KEY POINTS:
Who would have thought it? Who would have thought that when you and I were sitting there, watching Sportscafe all those years ago, that we were participating in a "discourse about gender that privileged new lad masculinity and reinforced the marginalisation of women"?
But that's exactly what we were doing, if you believe a Waikato University sports sociologist. Dr Toni Bruce, a former sports journalist, made her comments at a Sociological Association conference in Hamilton recently, and unbelievably, she's not taking the piss. She's deadly serious.
Sportscafe, with its sexual innuendo and its voiceless, nameless dancers and its camera angles of Eva the Bulgarian's lips, breasts and buttocks can be seen, if you have the squinty, blinkered vision of Dr Bruce, as the "last bastion where men are safe from the threat of women" and as the "reassertion, if not desperate clinging to [of] values that are culturally perceived to be under threat".
As the boys might say, get your hand off it, love. Dear me! Surely, even in this day and age there is such a thing as harmless fun. Although I'm not a big watcher of television, given my late-night working hours, I have seen Sportscafe, and I've also seen a couple of episodes of Game of Two Halves - the other programme Dr Bruce felt reinforced male chauvinism. And while I wouldn't say I was a huge fan, I enjoyed the shows I saw. Some of the humour was a bit blokey, but then I figured middle-aged mothers from the 'burbs weren't the target audience. This is the way some blokes talk among themselves, and clearly quite a few people enjoy eavesdropping on their shenanigans, as is evidenced by the popularity of both shows. Game of Two Halves especially has enjoyed an incredibly long run by New Zealand television standards, and the format has stayed pretty much the same for years. Blokey blokes and the odd sheila who's a good sort and can give a bit of stick take each other on in a test of sporting knowledge and give each other grief along the way.
The humour is not highbrow, the participants get laughs by bludgeoning the audience with the blunt force of their puerile antics, there's more swearing and cussing than in the entire series of The Sopranos - and that's about it.
People who don't like that sort of show aren't compelled to watch it. It gets no New Zealand On Air funding, and it's on late enough so that it's not going to subvert the minds of the nation's impressionable young boys who, Dr Bruce indicates, would turn into chest-banging rugby playing oiks with a bad attitude to chicks if they were exposed to these evil shows.
In fact, the characters from the Game of Two Halves and the Waikato sociologist may have more in common with each other than they care to think.
Both use language as a signifier of their tribe, and both use language as a barrier.
In the lads' case, the frequent use of expletives, the put-downs of one another and the fact that most of their words are monosyllabic brands them as belonging to a group where men are larrikins, girls are good sorts and nothing's too serious.
People offended by the language will be offended by the boys themselves, so the language acts as a warning. Similarly, Dr Bruce's dry academic language acts as an identifier and a barrier.
As a former journalist, she knows, or she should know, how to cut to the chase, to say what she means in as simple and clear cut way as possible. By choosing to speak the language of the ivory towers, she's telling us she belongs to an exclusive group that can interpret her academic waffle, and she's also warning proles to back off because they're not going to understand.
I hope that Dr Bruce would be able to use different language and present herself in a different way when talking to different audiences - or participating in discourses with variant subjects.
Similarly, most of us will change our language and our persona depending on the situation we're in.
Marc Ellis, Matthew Ridge et al are putting on an act. A caricature of themselves that is an aspect of their personality, but not all.
And perhaps that's what Dr Bruce is doing too.
