One of the Greatest Unacknowledged Privileges Is That the Culture Discusses the Stuff You Care About

In defense of "sportsball" and similar expressions of disgust

Recently, someone saw one of my Twitter threads on the issue of trans women’s participation in women’s sports, and sent me a link to an episode of Dr. Phil’s talk show which discussed the issue. The show was about what one would expect- a pretty superficial 40 minute discussion featuring a female athlete, some experts, and plenty of talking by Dr. Phil himself. Meanwhile, The Problem With John Stewart tackled the issue of GOP anti-trans legislation, focusing on Arkansas, and was spread far and wide by liberals on Twitter, generating extensive discussion.

Here’s the thing- about 2 million people watch the Dr. Phil show every day, and about 40,000 people watch The Problem With John Stewart. And yet, on Twitter, nobody cared about Dr. Phil’s discussion while Stewart’s was discussed extensively. This sort of thing happens over and over again: things that are important to the elite educated, well off, disproportionately male influencers and journalists and media types on Twitter become the center of the universe; while mass culture consumed to a great extent by a very large, non-elite female audience, is ignored.

This is the great cultural privilege of the elite. We talk about it less than we talk about the elite’s monetary and power privileges— everyone knows that Ivy League graduates dominate the highest levels of finance and government, for instance. But elites and their preferences dominate the national water cooler as well. This manifests itself in various ways and, I would argue, both devalues the preferences of women and contributes to the modern problem of the Democratic Party of being out of touch with ordinary voters and their concerns.

So what exactly is the cultural privilege? Well, consider two TV shows, The Wire and Modern Family. The Wire was endlessly written about, dissected, and otherwise discussed as a major cultural milestone in online discourse. And it did pretty well for prestige TV: it drew over a million people an episode for most of its run. But Modern Family, a very standard issue television sitcom, has had an audience of over TWELVE million for most of its run. And there’s almost no discussion of Modern Family or its larger meaning the way there is with The Wire. Why? Because the types of people who dominate our discourse, and Democratic Party and liberal politics more generally, are the kind of people who watch The Wire and not the kind of people who watch (or even possibly have even heard of) Modern Family.

In a sense this is the oldest story in the world— elites go to the opera and the masses go to the movies— but it gets taken another step. I.e., I don’t perceive that the opera-going elites of the past thought the movies were unimportant, or made it a point not to know about popular movies or the people who attended the cinema. But with modern elites and their cultural privilege? Well, I’m not sure.

Here’s my favorite example, which actually illustrates another point about elite discourse as well— sports and fashion. Now sports, unlike The Problem With John Stewart, actually do have mass popularity. They earn their audience legitimately. But fashion has a huge audience too: back when people still bought print magazines, Vogue was a titan, the jewel of the Conde Nast empire, even the subject of a hit Madonna record, with circulation over 1,200,000, and 900 page special editions full of ads from the major design houses. Even now, fashion shows are everywhere, and Project Runway was a big hit show before its producer Harvey Weinstein got exposed for what he was. And at least some of the appeal of institutions such as the Kardashians and the Real Housewives franchise has to do with the popularity of fashion. Or you can just go to a big city shopping mall or shopping district on a typical weekend. People love fashion.

Or, to be more specific, women love fashion. And men love sports. So what do we talk about all the time, incessantly, in male dominated online discourse? That’s right. Sports. Indeed, women have made great efforts to insinuate themselves into the sports world as announcers, journalists, and fans, a trend that I think is great and long overdue. But men- and especially heterosexual men- stay far clear of the fashion industry. Men, with a dominant position in culture and discourse in a patriarchal society, don’t have to accommodate themselves to women’s tastes (and indeed can dismiss them as “unmanly”)- they can make women accommodate themselves to theirs.

And this gets to a thing that drives a lot of sports obsessed guys crazy— the insult “sportsball”. “Sportsball” is a word used by non-sports fans to remind everyone who unimportant sports is; it both makes the statement “I don’t HAVE to even learn your hobby’s terminology” while also saying “you are obsessed with a ball bouncing around”. But it’s true! Because men control the discourse and men like sports, men write stuff making sports vastly more important than they are, into the metaphor for so many things in life. Again, this is longstanding- think Hemingway and bullfights and fishing. But you could do the same thing with fashion- doesn’t what we wear say a ton about who we are? We don’t, though, because in an elite discourse world controlled by men, there’s no market for it. There is, however, always a market for how important Aaron Judge’s non-major league record 62 home runs is. “Sportsball” is just saying to men exactly what men say to women about fashion- that we don’t have to participate in something that is important to you. Turnabout is fair play.

The key to all these privileges are how unacknowledged they are. You don’t even think about the fact that your preferences are catered to. And meanwhile, the people who have common preferences that don’t get reflected in elite discourse don’t realize how many people share their passions. Elite discourse makes sports seem more popular than they are and fashion less popular, or prestige television more popular than it is and mass television less popular.

But in addition to just warping people’s senses of what is really the zeitgeist, this privilege also isolates elites from the masses, which is, of course, one of the central problems facing modern liberal politics. If you want to understand what ordinary people think, you probably should be watching the Dr. Phil show and not The Problem With John Stewart. And if liberals want to win elections, they probably need to start inviting these mass, non-trendy discussions into the elite discourse. They should start talking about the shows that Americans actually watch, and the things that they are actually interested in. And they should especially make it a point to get to know American women. They’re 51% of the population, and they vote.