Barstool Sports: A Defense of Mindless Entertainment
Not everything needs to be categorized as "healthy" or "harmful." Some media can just be entertaining.
It’s easy to be wary of any media that caters specifically to young men. There’s reflexive skepticism, and I get why. There’s no shortage of content that warrants genuine concern. In trying to sort through it all, we can sometimes cast too wide a net and apply a strict binary judgment deeming content “good” or “bad.” I’m here to argue that we need, at the very least, a third category: “fine.”
By assuming everything with a low-brow, crude comedic angle is an essential part of a broader problem, we misunderstand the space entirely. Some content is just lighthearted escapism and not everything is some concerted effort to push harmful agendas or exploit social grievances. If we chastise the “fine” and group it in with the “bad,” we create a self-fulfilling prophecy and push young men away from the harmless and toward the caustic.
No content fits the “fine” category better than the men’s entertainment behemoth Barstool Sports. Rather than painting with a broad brush, it might help to look more closely at what Barstool Sports is, and what it isn’t. It’s not toxic reprogramming to turn young men into misogynists. It’s entertainment that may occasionally cross a line.
What Barstool is and is Not
Barstool Sports is a deeply unique media company; half reality TV, half digital media publishing platform. Barstool grew from a local sports paper in Boston, led by its brash and outspoken founder, Dave Portnoy. Portnoy himself is a controversial figure and has drawn his fair share of criticism over the years. I’m not here to defend any of it. That’s not the point of this article. What I will say is the company Portnoy built deserves more respect than it gets.
In the days of YouTube’s infancy, he saw how social media was evolving and predicted where the influencer market would end up. In 2007, before Instagram hit the app stores, Barstool began posting content online. Portnoy started recruiting other content creators (a term that was yet to be invented) to join his platform and form a collective of digital creatives who published both individually and collaboratively, but all under the larger Barstool Sports umbrella. He created a flywheel effect for both the Barstool brand and the public personas of the company’s influences, where virality for one increased everyone’s audience and visibility. It spread the risk around and manufactured a platform that could self-advertise. It’s a brilliant model and one that has been copied many times over. I believe Portnoy was the first to do it.
Over time, it evolved into a quarter-billion-dollar digital publishing house, showcasing sports commentary and cultural discussions alongside comedic bits and bizarre live streams, which may seem boring to the uninitiated but generate shocking levels of engagement. One of Barstool’s defining characteristics is how it puts its employees front and center by filming the workplace at a nearly 24/7 rate, letting the audience see them not just as podcast hosts, but as real authentic people. In many ways, it’s like a reality show set in an office: the interactions among the staff become as much of a draw as the podcasts and sports content itself.
Serving as the original home of the mega-popular podcast Call Her Daddy and the current platform for Pardon My Take, the most popular sports podcast on the planet, Barstool has become a massive social and cultural influence for young people. What Portnoy does, better than anyone else in this space, is leverage the authenticity of both himself and Barstool’s content creators. Videos of Barstool’s main office or quick snippets of meaningless sports debates between employees are ubiquitous on any young man’s social media feed.
Why We Should Avoid Oversimplification
The algorithms love Barstool’s content and young men, hungry for authenticity, love the entertainment. It feels close and familiar as if you know these guys on a deep and personal level. Not as trusted sources of information, but as guys you’d watch football with. That distinction is important. The Manosphere influencers’ harm derives from their positions as self-declared role models for young men who are in desperate search for meaning. That position gives them legitimacy to tell young men how to live and without it, they’re just shock jocks. The content would be meaningless without that air of perceived legitimacy.
Despite misconceptions, Barstool Sports is not Manosphere adjacent. It doesn’t claim to be a platform filled with role models and the influencers would be the first to tell you not to listen to their advice. It can be irreverent and rife with humor that occasionally crosses a line, whatever that may mean, but calling it part of the Manosphere oversimplifies the space and the role this type of content fills. Barstool is, at its core, pure entertainment and it doesn’t pretend to be anything more.
They’re not advising men on how to view society or how to define masculinity. They’re not exploiting grievances to methodically spread divisive mindsets. They’re certainly not out to market themselves as thought leaders on personal development or gender dynamics. You should take them as seriously as they take themselves.
I’m not saying some of Barstool’s jokes aren’t occasionally offensive to some people or that they don’t occasionally cross a line. I’m saying that these jokes are not made with some ulterior motive to socially manipulate their listeners. There is a big difference between Andrew Tate and an offensive comedian, and it does everyone a disservice to pretend otherwise. Lumping Barstool (and others like it) in with genuinely harmful media obscures critical nuances and ends up pushing young men toward the very media you are trying to condemn. It’s like a strict parent banning rock music because it’s corrupting. The kid will roll their eyes and wonder what else society is overreacting about.
It dilutes the seriousness of actual divisive conflict entrepreneurs. The term “Manosphere” loses all meaning if it includes everything beyond the harmless. Grouping it in a category that is somehow inclusive of off-color sports commentary and content made by literal sex traffickers seems like an overreaction. Young men know it’s an overreaction and they tune the warnings out. It also cedes the platform–which is unfathomably popular across all young male demographics–to everyone else. Politically, that’s why the Barstool podcasts hosted a litany of right-wing politicians in the 2024 election cycle. No one from the left would go on the shows.
None of this is to say Barstool Sports is beyond reproach. Like any media platform, it has weathered controversies and will likely face more. People are free to critique its humor, tone, or personalities (just know that they would welcome the free engagement). But if we care about building a healthier online environment, we need to distinguish between intentionally harmful content and content that’s simply low-brow, crude comedic entertainment geared toward college-aged men.
Not everyone will enjoy Barstool’s style, and that’s perfectly fine. It probably means it’s not for you. But in a world where so much hostility and aggression do exist, lumping relatively innocuous platforms into the same category can muddle our understanding and weaken our capacity to respond effectively to actual harmful content. If you reject that argument, then at least consider picking your battles. There’s more important stuff to focus on.