"Supporting" the NFL as a Woman

http://jezebel.com/if-you-care-about-women-and-still-support-the-nfl-you-1631903485/+tcraggs22

So, being not only a giant football fan, but also a follower of Chris Kluwe (@ChrisWarcraft) on twitter, I found the above-posted Jezebel article this morning and read it.

The crux of the article is, given the NFL's abominably weak stance on womens' rights, if you're a supporter of women or feminism, you should hit 'em where it hurts and stop watching, supporting, and buying merchandise. Also, if you boycott other products because of cruelty or some similar social injustice, you're a hypocrite for not giving up the NFL also.

And I completely respect that argument. But I'm not going to agree with it.

I already do not shop at Chik Fil A (partially because I'm vehemently against the glorification of bad grammar/poor spelling), Hobby Lobby, and Carl's Jr, I change the radio whenever I hear Chris Brown or Robin Thicke, I buy cage-free vegetarian eggs, I buy as much fair trade clothing from H&M as possible etc etc.

However, I am a graduate student carrying literally tens of thousands of dollars of debt, and earning a mere $12,000 for nine months' work at my graduate assistantship (causing me to have to borrow money every month from my parents to make both ends meet, and again in the summer so I can pay to attend field schools to get experience), which severely limits my spending power. I do not have a great deal of money for myself, and even less for entertainment. Football - the NFL - is one of my favorite diversions from the backbreaking grind of graduate study.

Which brings me to my main point - how much is too much? Having given up what I have, limiting my clothing purchases whenever possible to garments I believe have not been made by bloody-fingered seven year olds in Bangledesh, changing my food purchases to obtain fresh and local as often as possible, boycotting fast food restaurants and craft chains I enjoyed, when can I draw my line and say, "I've had enough"?

If I dressed myself in sackcloth and ashes, if I limited my diet to a few hundred calories a day of local organic produce, if I lived without electricity and halved my monthly use of water, rejected anything plastic and all televison, I could not begin to set right all the wrongs in the world. Each individual certainly has a responsibility to the world, and to the societies that "raised" us, but how much responsibility can any one individual take on?

I concede that supporting the NFL - that is, watching it, and sighing over over-priced jerseys I cannot afford - while it continues to flout the women from whence flow at least 50% of their security, is both dangerous and foolish.

Jezebel's article has one crucial failure - it doesn't state what must happen before we can enjoy football from a stand of moral equality again. Must Goodell be fired? (I would love that.) Must Ray Rice be banned for life? (Not having seen the video, I can't say.) Must whoever tweeted for the Ravens that "Janay Rice deeply regrets" be sent to have their head examined? (Magic 8 Ball says: "Yes")

But I am drawing my line in the turf. I have before tweeted, emailed, and blogged about how I feel about how the NFL treats women, and I will continue to do so in the hopes that one day they will realize that women buy half their stuff, and pay half the household's cable bills, and it's about time to start punishing their players for violence against women. However, football provides me with so much relief from what I endure on a weekly basis, I refuse to make my life - a woman's life - harder because Ray Rice is a colossal douche, and Roger Goodell is a bigger one.


P.S. Has anyone ever wondered why so many football players love their mothers - say that they're doing this for their mother (or their grandmother) and once they "make it" buy them houses and cars...and yet, still treat women in general like shit?