I tuned into the Super Bowl last night, partly because I had to–I’m married–and partly to see whether there could be any empirical truth to the favorite rad-feminist canard that domestic violence spikes on Super Bowl Sunday. (See “Be My V- (No, Not Valentine),” Jan. 27 below.) Unfortunately, the only domestic violence that occurred around our TV set, before which three males ages 6 to 58 sat transfixed for nearly four hours while I fumbled in the kitchen, was to the crate of Popeye’s fried chicken that a guest had kindly brought. And I had even tried to skew the outcome by serving a 100% percent testosterone-friendly Super Bowl meal to go along with the Popeye’s: a nutrition-nut-freakout combo of margaritas, beer, grape juice (for the 6-year-old only), chili, and homemade cornbread. That should have jacked up the male aggression by hundreds of points. But nothing happened. Indeed–yuck–the Patriots, from New England, home of wimpy Dem frontrunners John Kerry and Howard Dean, beat North Carolina by a hair. But only a hair!
Supplementing the New England win was the utterly lame half-time show, featuring: old folks (Aerosmith); legal-defense fund-raisers (Janet Jackson, undoubtedly trying to scare up bucks for broke li’l bro Michael); and crotch-grabbers (P. Diddy and scraggly-bearded non-hunk Justin Timberlake), all jumping up and down to spastic hand movements. “This is dumb,” pronounced 6-year-old Johnny. From the mouths of babes. The Super Bowl is for real men. The half-time show this year was for, uh, Patriots fans.