Today I watched a guy score.

He went through the bases sequentially. Patiently. First base. Second base. Third base. You know, how most people do it.

Hey there, get your mind out of the dugout! I’m writing about baseball here, and this is not “The Wednesday Hump.”

Sex may be all around us — in the Daily Nexus, on Del Playa Drive, in Sociology 152A – but when is it appropriate to ditch the sex talk and focus on the platonic game?

I say let sports be sports. Leave sex out of the game.

Yet whether we like it or not, sex constantly creeps into our athletic vocabularies.

Running the bases is one of the most essential aspects of the game of baseball. A team cannot score points, or win for that matter, if its players cannot make their way home. Still, I’ve heard guys (and girls) everywhere talk about getting to second base with a significant other more often than I’ve heard my baseball playing friends gush about their game-winning homerun. Adam Carolla, co-host of the nationally syndicated call-in radio show “Loveline,” has even gone so far as to define the sexual acts associated with each base.

And it doesn’t end with baseball.

While covering a women’s basketball game in the Thunderdome, I noticed a group of students at the top of the bleachers holding up a sign reading “Cheerleaders Suck.” I reacted with disgust that these students were knocking something they were not even attempting themselves. Unfortunately, my friend Tanya interpreted the sign at a lower level.

“Those girls (cheerleaders) do give a lot of head,” she said.

Oh Tanya, Tanya.

Although it may be a phallic fallacy, the fact that female cheerleaders are constantly labeled as sluts brings the erotic back into the game. What do stunts and cheers have to do with sex? Nothing. I’m sure girls who cheer are not any more promiscuous than Jane Doe sitting next to me in Spanish class. Which leads me to another issue: male cheerleaders.

When a group of people see a male cheerleader, the majority of the viewers immediately label him as homosexual. Likewise, female football players are called “butch.” We tend to attack a person’s sexuality based solely on the activities he or she participates in. And the stereotypes are not limited to sports. Actors, dancers, artists and computer geniuses, among others, are all judged as well.

If male cheerleading is considered homoerotic, why then are football players who slap one another’s butts as an encouraging mid-game gesture not judged in the same way?

Bringing sports into the gutter once more, wrestling may oftentimes be a sexy game of foreplay. But when two men compete in a wrestling match on a mat it’s “gay”. Excuse me, but wrestling is wrestling. I’d like to see Average Joe escape from a half nelson.

I asked another friend what he thought about sexual references in sports.

“What about volleyball? Those girls are hot,” he said.

And so our conversation turned to spandex.

“You can’t leave sex out of anything,” he said.

Spoken like a true man, I suppose. But even so, a base is a base and wrestling is wrestling. Stealing bases and having grand slams in the bedroom ought to stay in the bedroom, not the ballpark…quit it with what you’re thinking right now.

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