SI swimsuit model Brooklyn Decker recently shared her Girl's Guide to the Super Bowl with Harper’s Bazaar in an effort to help those non-football loving, yet super fashionable ladies enjoy the day and look good doing it.
Decker’s “guide” via Jezebel is mostly asinine and raises a larger issue, which we’ll get to, after we look at some of her tips. Number one:
“Pick a team” – even if at random.
That’s all well and good, but she doesn’t really help in terms of the logic a non-football fan would use to pick a team. She chose Denver because of Peyton Manning. But how do you randomly pick a team to root for so you’ll be invested in the game if you’re not invested to begin with? I’m giving myself a headache.
Decker also gives tips about what to wear: comfortable-chic! No heels! No midriffs! (Did we dial it back to 1991 and no one told me?)
The problem with this guide is that it’s not actually helpful. If you hate football, wearing a cute pair of boots and randomly deciding that Pete Carroll closely resembles Ellen DeGeneres and you love Ellen so you will be rooting for the Seahawks will not really make the game that much more watchable. You'll still hate football regardless.
And the problem with girl's guides on the whole is that they are generally condescending. The New York Rangers learned this lesson when they tried to publish a "Girl's Guide to Watching Hockey" last year and it was rightly trashed. I am not here to stand on my soap box and scream about feminism so much as I’m wondering why there still seems to be so many people who think this huge-ass gender gap exists and therefore we need handy dandy guides shoved in our faces in order for us to function? As a female sports fan, it's insulting.
Yes, there are backwards people still out there like Damon Bruce and Dan Sileo, but women have more progressive roles in sports than ever before. Women host sports shows on television and radio, break news, and announce games in the broadcast booth. Do you think the likes of Erin Andrews and Pam Oliver needed a "girl's guide to football" before they went on the air at the Super Bowl in front of 100+ million people? Of course not. Girl's guides to sports do nothing but denigrate the work that these women and more have done to try and level the playing field. Girl's guides send the misguided message that women should know their place in sports, which is to cheer based on colors and not ask too many questions, or something ridiculous like that.
On the flip side, it’s perfectly okay to not enjoy sports and not want to watch the Super Bowl or faking interest in order to make it through the day, male or female. But.. if I DID want a legitimate guide to help me understand football better, I’m not sourcing a fashion magazine, even if the source happens to be married to Andy Roddick.
UPDATE: According to Decker, Harper's Bazaar originally pitched questions to her as a novice's guide instead of the more charged language of a "girl's guide" to football. It makes you wonder why the magazine would immediately think novices and girls are interchangeable.
@awfulannouncing Just wanted to clear the air… I was answering specific questions for "a novice who wants to enjoy" pic.twitter.com/H32UYy8gBI
— Brooklyn Decker (@BrooklynDecker) February 4, 2014
@awfulannouncing I wish that the article had been written as a "novice's guide" as it was pitched to me, and had included the questions.
— Brooklyn Decker (@BrooklynDecker) February 4, 2014
