There’s a five-second moment that happens when I walk into a room full of “hockey guys”. I clock the room, the room clocks me, and somewhere in those five seconds a decision gets made about who I am and what I know.
I’ve gotten very good at reading that moment. I can tell who’s going to talk to me like a colleague, who’s going to talk to me like a guest, who’s going to ignore me altogether.
The men around me don’t go through any of this. Nobody asks them to prove they’ve watched a game. Their takes get to be takes. Mine get treated as evidence in a trial with a jury that already has a lean.
I want to talk about that feeling, because it explains a lot about how I work, how I write, and why one magazine article made a lot of people upset.
The Fine Toothed Comb
When I’m putting together a piece, especially for Hockey Wilderness, I turn into Santa Claus. I make the list and I check it twice, and then I check it a third time because the second one felt suspiciously smooth. Every stat gets traced to its source. Every date gets confirmed. Every “led the league in” gets a second look to make sure it wasn’t actually “tied for second among skaters with 40 or more games played.” I have pulled up a box score at midnight to confirm a number I was already 99 percent sure about, because 99 percent isn’t enough.
Some of that is plain journalistic integrity, and I’d do it regardless. Getting it right is the job, and one I take seriously. But I’d be lying if I said that was the whole reason.
A lot of it is fear of the fine-toothed comb.
Here’s how the comb works. If a man is off by a point in a stat line, he gets a correction, maybe a “whoops” tweet, and everybody moves on with their day. If I’m off by a point, I get a screenshot, a quote tweet, and a thread explaining that this is exactly why women shouldn’t write about this sport. One error stops being an error and becomes a verdict on everyone who looks like me. I’m not just representing my own work, I’m representing the entire category of “women who write about hockey,” and the category is apparently on probation.
That’s the tax, and it’s invisible and constant. It costs me extra hours, extra stress, and a low hum of dread every time I hit publish. Nobody budgets for it and nobody sees us paying it. It sits in the background of every sentence I write, asking whether this is the one that gets screenshotted.
The “Female Fan” is a Character, and I’m Sick of Her
You’ve met her. Even if you’ve never met her, you know of her, because she’s been drawn for you so many times you might even think you know her personally.
She’s wearing a jersey that’s a little too clean, with a name on the back she can’t quite pronounce. (Pink, probably. Or bedazzled. Or cut in a way that says the team made it for her specifically, because god forbid she wears something that isn’t hemmed tighter at the ribs than the “boy” jerseys) She’s at the game because her boyfriend dragged her, or because a player’s face showed up on her For You page, or because a friend said the team had “so many hot guys.” She cheers at the wrong moments. She asks what icing is, loudly, mid-play, so the people two rows up can hear. She knows every player’s birthday and zero players’ ice time. She has a favorite because of his eyes, and when he gets traded she’s heartbroken for reasons that have nothing to do with her team’s cup odds.
She is sweet, and she is harmless, and she is, above all, unserious. She isn’t real.
Nobody says “women can’t understand hockey” anymore. Nobody has to. The caricature does it for them. It lives in the head-tilt when I mention a take. It lives in the “oh, you actually know that?” delivered with such warmth that it sounds like a compliment. It lives in the guy who tells me his girlfriend “is getting into hockey now, she’s so cute about it,” as if she were a puppy learning a trick. It lives in the quiz, the little pop-quiz that happens in the first minute of any conversation, where I get asked to name the offside rule or a third-line center before I’m allowed to have an opinion on anything.
The part that gets me is how efficient the caricature is. She’s a shortcut. She lets people skip the work of finding out what any actual woman thinks. Why ask me about the penalty kill when you already know who I am? I’m the girl in the pink jersey. I’m here for the cute boys. The fact that I might also have a doctorate-level interest in how the league handles injuries doesn’t fit in the little box, so it gets quietly thrown out.
The real women in this fanbase are nothing like her. Or rather, we’re a thousand different things, and a few of us are a lot like her, and that’s fine too, because a real fan can be anything. I love a bedazzled jersey just as much as the next person. And I don’t particularly find it to be a crime to think an athletic man is attractive. And I don’t think women need to be any type of fan so a man can approve of it.
But I know a woman who has tracked expected goals for ten seasons now. I know a woman with season tickets and a shelf of bobbleheads she will defend with her life. I know women who write about hockey, women who run stats accounts, women who write fanfic, and women who would sooner eat a puck than read it. I know women who have watched hockey their entire lives and women who found it last year because a friend dragged them to a game and they loved it. The only thing we have in common is that we like the same sport and we all got lumped together anyway.
