Double Standard

I find our society's views on sports fandom to be entirely hypocritical. And it's always at its worst during a playoff season.

Last Sunday, when the game in which the Broncos got pretty thoroughly destroyed was just beginning, I was out with some friends of mine at lunch. We were planning to go to a movie after we ate, and politely mentioned to our server that we were in a bit of a hurry because we had somewhere to be.

"Oh... you gotta get home to watch the Broncos, right?"

No, we told her. We couldn't care less. We were going to see Match Point.

Well, she looked at us like each of us had sprouted a second head. She really poked at us, too. "What? Are you serious?" She really could not believe it.

Do people get like that when... say, you tell them that you don't watch CSI: Miami?

When a big game day comes, if you walk out in public, every other person has some bit of sports memorabilia on: caps, t-shirts, some even official jerseys. And everybody is completely fine with this. But if just one person walked around in public in... say, a Starfleet uniform, everyone would be pointing and staring, and probably not making much of an effort to be polite and hide it, either.

I don't fault people their love of sports. Suits me fine. And I'm not saying I personally want to go around in a pair of Spock ears or whatever, either. I'm simply saying that we've got a vicious double standard at work when it comes to different aspects of the same phenomenon -- fandom.