The Two-Line Pass

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Man, it’s a tough time for a hockey fan. Another lockout, another reason to no longer want to be alive. I get it.

But there’s an unintended victim in all this that is really going to be hurting once the season doesn’t start. I’m talking of course about the wives and girlfriends of every hockey-lovin’ man in the world, who will not know what comfort food to cook their sobbing husbands, and won’t be able to distract him with a Sens game while she needs to go food shopping.

Fortunately, a champion of women’s rights named Patricia Dawn Robertson recently wrote an editorial for the Globe and Mail, entitled “Why women cannot accept an NHL lockout,” addressing these myriad issues the lockout has caused for the fairer and more subservient sex.

Some of the more appalling sections from the piece are as follows:

It’s not the immediate fall season that has me worried. I can keep hubby happy with Saskatoon’s new Lingerie Football League for a few more months. We can ride out Thanksgiving with its nap-inducing turkey dinner. The exhausting run-up to the 100th Grey Cup will also fill the drama quotient until early December.

But what happens on those evenings when I need to sneak Christmas shopping in through the side door while hubby’s watching the Canucks? Midwinter is the real test of any relationship in rural Saskatchewan, and I don’t like the odds without televised hockey in my arsenal.

Terrible. But it gets worse:

What do the women of Canada need to do to fix this impasse? I say we appeal to Mr. Bettman’s wife, Shelli, to work her magic. Couldn’t she leave a few glossy brochures promoting the benefits of early retirement on her hubby’s night table?

No more neck rubs, Gary, until you reach a settlement with the NHL Players’ Association. And Costco chicken and bagged salad will remain on the rotating dinner menu until I see a centre ice face-off.

Okay, so here’s the thing with this column. It doesn’t make sense. If it’s supposed to be satire — which I guess it might? — then it’s not doing a very good job. (Deadspin, likewise, had no idea what to make of that aspect of this disaster.) In the same way that While The Men Watch was supposedly for the benefit of women, it also made them look like the very worst stereotypes about them. If this is playing on that, then what even is the point? While The Men Watch was six months ago, and pretty much universally derided. CBC has surely hired some gal — and been careful not to pay her as much as a man doing the same job — to sweep it under the rug.

If it’s not playing off that abhorrent programming choice, then, like, who is it targeting? Women who actually think like this? Dumb husbands? The league? Hockey culture? It’s all baffling. The point of parody, as I understand it, is to make something the subject of mockery, either subtly or not so subtly. This column really only serves to make its author, one Patricia Dawn Robertson of rural Wakaw, Saskatchewan, look bad. So I guess if she was targeting herself, she nailed it.

But the thing is this: I think she might be serious. There’s a very real possibility that this is the case. I’m led to believe she doesn’t actually like hockey very much because she refers to the “Montreal Canadians” and no one who is actually a hockey fan makes a mistake like that. Perhaps this is some deep irony, that she’s letting this abominable hockey sin pass without comment, but given how terrible the rest of the article is — including SIX uses of the word “hubby” — I don’t think she’s clever enough for that.

After all, she’s a woman.

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This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2012 at 12:12 pm and is filed under Hilarity. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.