What do you call a sports network that lost 4 million subscribers?

The View (without the balls), or ESPN.

Hardcore Social Justice Warrior Advocacy Channel With Occasional Highlight Reels of Home Runs Hemmorhaging Subscribers, For Some Reason

—Ace

ESPN -- Your one stop shop for listening to a morbidly fat white sportscaster, who looks like if you threw him a ball his instinct would tell him to cover it in cheese sauce and cookie crumbles and then eat it and then poop his pants, lecture you that you shouldn't body-shame Lena Dunham.

They lost four (4) million (000,0000) subscribers last year.

And I guess that's just among the cable networks that allow you to de-subscribe.

Gee I wonder why men are no longer watching?

I think men have an inborn sexist impulse. I really do. Hear me out.

I think that at some point in a boy's life, say from age 11 to 13, he starts tuning out his mother's voice.

Oh, it's not because he doesn't love his mom. All good boys love their mom. But boys get sick of being told what to do, and it's their mothers (being the primary care-givers) who do most of the telling them what to do.

Plus, when Dad tells you what to do, it's occasional, and it's serious. Dad brings the threat of a belting.

But mom? She's always telling you what to do, and she's also less violent, so it's safer to ignore her.

Anyway, men start tuning out the "do this, do that" coming from women's voices.

Alas, I think this does carry over to later years, and I do think this sort of rebellion-against-mom (which is really not a rebellion against mom per se, but a stab at actual "adult" autonomy) carries over and men get kind of annoyed listening to women nag at them.

But not just women. Men might be particularly sensitive to a female voice nagging at them, but what they learned, in a psycho-social reaction at age 11-13, was to rebel from anyone nagging at them in that hectoring, lecturing, You Must be a Good Boy voice.

Men don't like hearing this bullshit from men, either. In fact, we might actually hate it more, because men are the same animals as we are. Women are different animals. When the same animal as you attempts to assert his dominance by putting you lower on the social pecking order by asserting his primacy by lecturing you as if you were a child and he were your daddy, men rebel and tune out -- innately, sometimes counterproductively (Because seriously, we really need to listen sometimes -- don't we, ladies? But we can't.)

Why the fuck does ESPN think men are tuning in to hear their priests-with-no-gods sermonizing?

How long do they think that real men -- rebellious, cantankerous, belligerently autonomous men -- will put up with this Atheist Sunday School bullshit for?

I tuned out my mom's nagging, and I loved her.

Why the fuck would I put up with it from Fat Chris Berman?

Hey Chris -- instead of lecturing me on gun violence, how about you put that energy into something productive, like squats?

You big fat flappy mouthed dum-dum.

Old Wisdom: ESPN is just Dungeons and Dragons for guys who used to beat up guys who played Dungeons and Dragons.

New Wisdom: ESPN is Bravo for guys who find all that hammer-swinging and beam-cutting on house-flipping shows to be reductively masculine

By the way: Tonight begins the Olympics, also known as the Sports Pageant For People Who Don't Actually Like Sports (TM).

It'll be on NBC, because, of course, it Must be.

Shouting! Is! High! Energy! Programming!

34 There is some ESPN show that comes on at 5:00 that has a round robin format that is absolutely some of the most obnoxious crap on TV.
What is with the fcking bells? And yelling?
Posted by: nip sip
...
42 I hate just imagining it.
My idea for an ESPN "high energy sports debate show" would be sixteen people on screen, lots of wacky sound effects and intrusive graphics, and where everyone has a strict 3-second countdown to speak, and if they go over it they get THE AIRHORN and a PUNCH IN THE BALLS FROM A MIDGET REFEREE

Posted by: ace

http://ace.mu.nu/#365057


My comments:

ESPN got rid of Ditka, got rid of Schilling, and put some college softball-playing bimbo in the booth to explain how men play baseball. If she was any good, she would have been an MLB player.

MLB Network has writers (men) who did not play in The Show, but those writers do not explain to anybody how to hit a baseball.

How does John Kruk stay with that network?