Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.
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I'm digging women's hockey this olympics, for the obvious patriotic reasons. I'm actually thinking it's a vastly underrated women's sport: the level and pace of play actually makes it more watchable than the men's, the girls are pretty and normal. It's much more entertaining than women's soccer, and the players are much easier to like than women's basketball.
But at any rate, the culture war angle interesting to me: lesbians have fallen off hard as a sexual fantasy, while at the same time homosexual men have surged, compared to when I was young.
At twelve in boy scouts, there was a common dirty joke: Right (index finger inserted into thumb and finger loop), Wrong (two index fingers bumping into each other), Fun to Watch (two thumb and finger loops bumping into each other). This more or less reflected the common understanding of homosexuality at the time (and our painfully stupid understanding of sex): two guys hooking up was disgusting and bad, two women making love was maybe not normal or moral but boy was it hot. This was reflected in media like The L Word (which my painfully square sister loved), episodes of shows like Sex and the City, etc. A woman could dip her toe in gay, or be turned on by lesbians, without it permanently scarring her as a partner, the male gaze was happy to absorb the content. Gay men were almost never eroticized, they were generally treated as jesters or sexless, gay sex took place exclusively off-screen. Lesbians reached acceptance through straight male and female masturbatory fantasies, gay men through pushing what was really happening as far out of mind as possible.
Compare to today, where Heated Rivalry is such a hit that seemingly every woman is flicking the bean to it, and women's hockey appears to be doing it for real and no one cares. Heated Rivalry has a huge following for the fantasy of maybe, what if, somehow, there were two gay guys in the NHL and they were actually good at hockey? Where we have like a dozen confirmed lesbian couples in the olympics playing against each other, and I'm not seeing any dirty fantasies about it. We've lost the raunch culture, the male focused Vulgar Wave of entertainment. There's not the Bulldog Briscoe to bark lasciviously and yell "hot" after every mention. What culture seems to be saying is that we've gone from Right Wrong Fun to Watch, to Right Right Who Cares.
Is this a fall-off in the lesbian fantasy in particular among younger straight men and women? Is it a fall off of male sexual power versus female sexual power? Is it the painful wokism of modernity? Am I just not looking at the right media?
Come on boys, let's get out there and RETVRN to tradition and objectify some female athletes when the pads come off!
I've been unable to watch it because I'm used to men's hockey, but I guess it might be a good on-ramp for people not already into hockey. It is overall the world's best professional sport for spectators, but the fact that somehow other sports are more popular show that there might be an issue of easing people into it. It's fast, it's strategic, it's robust, it highlights personal courage and grit, it requires its athletes to be complete well-rounded athletes instead of min-maxxing specific traits, it's exciting with games (at the pro level, not as much in the Olympics) usually ending with a close score. It hits the perfect balance of personal and team effort in success. Goals are neither infrequent (soccer) nor too frequent (basketball). The flow of the game feels mostly natural, less artificial stop and go (football, baseball). The only thing I'll grant other sports over hockey is that hockey is perhaps less relatable especially in places with less ice rinks; any kid on the planet can play pickup soccer, you just need a ball and a big enough field. Basketball you just need a ball and a court. Hockey needs a bit more than that.
Problems for Hockey that hold it down:
-- You can't see the puck on TV. The author in the linked article defends that you don't need to, but that's kinda goofy, and also pretty telling that he isn't saying "yes you can," he admits it is a problem even if he claims that it shouldn't keep you from liking hockey. Not being able to see the ball in any other sport is an immediate crisis.
-- It's freakishly expensive for kids in the USA. Travel team hockey costs around $7-15k/yr and some higher than $20k. That's crazy numbers. Competitive youth golf is cheaper than that. That's getting into "cost to keep a horse" territory in a lot of places. While travel teams are a problem in all sports, the rest of the big team sports in America still have a viable path for a kid who joins rec league teams and then makes the high school team. In hockey there's very little pipeline to the NHL other than through elite youth programs. It's a rich kid sport.
-- The population center of gravity in the US keeps shifting south, and even the northeast has had mild winters preventing ponds from freezing to safe levels in recent years, so nobody is playing hockey outside the way it was meant to be played.
