Argumentative Paper

Irina Ciurea

English 111

John Chernega

July 2, 2014

Argumentative paper

Downsides of expressed feelings: hooliganism culture

The guys between 16 and 26 years old, described in Michael Kimmel`s book Guyland, would make their favorite sport`s team a huge passion. Kimmel seems to drop his guard regarding the bad aspects of Guyland culture in chapter six- Sports Crazy. Due to his personal appreciation of sports, the initial awareness of guys` bad behavior resumes to only mentioning that the women`s sports don`t receive as much media attention as men`s sports because “women remind men that they are supposed to be adults” (136). Alternatively, the author focused on revealing the good aspects of men`s passion for sports, such as the bonding occurrence between sons and fathers, people of different ages and races, and the allowance of men to show feelings.

Even though it has a beneficial effect that lets men demonstrate feelings, some of the guys tend to go beyond expressing just a simple opinion on a sport`s match. Their subjectivism regarding a favorite team can easily escalate into violence exerted on the opposite team`s supporters, creating the culture of hooliganism.

In order to analyze the men`s violent manifestation related to their favorite team, I had researched sport`s supporters behavior and culture from several areas of interest. Economics department researcher, Mikael Priks, found in his empirical research that Hooligans resort to aggressive behavior mostly when influenced by feelings of frustration generated by their favorite team`s performance, and that the Hooliganism in general generates high costs of policing(405). From the psychological point of view, Jesse Courtney and Daniel Wann`s investigation demonstrated childhood bullying behaviors reoccurrence in the adult life, aka in the dysfunctional behavior of supporters (194). A perspective across borders of Harvard professor, Andrei Markovits, compares the American and the European...