The combination of media and sport represents a powerful ideological and cultural force, which deserves immediate and critical attention. For example football is the peak masculine sport in the U.S. It is a sport where the definition of excellence is premised on strength, where there is a readiness to injure an opponent and where men have a considerable advantage over women. All of these features are heavily promoted by the mass media. The amount of pain a player can inflict and withstand is valued as a measure of 'manliness'. It is this process which makes football a vehicle for masculine identification. The qualities of a good football player, which include physical strength, the capacity to be violent and the ability to play in pain reflect and reinforce a culturally valued form of masculinity:.
Thus the attempts of commentators and legislators to find "solutions" to the problem of crowd violence and violence amongst players has a massive flaw: one of the functions of male sport has been precisely to provide ritualized form of violence. The ritualization does not preclude actual violence taking place on or off the "field". (Horrock1995: 154).
This shows us that male violence with in the field of sport is considered ok allowing popular male athletes the freedom to commit violent acts with less punishment. A male that is not protected within his athleticism is shunned and looked away in jail if they are caught committing the same acts. Sports associated with the dominant form of 'manliness' are the most culturally valued in our society. .
There are no discrete models for different masculinities working class, intellectual, or urban, there's neither a master blueprint of which all other masculinities are simply versions. Instead "the whole diversity of lived masculinities can be understood as specific realizations of a vague set of ideas and demands, images and stories that are defined as masculine, adapted to the concrete situation an individual or group has to cope with"(Peterson 1998: 126).
