date machine : football

Love Machine: Making Love to ESPN

amboabe — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 09:19:00 GMT

I used to play high school football. I was obsessed with the NFL when I was younger and there were a few years in my life where I thought my destiny lay in professional sports. Sundays were an exhausting waste during football season. I would wake up early and inhale pre-game prognostication, watch random early games with teams I didn't care about, and make mental notes about random position players for use in comparative analysis. Who's the best right guard in the AFC? Does the 46 defense have a place in the league anymore? With the sun going down and eight or ten hours heedlessly tossed away, I would turn the TV off and realize the weekend was suddenly over, I had done nothing, and my favorite team had lost an away game with a fourth quarter defensive lapse. When I was ten I actually cried one Monday Night when the Raiders lost to the Jets in a game that effectively knocked them out of playoff contention.

There are a lot of women online who profess a shared love of sports. They claim to get along better with men than with other women, prefer beer to wine, like watching ESPN and wearing a big foam Number One hand on gameday. You see them every now and then, at sports bars or Super Bowl parties, wearing team jerseys and talking 3rd down percentages with the barrel-gutted dudes waging a group assault on a pitcher of hefewiezen and a trough of fried anything. It's like being in a strip club and watching a woman with self-possessed swagger move up to the stage with a fistful of dollar bills. It's not that it's so strange to imagine a woman being interested in sports, but I don't understand the impulse for a woman to try and identify with the underlying culture of sports, the sloth, the statistical road to nowhere, the pornographic explosion of team logos and colors, the desperate clinging to the loose storyline of the season every Sunday night, trying to postpone the postgame sobriety as long as possible.

I spent a winter in Prague in my early twenties. I rented an attic room in a hostel in the suburbs for $225 a month, and spent most of my mornings and afternoons clattering away on an old typewriter I had packed into my duffel bag. On Sunday nights I would walk downtown and find an internet café to check in with the NFL. There weren't any places to stream games live yet so I would sit and stare at a small pop-up window with a list of statistics and a written description of every play. Kaufman carries for 2 yard gain. 2nd down and 8.

It wasn't quite an addiction, but it was a lonely attempt to connect to a community. The language of sports, the biblical arcana of the NFL rulebook, the secret conclusions carried in random statistics, the crotch shaking energy of cheering in unison with 60,000 other people; it's all a way of gaining an identity without having to risk anything.

Shortly after that winter I stopped caring about professional sports. I lost track of who the new SportsCenter anchors were, I missed out on the Cinderella stories of yesterday's worst teams turning into playoff contenders, I missed all the controversies about inappropriate celebration dances, spats between teammates, superstars unhappy with their coaches, the salary hold-outs, the retirements, the steroid scandals, and the fallout of someone trying to board a plane with some cocaine or marijuana in their carry-on. The story in professional sports is always the same.

Following an NFL season is like reading the same book year after year after year. There are variations, nuances and subtle shifts in meaning float to the surface, but the larger story is identical. Someone always wins, someone always looses. The winners work better together than the losers, they understand their weaknesses better, compensate for them, stick to the game plan, get some lucky breaks, and win. Last year it was New York, this year it's Tennessee, next year it'll be Jacksonville. The names and faces will be different. The jargon will be the same.

Sports is such a permanent ballast for so many relationships. I wish there were statistics for the prevalence of sex on Sunday nights during football season. How many men get plastered watching other men brutalize one another, come home buzzed and filled with the sense memory of cheerleaders and take to their wives or girlfriends with elephantine urgency? How many women have to compete with Sports Center on Sunday nights for attention and a little empathy?

Maybe it's a welcome respite. The subconscious knowledge that you can count on some time every week where you don't have to worry about your partner, where you can part ways for a little while and be your own separate selves; maybe it's a relief. Coming back together after a day alone could refresh the appreciation you each have for one another.

But how appreciative could someone be for a man stumbling home with the rancid breath of hot wings and Miller Lite, in the male equivalent of a muumuu? How many men piston themselves into a lather on top of their women, get up for another beer, and then wind up in their sweaty underwear on the couch hypnotized by the nursery rhyme of the 11PM Sports Center? Who'll make that porno? I would watch it.

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Date Machine: 5 Things I'm Thankful For

