Life's Persistent Questions

Why men love sports more than women?

So women buy more fiction than men. Apparently male readership of fiction has been in decline for years. On the other hand, our gender's death grip on sports-watching, dare I say from spelling-bees to put-put golf to world series of poker (all thanks to ESPN), has become tighter than ever. Does the losing appeal of fiction to men correlate with the rise of color television and broadcast of sporting events? You may think this is purely speculation, and it is, but perhaps there is a deeper reason than just beers and ball games.

We live in a world of predictability. 99% of us go to work knowing what the world expects from us, and what we can expect from others. We crave the unpredictable. So where do we find it? Fiction? Naw. Many of us, dudes, find it in sports. In sports, the outcome of the game is never predictable. We see athletes, superior physically, but nonetheless doing tasks that most of us have done or haven attempted to do in P.E. classes, playground or parks, yet somehow in the face of uncertainty, they rise above the ordinary and accomplishes the extraordinary. We live vicariously through the excitement of their accomplishment, and sometimes the crushing pain of disappointment. The fan identifies with the athlete, and his quest become my quest. In sports, anything is possible and no one knows what's going to happen next. On a side note, this is probably why fixing games for gambling is an especially heinous crime in a fan's eye.

For fictions, no matter how much plot-twisting and character development, there is the subconscious knowledge that at least one person controls the outcome of the story, the writer. The fate of each character is fixed and everyone is powerless to effect change. Even the reader is powerless. It is my belief that it is this imbalance of power that divide the sports fan from a nice piece of fiction. Let's face it, most mainstream fictions, like TV shows and movies, are quite predictable, reading them merely reinforces our preset beliefs about the world.

I suppose I haven't discovered why women would prefer fiction and men prefer sports, because I don't want to venture into a discussion about the whole "women want stability and men live for the unpredictable hunt" thing (oops, I guess I just did). So what do you think?

posted by hedgehog @ 10:32 PM