There is no “female fan.” There’s a cartoon, and there are thousands of actual women who are tired of being measured against her.
And notice who the cartoon never gets applied to. Nobody builds a segment around whether men understand icing. Nobody asks a player how “the male fans” feel about him. Men get to be a thousand kinds of fan: the stats guy, the superstitious guy, the guy who yells “Shoot!” on the power play, the guy who cried at the playoffs. Men get to contain multitudes.
The GQ Piece Does Not Exist in a Vacuum
Which brings me, finally, to the Macklin Celebrini feature in GQ.
I want to be clear. A player with this much hype is going to be asked awkward questions. That’s part of being the face of a franchise and part of being a young star in the social media era. I’m not here to say nobody should ever bring up the fandom. It’s a real part of the sport’s current moment, and I’d be a fool to pretend otherwise. I also think a feature like this is genuinely good for hockey. A glossy national profile of one of the league’s best young players pulls in people who’ve never watched a shift, and I’m for that. And to its credit, the piece spends some time on the hockey: the contract, the Hobey Baker at 17, his college coach raving about his work ethic.
But then it turns to the fans.
First, the setup. After the hockey, the piece pivots to his “heartthrob looks” (the jawline, the eyes, the hair he pushes back during press conferences) and says he could have been cast in Heated Rivalry or Off Campus. Then it says he’s become an “unwitting target” of “parasocial projection” among those shows’ many “(mostly female)” viewers. It describes those shows as making a lot of watchers “hungry for love or horny (or both),” and primed to go looking for those things in a hockey arena. Newcomers fill the stands and make TikToks about “the boy aquarium.”
Then comes the question. The writer asks Celebrini what he thinks of the narratives people spin, and “the fan fiction element.” He lowers his eyes, quiets his voice, and says, “I don’t really think about it.” The piece notes he seems ready to move on to another topic. He’s 20. He was handed a question about what strangers write about him, framed around the women who write it.
Now, the piece isn’t pulling this from thin air, and I’m not going to pretend it is.
I’m not denying that Celebrini has fans who relate to him purely as a parasocial figure. Of course he does. Every young star does, and some of that behavior really is over the line. He says himself there have been times where “it’s a little much,” and that he gets the occasional crazy DM. The interviewer didn’t pull this out of thin air.
But that’s one slice of a much bigger picture, and the piece treats the slice like the whole pie. The most visible, most extreme corner of the fandom got the spotlight, and the rest of us got folded into it. That’s how a cartoon gets made. You take the loudest version of a group, you let her stand in for everyone.
Nobody ever invites us to the table
Read the coverage of “women and hockey” and count how many women are actually speaking. A man interviews a man about how women feel about the sport. A man writes about the female fanbase. A man edits it, a man writes the headline, and the women it’s about find out when it shows up on their timeline.
It’s a closed loop. The men are the experts, the men are the sources, and the men are the audience, and we are the subject, studied from a respectful distance like a rare bird. We’re discussed in the third person while sitting in the same building, sometimes in the same row.
And I’m tired. I’m tired in a way that has very little to do with any one article. It’s the accumulated weight of being a debate. Every few months the cycle runs again: women are good for the sport, women are ruining the sport, women only like the players, women secretly know more than you think, women are a business opportunity, women are a problem to be solved. My existence as a person who likes hockey keeps getting turned into a conversation, and I’m never the one holding the microphone.
I didn’t sign up to be a talking point.
What it would look like to do this right
I don’t want this to be only a complaint, so here’s the constructive part.
Hire women to write the stories about women in hockey, and then let us also write the stories that aren’t about women in hockey. I cannot stress that second part enough. We can cover a trade, a playoff series, a draft class, a goalie controversy, and we can do it without a “perspective” label slapped on top.
If you’re going to ask a player about the fanbase, ask about the fans, plural. And if you want to know what women think about hockey, ask a woman. Ask a few. Ask them about the power play, the trade deadline, the officiating, the goalie who deserved better. Let us answer as individuals with different opinions, which, shocker, we have.
And for God’s sake, stop treating women as a monolith.
At the end of the day I’ll keep making the list. I’ll keep checking it twice. I’ll keep doing the audit at the door and then sitting down anyway, because my work is good and I’m not going anywhere. I will not be talked out of this room.
But I would really love it if, the next time someone wants to know what women think about hockey, they just asked one of us.
We’re right there. We’ve always been right there.
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