Puck Bunnies

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I live in a big sports town. It's hard not to get a least a little twinge of excitement when one of ours wins brings home the big prize in their sport, and another seems poised to (or, at least, go further in the playoffs than they have in a long time.) That being said, I don't write about being a sports fan, or rather, being a woman and sports fan. I think you can imagine how it would go.

The pro-sports world is one of the last bastions of overt, acceptable, misogyny, but I hadn't heard this particular insult until I saw it crawl across my feed via a post from fuckyeahfeminists:

Puck Bunnies.

From Sports Illustrated : "Hockey fans come in all shapes and sizes, buy few are as passionate as the league’s female fans (aka - Puck Bunnies). Whether it’s proposing to a player through the boards or painting their stomachs with the name of their favorite team, these ladies are not shy about expressing their devotion. In this gallery, SI pays tribute to the NHL’s Puck Bunnies."

I'm not going to get into a debate that pits "real" fans against "groupies," but the SI slideshow is painting with to wide a brushstroke. Another thing? Why is finding a player attractive anathema to being a "real" fan? Emma Harger for Yahoo Sports writes:

"No. Not every female hockey fan identifies herself as a "puck bunny." In fact, most of the women I know explicitly hate the term because that's the first insult men throw at women when the man's goal is to tell the woman that she doesn't belong in his clubhouse. It's a phrase that's used to imply shame for women having healthy, normal thoughts about men. 

Meanwhile, men are free to think this way about women of every stripe, including athletes. Remember Hope Solo, the goalkeeper for the U.S. women's national soccer team? Just search for her name and one of the first suggestions is "hope solo hot." It has millions of results. No one ever scolds a male soccer fan for saying he finds Solo attractive and talented. But as soon as a woman says that a male athlete's looks, in addition to his talent, are satisfactory to her, to many men that means she's only in it for the sex."

I see some definite parallels between this and how female music fans are treated: you can't be serious; you're just a groupie. If you admit to even a ounce of attractive to a musician, well obviously you're only in it for the sex. This has, literally, come out of the mouths -- and pens -- of men who drool over the looks of artists like Nico Case or Jenny Lewis, and some of those men are still well- respected critics.

Affixing labels to female fans is just, as Harger says, another way that the professional sports world tells women they don't belong -- and if they do, they're only there because of the hotness of the players. They're not real fans.