach get emotionally aroused while he was diagramming a particular play into an imaginary hole on the blackboard. His face red, his voice rising, he would show the ball carrier how he wanted him to "stick it in the hole."

[...] Much of the sexual slang makes it very clear that the winners are men while the losers are women or passive homosexuals. [...] Thus in the beginning of the football game, we have two sets or teams of males. By the end of the game, one of the teams is "on top," namely the one which has "scored" most by getting into the other team's "end-zone." The losing team, if the scoring differential is great, may be said to have been "creamed."

While it is possible to disagree with several of the interpretations offered of individual items of folk speech cited thus far, it would seem difficult to deny the overall sexual nature of much of football (and other sports) slang. The word "sport" itself has this connotation and has had it for centuries. [...] It should also be noted that "game" can carry the same sexual connotation as sport. I have no doubt that a good many football players and fans will be sceptical (to say the least) of the analysis proposed here. Even academics with presumably less personal investment in football will probably find the idea implausible if not downright repugnant that American football could be a ritual combat between groups of males attempting to assert their masculinity by penetrating the endzones of their rivals. [...] Yet I think it is highly likely that the ritual aspect of football, providing as it does a socially sanctioned framework for male body contact—football, after all, is a so-called "body contact" sport—is a form of homosexual behavior. The unequivocal sexual symbolism of the game, as plainly evidenced in folk speech coupled with the fact that all of the participants are male, make it difficult to draw any other conclusion. Sexual acts carried out in thinly disguised symbolic form by, and directed towards, males and males only, would seem to constitute ritual homosexuality.

posted by troll (4 comments total)

It's just horseplay.
posted by Artw at 12:14 PM on January 14, 2012

Doesn't "More inside" usually imply less outside?!?!
posted by hincandenza at 12:16 PM on January 14, 2012 [5 favorites]

Ack, holy scroll batman! Could you maybe put all that under the fold except for the article itself?
posted by jeffburdges at 12:16 PM on January 14, 2012

Look inside. Find more inside.
posted by stinkycheese at 12:16 PM on January 14, 2012