More generally, and less publicized, the masculinist character of the sport and its media representation is troubling to anyone with an interest in gender equality. As with many of the very popular spectator sports, heroized men play while sexualized women cheer. The sport itself is violently militaristic. The centrality of football every autumn and winter in American society gives many straight men an opportunity to shirk domestic responsibilities in the name of their fandom and their fantasy standings (perhaps the deep fantasy of this endeavor is that you can stop attending to anything else). Of course millions of women watch. The league has been courting them aggressively, as during the pinkwashing of Breast Cancer Awareness season. I wouldn’t question the authenticity of anyone’s fandom but they must often recognize that the game they love makes little place for them.

Football is not just a cultural fixture, but the most popular and profitable media content in America. While not very much studied by TV scholars, football games on TV get Nielsen ratings that are staggering in an age of niche audiences and narrowcasting. While a hit sitcom today might have ratings numbers that would have led to quick cancellation in previous generations, football games continue to draw a mass audience. Thus the expansion of the football schedule in prime time from one game a week on Mondays to additional games on Thursdays and Sundays. TV money is the golden ticket for the league and the people who get rich from it.

It’s hard to see how the NFL might change as long as it remains the most popular show on television in a big rich country like this one. Some suggest that the most likely outcome for football is that parents will forbid their children from playing out of brain injury fears. But depriving the league of a next generation of players through this kind of cultural change would be a slow process. A class system would likely emerge as less well off communities continue to support football even after cultural elites shun the sport. The prospects for near-term reform don’t look very good. America isn’t about to replace our bad kind of football with the appealing sport called football by the rest of the world, even with the World Cup enthusiasm we saw over the summer. If the World Cup had been programmed against even early season NFL matchups, it’s hard to imagine a similar level of interest in America.

I’m not a huge NFL fan, but I support my home team (Green Bay), and I love pro football as a TV show. It looks really pretty in HD. It has great spectacle value when the broadcast comes from a noisy stadium filled with fans in their home colors. The game itself, despite the irritating frequency of commercial interruption and video replay delays, has a compelling dramatic quality. There are personalities and backstories, rivalries and nemeses, reversals of fortune, a sense of a narrative arc and natural suspense. Many football plays have beauty and grace, surprise and excitement, and the physical skill and stature of the players is simply awesome. The broadcasts increase the sport’s appeal with digital enhancements like the first down line and wild camera angles from overhead. Unlike a lot of TV now, you can peek in on a football game and watch 10 or 20 minutes. It doesn’t demand your total attention. And it’s fun to watch in a group. It gives us something to talk about and sustains many bonds on regional, community, and familial levels.

But the game and the league are so offensive, it’s becoming a guilty pleasure and not in the way we often use that phrase. My guilt has nothing to do with aesthetics, but everything to do with ethics. Is it right to give my attention to this brutal, exploitative, retrograde amusement? Should I turn off the game in the name of doing good? I sometimes wonder. I wouldn’t be the first — others have lately declared that they are giving up the NFL. People refuse media they object to in all kinds of ways, as political protest or articulations of identity.

No one has to watch a show they dislike, but I sense that fans who give up football don’t dislike it. They disapprove of it, and are denying themselves a pleasure out of conscience. I admire this to an extent, but also wonder what it all adds up to. Anyone with a critical sensibility and some media literacy knows how to appreciate popular culture that is on some level offensive. Hollywood movies are full of racist, sexist, heteronormative, classist, and other kinds of not very progressive representations. If you are so offended, you can stay away from the movies. But it’s not that hard to accept that the pleasures they offer are in balance with the offenses they give. It’s good to call out these problems of representation, as it is to call out the dominance of rich white men in the media industries. We should talk about it. At the very least, we need to engage with these representations in order to function as their critics. As long as football is a popular television show, I will probably keep on taking pleasure from it. I don’t think I, personally, am doing any harm. I don’t think football is my fault.

In other forms of ethically contested media, such as pornography, it is sometimes argued that the audience’s attention amounts to complicity in exploitation. During the aftermath of the circulation of stolen photos of young female celebrities last month, some people I follow on twitter suggested (or retweeted) that looking at the images means participating in the crime. Probably the most extreme formulation of this stance would be the statutes that make it a crime to possess child pornography. I wouldn’t want to make too close a comparison between the exploitation of football players by the NFL and the exploitation of children by pornographers. But the juxtaposition here is meant to reveal that we can and do think of paying attention to media having the potential to carry a strong ethical charge. Maybe we should feel guilty for watching football. But this doesn’t make it the audience’s responsibility to change the league and the game. As individual viewers we can’t really effect a meaningful change in the culture of football. We can’t change football by turning it off any more than we can end global warming by turning down our thermostats. Major political-economic and regulatory and cultural changes would have to occur for football to be effectively reformed. (Of course we can work toward those goals if we want to, but individuals not watching and proclaiming their refusal won’t do the trick.) Massive advertiser boycotts would be a good start. Perhaps the best we can do in our own private lives as fans of the game is to watch in our conflicted state, acknowledging at once our pleasure and our displeasure, and hoping for better. Maybe even, one of these days, for the league’s demise. After all, every show on TV gets canceled eventually.