Not being able to see the puck to me is a weird complaint although I guess it might be valid for people not used to hockey. It's not so much that nuh-huh, you can see it, but that with a bit of awareness of the game and a decent sportscast, it's obvious where the puck is whether you see it or not. The player with the puck moves differently, other players move differently with regards to him and the camera usually follows the puck.
Sure, but at that point I'm not really watching the game of Hockey, I'm watching the reactions of the players to the game of Hockey. Yes, I can pretty much follow who has possession of the puck, but I can't really see the puck being shot or going into the net in real time. For Larkin's goal against Slovakia I can't process the movement of the puck during the shot to know whether the shot went in or not prior to seeing the player reactions. I don't actually know what is going on if the broadcast cut off before the reaction. Where I can see that Devonta Smith caught the dagger, or a VJ Edgecome put back, or a penalty kick. I suppose if I spent 10,000 hours watching hockey, I might acquire the perception "at the level of baseline skill" to pick up the puck going into the net, but like, why? To impress rich kid Canadians?
Due to the pace of hockey, one pretty much has to be glued to the screen to get anything out of it in real time. I have to be watching and focusing to perceive what's going on, not chatting with guests or cooking dinner. Where baseball and football (both, in their own unique ways) are so slow that I can mostly just look up every now and then and not miss anything important; and also enjoy them audio only, where hockey audio just sounds like a random listing of mixed English and slavic names.
I actually think one of the downsides, or overapplications, of instant replay has been that increasingly I can't see live whether something is a "catch" or a "foul ball" or a "goaltend." Instant replay should mostly be for situations where the ref had a bad angle on it and the whole world can see he was wrong, not for Zapruder film style breakdowns looking for whether a single toe touched the line, or talmudic interpretations of what constitutes a "football move."
FWIW, I don't think the problem of the inferior product being more watchable is limited to hockey. MMA, depending on the meta of the time and styles making fights, has often suffered from lay'n'pray championship bouts that were like watching paint dry; while undercard fights between two bar bums can be exciting as hell. March Madness is a strictly superior entertainment product to the NBA, pound for pound, despite the fact that even a poverty franchise like the Sacramento Kings would rip through every college team like butter.
I'll put in a "nuh-uh" on that -- maybe only Canadians can see the puck? Certainly you lose track of it at times when they're fighting for it in the corners or whatnot, but out in the open being passed or shot it's just, like -- not hard to see? Easier than, say, a baseball in flight I'd say?
The "i know where the puck is even if I can't see it" thing is not that you never see it -- it's that you know where it is, so when it pops out onto open ice that's where you're looking. Maybe your TV is too big?
Watching that goal, I see him shoot it, I track it briefly in flight, I don't really see it going in just bouncing out after. Absent the commentary and player reactions, they could just keep playing and I'd assume it didn't go in. In baseball I can easily track flyballs, so a lot of it is probably that baseline skill/experience issue. But that does serve to make the game less accessible, for the vast majority of people who aren't already hockey fans or former players.
Sick final though. Trading two teeth for the gold medal in OT is legendary.
I'm watching it right now -- yes I know what happens, I'm watching it anyways!
NBC doesn't serve hockey to Canadians apparently, but looking at footage elsewhere it's a hard shot that bounces out -- this is hard to be sure about sometimes even for the refs and players! That's why there's a goal judge sitting behind the net. In this case it looks like it might have bounced off some of the crap they've got stationed inside the net; in the past you'd mostly see the impact on the netting, but there's still the rear bars -- normally there's a noise though.
If you think hockey is bad you should try watching lacrosse -- crowd injuries used to be a major problem there for people who didn't follow the action. Now I think there is dumb netting all over the place so people can safely focus on their beer.
Cheers, I got up at 5 to get through my morning chores, mass, and get a little toasted for the final. Fantastic game. Absolutely heartbreaking olympics for Canadian hockey.
Ok, I think we're on the same page here, you agree that there are some plays that are basically impossible to perceive directly for a casual audience. I think there are more plays in hockey where I have a distinct lag in perceiving what is happening than there are in other major team sports, and that this holds it back in ease of spectator interest compared to the other major team sports.
I like hockey well enough, but I think tv content and youth costs are the biggest things hurting hockey's mainstream popularity.
I wonder if professional lacrosse ever makes it big, if I'm capable of forming team loyalties anymore.
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