Sex Machine: Having Sex at Weddings

Love Machine: What Work Is

Sex Machine: Sleeping Naked

Love Machine: Breaking Up in a Text Message

Date Night: The F U Date

Sex Machine: Shave My Bush

Love Machine: Taking A Break From Dating

Date Machine: The Celebrity You Most Resemble

Sex Machine: I Kissed A Boy

Vote Machine: No Gay People Can't

Sex Machine: Let's Have an Orgy

Sex Machine: My First STD

Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV

Love Machine: Let's Make Babies

Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines

Sex Machine: My Kingdom for a Boner

Date Machine: Don't Make Poopy in the Office

Nerve Confessions: Fat and Skinny, Ugly, Pretty

Crying In Public: Some Corner in Brooklyn

Dating the Web: Don't Google Fisting and Why Women Apologize So Much

Date Machine: The Woman in the Coffee Shop and The Woman at the Bus Stop

Love Machine: Your Mom Will Do

Date Machine: Scary Movies or I Peed My Pants

Date Machine: Rate My Ethics

Love Machine: Let's Just Be Friends

Love Machine: Must Be Willing to Lie About Where We Met

Sex Machine: Why Women Are Great In Bed

Sex Machine: Why Women Suck in Bed

Date Night: All By Myself on a Saturday Night

Sex Machine: Spank My Ass

Sex Machine: I Kissed A Boy

amboabe — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 21:39:00 GMT

I was twenty-five the first time I kissed another man. It wasn't a playful peck or some proto-ironic beso, this was an open-mouthed salivary exchange. It was during a game of spin the bottle so it wasn't exactly arousing, but I still remember it very clearly. I had thought kissing a male mouth would feel like a cross between a garbage disposal and beef jerky. In the world of the sports-consuming, beer guzzling straight man, the concept of sexualizing another man is a revolting threat to the status quo. ESPN fans talk about women with the same fixated affection that they reserve for fine cuts of steak. The tales of their sexual exploits sound like a pre-historic hunting yarn that culminates in some blushing attempt at bravura. "Let's just say she had a good time," you might overhear from the next table at a Hooters on game day. As I was moving in for the final approach to kiss this man, I felt apprehension and a flickering revolt. "This is going to be gross," I thought.

I was in high school when I started wondering what it was that separated men and women on a chemical level. I was convinced that the molecular composition of a man's mouth had to be entirely different from that of a woman's. It seemed like an inherent certainty, but I couldn't understand how or why. I imagined doing a kissing test, taking ten mouths and pushing them through some scientifically approved glory hole and testing how accurately someone could guess the gender based on taste alone. I remember pulling out my lower lip and looking at the shiny inner edge in the bathroom mirror one day. How can this be any different from a woman's inner lip?

When I finally kissed R it was a giant anti-climax. His mouth was wet, warm, and smooth to the touch, just like anyone else's. His saliva tasted entirely neutral, almost flavorless. It wasn't putrid, nauseating, or filthy. It was just boring. My tongue swished around inside his mouth in disbelief. I thought I was missing something. I thought there must be some oral g-spot in there that releases a flood of musky pheromones. I couldn't believe there wasn't some physical trigger that made the process nauseating. Shouldn't this taste at least as bad as when my old dog would come around and slobber all over my face?

It made me think of a night a few years earlier, when I had gone skinny dipping with a few friends. After running around in the middle of the night, naked, breaking into a public pool, and baiting some hapless security guard on a wild goose chase, my friend and I tried to convince the two women we were with to kiss each other. The woman I had been seeing relented and they shared a short, closed-mouth kiss. This was just enough to draw cruel jeers from my friend and me. There should be no half-measures. We demanded a full-on lesbian exchange.

I felt bad about putting so much pressure on them. I didn't really care whether or not they kissed. I was pretty sure that watching them kiss wouldn't turn me on at all, and I didn't want to push the woman I was seeing into doing something she didn't want to do.

I've never understood the way straight men fetishize lesbianism while turning a scornful eye to man-on-man expressions of affection. When it's born of genuine attraction it just adds a layer of distance. I can't imagine there being a place for me in between two women already engaged in having sex. When it's the product of social pressure to show off, or comes from the impulse perform for the hooting hordes of Green Bay fans licking hot wings sauce from their fingers, it's even more dispiriting. It gives me the same wonderment and melancholy I got from looking at an exhibition of carnival freaks in a museum once. It's never possible to underestimate what people will put themselves through for attention and a sense of acceptance.

I used to torture my male friends with the fact that I had kissed other men before. I would needle them with it over and over again, watching their faces turn from unresponsive to antagonistic in a few quick seconds. I enjoyed the act because it was vulgar, separating the action of a kiss from its deeper purpose of attraction and expression. It was as much fun as telling a handjob joke at a black tie function. Last new year's eve I was in Texas and gave one of my friends a short little lip licking in a bar to celebrate the ball drop. I heard a woman who had been watching us say, "That was so hot." I immediately felt feminized and attractive, like some insecure nineteen year-old on a beach in front of a sea of men hooting and cheering. "If that's the reaction I get, then bombs away," I thought. All while the person I would have really wanted to kiss stood idly by with a beer in her hand, watching the show.

Previous Posts:

Vote Machine: No Gay People Can't

Sex Machine: Let's Have an Orgy

Sex Machine: My First STD

Sex Machine: There's a Possibility You've Been Infected With HIV

Love Machine: Let's Make Babies

Date Machine: Rate My Pick-Up Lines

Sex Machine: My Kingdom for a Boner

Date Machine: Don't Make Poopy in the Office

Nerve Confessions: Fat and Skinny, Ugly, Pretty

Crying In Public: Some Corner in Brooklyn

Dating the Web: Don't Google Fisting and Why Women Apologize So Much