Her name was [changed to] Nikki [to keep her anonymity]. She was in her early 30s and a divorcee, with all the sagginess and stretch marks you’d expect from a woman that had given birth to a child. But the sex was excellent, mainly because she was one of the few women I’ve met who allowed me to perform the “supported congress”, to borrow Vatsyayana’s phrase. She asked me why I was in bed with her, rather than watching the baseball game that was occurring concurrently, and I bluntly told her that I preferred to play with her rather than with a bunch of sweaty men in a bar, and we began.

You might ask, why am I talking about this (besides the obvious reason: to once again brag that I’ve actually put my penis inside a woman), and what does it have to do with the title of this essay? Tattooed across Nikki’s lower back was the name of her ex-husband (I again refrain from naming him), and below it, the phrase “Daddy’s Girl” (There were also some twiddly flourishes and faux-arabesques).

Whenever I see a grown man walking around with another man’s name across his back (via replica jerseys of any sport), I am always reminded of that tattoo (and that’s not to mention that I’ve literally seen tattoos of athlete’s names and faces on men’s bodies). However, I’m fairly certain your average beer-bellied, man-boob’ed American sports fan doesn’t have anything close to the air of faded beauty that Nikki had.

Just to clarify, I am not saying that watching sports is inherently something wrong: I occasionally partake in watching a game myself (or, more often than not, a fight, as my interests tend towards combat sports more than ball sports). But, in my mind, there is a very large, and very noticeable difference between being a fan, and being like the “man” in the picture that opened this article.

The difference? Guys like that dedicate their lives to a team. They find validation in the victories of other men. They wake up thinking “I love (X) team”, and goes to bed thinking the same. He celebrates a victory like a national holiday, and weeps like a child when “his” team loses. For that matter, that guy refers to a bunch of strangers that wouldn’t give him the time of day as “his” team.

And most damningly of all, that guys seeks all of the above, and engages in it, because he has little else in his life to satisfy him. Of course, I am not exactly some ultra-stud alpha male who succeeds at everything he does, and I have never claimed to be, but I at least do things that I find emotionally fulfilling, challenging (physically and/or mentally), and intellectually stimulating: I engage in physical culture in all its forms, I play and write music, I have a full time job utilizing my talents, and I moonlight by writing literature such as this outstanding piece you are currently perusing.

To be fair, this same criticism of “buying a fake identity” to numb the pain of an unfulfilling life can be given to anybody whose life revolves purely around a corporatized product (whether it is video games, a certain musical/artistic/literary subculture, a television show, etc.) And certainly, if you’re so invested in any type of bought-and-sold identity that you refer to it as a lifestyle, you have a problem.

However, because they take it to a greater extreme than the most unkempt Trekkie is why this sort of sports fan raises my ire, far more so than the average nerd-I have yet to see any man walking around with James Tiberius Kirk’s name emblazoned across their back, for example. Nor have I seen even the palest, masturbating-est video game nerd walking around with “Solid Snake” or “Mario” being branded upon their torso. And yet, the tubby sports fans somehow see themselves as being better than the nerds.

But let’s get to what the title refers to: the whole enterprise of cheering for other men doing things you wish you could be doing, wearing the name of another man on your back, and spending huge monetary sums to vicariously live through other men just seems vaguely sexual to me-at best the sports fans are essentially in the position of being smitten young women: walking around snuggled up in the clothes of another man, like some schoolgirl who (like, ehmagawd!) has been given the captain of the football team’s varsity jacket, to signify that he’s going to (squee!) invite you to the prom!

And, despite the fact that some of these men have an equal body fat-to-muscle ratio of your average 16 year old girl, this is probably the least offensive way this scenario can go. To put it in rather uncouth terms, am I the only one who finds the whole phenomenon of athlete worship to resemble cuckoldry?

Allow me to explain to the more innocent of my readers-cuckoldry literally refers to the act of a woman cheating on her husband (who is thus the cuckold, and the “other man” in question is referred to as “the bull”). However, in modern parlance, it is a specific sexual fetish (occasionally dubbed the “thinking man’s fetish” presumably because all that time not having sex gives you a lot of time to think) centering around the cuckolding of the husband-namely, the “bull” sleeps with the woman while the cuckold sits in the corner and pouts or masturbates or whatever, feeling inferior all the while.

I will not pretend to understand why failing to satisfy your wife, and needing a surrogate, is supposed to be arousing to the inferior man (perhaps because I actually have some modicum of self-respect), but to return to the original discussion of sports-watching…is it so much of a stretch, to look at a bunch of pasty, flabby, low-testosterone men cheering and idolizing a virile, muscular, high-testosterone man that wins glory and beds beautiful women, and not feel that there is an implicit sexual domination occurring?

And that’s not even getting into the racial implications of the matter-it doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a sizable percentage of professional athletes (at least in the United States) are of pan-African descent. Now, take everything that I said in the previous paragraph explaining what cuckoldry is, and pay a visit to Interracial Cuck or any of the other websites catering specifically to this racially charged variation on the theme. Or, better yet, look at the leftists making sport (no pun intended) of the alleged racial implications of sports viewership.

“Oh, you want to win a game and sleep with the cheerleaders and make millions of dollars…that’s fine, I’ll just…be in the corner…”.

Don’t be that guy.