...These Messages...

I thought we had an understanding: the game is for the dudes and the commercials are for the ladies. This is the way Super Bowl Sunday is structured in America. Other countries have their own Super Bowl Sunday traditions, most of which fail to include light beer, deep fried gluttony (with Velveeta-Rotel dip!), barely sublimated homoerotic wrestling en masse while wearing plastic suits and, oh yes, the actual Super Bowl. Travel abroad and you will see: nearly everyone else does it wrong. They can't even get the game on during prime viewing hours, that's how inept other countries are at celebrating the most provincial of inflated self-important hypernarrowly autoreferent sporting exercises. It's like they're not even trying.

But just because the Chinese spend Super Bowl Sunday in blasphemous indifference, treating it like it was any other normal Chinese day, chain smoking harsh Russian cigarettes and selling unwanted girl children to sad-faced round-eyes, that doesn't give us license to let our own traditions fall into abeyance.

I watched the game and I was, as is dictated by cultural precedent, moved to respond beyond all proportion to the fortunes of teams I have no affiliation or allegiance to, nor frankly any interest in were it any other day of the year. I yelled, I cursed, I abused the furniture, I punched my wife in the stomach because I believe in little ideas like duty, honor, country. I didn't want to punch my wife in the stomach, of course not, but the Saints failed to convert a third down after an incomplete pass on a very catchable ball. Failing to deliver domestic abuse in response to such an outrage would be like Christmas Eve with no visit from the police. The spirit of the holiday would have been violated by the abrogation of responsibility.

Because what is tradition but the thoughtless continuation of a behavior imposed on us by an irrational and childish fear of the opinions of our elders? When you pledge a fraternity, you get teabagged every night for the first week in the house. Do you think those guys want to teabag you? Of course not. That would be gay and they can't be gay because they are in a fraternity and everyone knows fraternity = vagina-loving heterofest. What else could a house full of rough-hewn, dewy young men, living, eating, sleeping and showering together possibly mean?

No, fraternity brothers teabag one another because when they were pledges, that's what happened to them. Want is not a factor in the causational algebra. It happens because it must because perpetuation is stability, the glue that holds societies together against the screaming, blustering tempest of anarchy and creeping socialism. If Castro and been teabagged a couple of times, Cuba would still be free.

Traditions mean something. That's what dismayed me so much about the Super Bowl television commercials. That's what the women are there for. They aren't there for the game. If they were there for the game, that would make them lesbians and we've already established that homosexuality is inherently destabilizing and unAmerican. Women need to be lured in, otherwise they will find something else to do. We all know what that means: Super Bowl party with no seven layer dip. Should we just eat salsa out of a jar? Are we animals?

It's scientifically proven that women love Super Bowl commercials. Every woman I know can't get enough of giant-breasted chicks in T-shirts two sizes too small selling internet domain names or instances where small animals violently attack unsuspecting men in competition for snack food.

But this year, for some reason, the thematics were all wrong. Commercial after commercial after commercial was about... men. And maleness. And the absence thereof and how Product X would return the maleness to men that has somehow been lost.

How would a woman be interested in watching that? Males emasculated by the necessary compromises of coexistence with the non-male half of the entire population of the Earth? They live that every day. They don't want to see that and it sure as fuck won't make them want to pay for that question-answering texting service thing I didn't understand.

Keep it up, Madison Avenue. Keep it up and you'll drive the women all away. Then we'll have Super Bowl with no ladies. It will be a bunch of dudes in matching clothes huddled around, ripe with emotion, watching a bunch of other dudes in skin-tight clothing falling on top of one another over and over and over again for four hours.

You know what that's called? Wednesday night at Eta Kappa Rho. And that shit is supposed to stay private.