ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Sunday, November 10, 1996 TAG: 9611080014
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 4 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: DALLAS
SOURCE: NANCY KRUH\KNIGHT-RIDDER/TRIBUNE
The Modern Woman will pick up this diminutive book and marvel at its clever title.
``Men Will Be Boys.''
The Modern Woman will chortle. Smugly, she will wonder how the book describes women.
And if she flips through the book, she'll find the answer, right there on Page 6: ``Women are pigs.''
In the realm of football fandom, this is what is known as equality. And, says author Sally Jenkins, it's high time that the Modern Woman learns to deal with it.
That's why she has written ``Men Will be Boys'' (Doubleday, $19.95), says Jenkins, an accomplished sports writer who describes herself as a Modern Woman.
She's intended the book for all the millions of women groping to understand why they can enjoy a game that - as Jenkins herself puts it - requires an ambulance on the field.
And they are enjoying it in startling numbers. Despite the enduring stereotype of fair maidens seeking smelling salts at the game's first snap or at least asking the frequent stupid question (``I do declare, why are all those men trying to kill one another?''), women now consider football their favorite spectator sport, according to National Football League marketing research. NFL surveys show women make up as much as 40 percent of pro football's television audience.
And don't think that women are confining their football fervor to the sidelines. Across the country, thousands of women are joining flag-football leagues, and scores of girls around the country are playing on school teams with the boys.
It was bound to happen sometime. The 1970s were for men to discover their feminine self. The '80s were taken up by everyone's search for the inner child. And now the '90s: Time for women to admit that, deep inside them, there's a little Dick Butkus yearning to break free.
``Women are beginning to discuss the pleasure and sense of accomplishment of physically moving another human being out of the way,'' Jenkins says during a recent visit to the Dallas area.
If any of this proves unsettling to some Modern Women, Jenkins has good news. Women may be pigs ... but at least they're female pigs.
``Football from the female perspective,'' she writes in the book, ``is a radically different proposition.''
This conclusion turned out to be a surprise to the author. ``I started with some assumptions,'' she says, ``that basic gender equivalencies exist, that women aren't that different from men in their sensibilities about the game. The fact is, there is a whole range of responses to football.''
What may have originally misled her was her own ardor for the sport. The daughter of Texas sportswriting semi-legend Dan Jenkins, she grew up in a home that was built on pigskin.
Born in Fort Worth and raised in New York City, Jenkins remembers the TV always being tuned to the game her dad was covering. At halftime, she and her two brothers would take turns tossing the football around, and she didn't even care when the boys yelled, ``Chicago Bears!'' and threw themselves on top of her.
Well, OK. Maybe she cared. But the point here is that she grew up loving the game - in a way she felt was no different from the way the males in her family did.
It was hardly a stretch when she chose to become a sports writer. ``My dad always told me to write what you know best,'' says Jenkins, 35.
She spent seven years at the Washington Post, then six at Sports Illustrated. Much of her work was on football-related topics, but not until recently did she become intrigued by her gender's enjoyment of a game that, as she says, ``was invented to shore up the male ego in peacetime.''
Several books have been written for women interested in how the game is played. But Jenkins rejected another ``how to'' book in favor of a ``how come?''
To try to answer the question, she turned to a variety of sources: social scientists, other journalists, athletes and women who teach other women in football clinics.
What she found is that women don't take the game as seriously as men do. As proof, she cites a 1990 study at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee of male, female and mixed groups watching football on TV.
``For various reasons,'' one researcher told her, ``women like to resist and subvert the game. Although women can get caught up in it, they choose a detachment that allows them to make fun of it.''
Which is why, one must figure, women tend to point and laugh at coaches who wear Sansabelt slacks and players who proclaim God wanted them to win.
Still, there is much about football that women find seductive. ``I love the aesthetic of it,'' says Jenkins. ``I love the skill players. I'd never confuse it with the ballet, but it has its moments.''
The sex appeal of sweaty men in tight pants also can't be denied, she says. ``Feminists don't like to hear this sort of thing, but it's part of sports,'' Jenkins says. ``The whole groupie thing needs to be examined.''
She also believes many women sense a deeper meaning in football. ``For all of their differences,'' she writes, ``men and women may understand each other better on the subject of football than they suppose they do. If aggression is a gender divide, bonding is a bridge.''
All the values expressed on the field - the teamwork, the sacrifice for the greater good - are easy for both genders to admire, she says.
But there is an underbelly to football that women, Jenkins says, find far more disturbing than male fans: the promiscuity, substance abuse and off-field violence that all too frequently accompany success on the field.
``Women have extremely mixed feelings for exactly these reasons,'' she says.
Then there's the case that Jenkins calls ``the Watergate of football'': the trial of former running back O.J. Simpson. ``It made female football fans forever cynical. We don't trust our Jack Armstrongs anymore,'' she writes, referring to the old radio serial about a boy hero.
But this is probably not such a bad thing, she says, considering she believes most male fans take the sport far too seriously.
``We have the capacity to be passionate fans without being fools about it,'' she writes in the book. ``We do not idealize our sports heroes to nearly the extent that men do.''
In fact, Jenkins posits, the Modern Woman may have a more rational handle on the game than her male counterparts. Men, she says, are more likely to overlook their sports heroes' indiscretions. They are more likely to tell their sons that hitting hard makes a man. And they are more likely to give each other high-fives when it's the helmet-head on the field who just made the touchdown.
``Guys think they sent in the winning play,'' she says drolly.
Maybe, she suggests, male football fans could learn a lesson or two from the Modern Woman. Calm down. Get a grip. Get a little perspective.
After all, as she writes in her book, ``It's just football, not childbirth.''
LENGTH: Long : 125 linesby CNB