It's a Man's World

So, last night, I'm watching the Amazing Race, and, recapping the previous episode, Phil describes something as "bigger than 20 football fields." I don't remember the exact number of football fields. It could have been 50, or 100. Roughly, a fuckload of football fields.

Naturally, he meant American football, not soccer. Which makes measuring things in "football fields" an American-centric term for a start, even though America is not the only place the Amazing Race airs.

But I imagine it's also rather alienating for most women, who, even if they're football fans, have most likely never played the game. It's almost totally an exclusively male sport: There's no organized football league for American girls (like there is for boys); though there is the occasional story about a solitary girl who plays for a high school football team, there aren't girls' high school football teams; there aren't girls' college football teams; and there's no equivalent to the NFL for professional female football players.

I know that a football field is 100 yards, or 300 feet, but that doesn't mean a hell of a lot to me (especially since I don't even know its width off the top of my head)—almost certainly not as much as it means to my dad, who played football and spent years coaching high school football, who's spent a lot of time actually on a football field getting some internalized sense of its perspective, rather than just regarding it, as I do, as an effectively useless synonym for "big."

Clearly, there are plenty of men who have never played football, either, for whom the term is just as inadequate. And that would be true of any sports reference—it's 50 soccer pitches, 200 basketball courts, 450 Olympic-sized swimming pools, 1,000 tennis courts!—but it's interesting that the only one typically used is, by far, the least female-friendly possible, thus making it perhaps the most inaccessible for the general population.

Although admittedly perfect for this guy: