Why men love sports

Conn Carroll

June 23, 01:44 AM June 23, 01:44 AM

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Ashley St. Clair, author of the book Elephants Are Not Birds, posted some classic clickbait on Twitter last week, noting, “I will never understand men’s obsession with sports.”

First, it is true that men are more obsessed with sports than women. According to a poll conducted by St. Bonaventure University this year, 69% of men reported watching live sports at least twice a week compared to just 47% of women. Other studies have found that of the 200,000 students playing intramural sports at college, just 26% are women. This despite the fact that women outnumber men by 60% to 40% on most college campuses.

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And these gender differences are not confined to the United States. If anything, the gender imbalance between men and women is greater in other countries that are significantly more patriarchal than the U.S.

But why do boys and men across the world like sports more than women?

In her book Warriors and Worriers, Harvard’s Dr. Joyce Benenson explains, “One reasonable and common explanation is that team sports mimic warfare. … Team sports allow players to display their own unique skills and ally with one another to defeat the other team. Boys who might have been competing to best one another easily become teammates when another team materializes. Even boys who dislike each other intensely will cheer each other on when an enemy or opposing team arrives.”

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“Boys seem to be spontaneously attracted to team sports,” Benenson concludes. She notes elsewhere in the book that this attraction to group activity begins in infancy. Before any socialization has occurred, baby boys prefer looking at videos of groups of children playing together over videos of single individuals playing together. Girl babies show no preference between group and individual activity, and those boy babies with the highest testosterone were also the most likely to be drawn to group activity.

For millions of years, male survival depended on a man’s ability to follow the rules, work well with others, and have the mental and physical toughness to out-compete other groups of men. Given this biological fact, it shouldn’t be that surprising that men still retain an interest in watching other men compete in group physical competitions.