I watch football from time to time, especially when the kids are here and it’s a typical fall weekend in Seattle, where the sky is dark and gray and the playgrounds muddy and cold. For me it’s a little relief from supervising the kids and cleaning up after them, and a bit of an excuse to just sit down for a while.

However, lately I’ve noticed that following every game the local FOX affiliate is showing a “most wanted” series that features almost exclusively guys wanted for some scuffle with a girlfriend. In tough tones the narrator excoriates these vile thugs for allegedly smacking innocent little angels, and demands that we identify them and help throw them in prison for their heinous crimes. In most cases, the guys are convicted felons, which explains how they ended up on the most wanted list, but the crimes they have been accused of hardly rise to the level of psycho killer or bank robber.

For example, first featured after last Sunday’s game was Kimo Warren, a young dandy and convicted felon who allegedly pushed his girlfriend, threw a lamp, and threw a drink at her. He also allegedly pushed the woman’s son down, for which I definitely think he ought to do some time (if my ex’s boyfriend ever laid a hand on my son I’d want him in jail), but even if it’s all true it’s fairly run-of-the-mill DV, which happens every day all over the place.

Next came Travis Jackson, another felon, who is accused of punching, kicking and choking his ex-girlfriend while she was holding her two-year-old. Sounds pretty serious, but this is an accusation, not a conviction.

Finally, a Samoan named Steven Faausu was simply described as an “accused woman abuser” who is wanted for second degree DV assault.

Chances are that the guys are guilty of something — the only non-felon among them has obvious gang tattoos and looks like a low-life, but aren’t these single mothers complicit as well? What kind of a mother brings a criminal into her home with her child? Sure, arrest the guys if they are criminals, but why not seize the children and return them to their father, assuming he isn’t in prison? Obviously, the kids would be safer with him than with some trashy slut who runs around with criminals.

That this follows a football game, which is a male recreational activity, strikes me as fairly tasteless. It would be like airing photos of prostitutes after an episode of Mad Men and demanding that the female viewers help track them down and lock them up. I seriously doubt that most male football fans want to be treated to heavy handed “lock ‘em up” programs right after watching something they enjoy. In fact, I doubt that football players themselves very much like it, considering how often they are accused of and arrested for domestic violence.

Although I’m not one to indulge in conspiracy theories very often, I think there must be something more than simple coincidence to this choice in programming. That the wanted men profiled after football games are mainly DV suspects, when this category is a minority of all wanted men in the state, suggests to me that the NFL may have made some kind of deal with feminists, who have been targeting football for some time.

This year we’ve had the pink ribbon campaign, which features players wearing pink, the incident with the slutty Mexican reporter in the Jets’ locker room for which the Jets were forced to apologize, the Brett Favre sexting incident, and lingering claims of sexual assault perpetrated by players. In the past, feminists have (falsely) claimed that the Superbowl is a time of unprecedented wife-beating, and they are currently attempting to find some angle to leverage something out of the NFL.

My bet is that the Orwellian post-game demands that we men go out and kick the crap out of accused DV perps is some kind of concession the NFL has worked out with feminists. They are balancing the male programming of football with something that makes feminists feel warm and fuzzy inside, namely the imprisonment of men. Feminism has become so shrill, so overwhelming, that it’s shoved in guys’ faces even when they just want to sit down and watch a ball game. How much worse can it get?