American college football is nasty, brutish and long – at least three hours, four if the game's on television. It's big business masquerading as amateur sport; serious violence sanctioned by the institutions of higher learning set up to civilise us; a quasi-fascistic spectacle complete with uniforms, martial music and shouted slogans; and, maybe worst of all, a festival of retrograde gender roles.

College football is deplorable, indefensible … and I love it.

I know I shouldn't. College football is the preferred sport of Republican voters, climate change-deniers, and evangelicals. I'm a tree-hugging, socialised medicine-loving pinko academic. I'm a feminist, for God's sake. What am I doing spending every autumn Saturday either in the sweaty stands of Doak Campbell stadium on the Florida State University campus or parked in front of a television screen, yelling my head off at a bunch of 20-year-old boys? What would Mary Wollstonecraft say?

Even in the 21st century, a woman's place in college football is on the sidelines, shaking her pom-poms, inspiring the men on the gridiron who are busy beating the living hell out of each other. The guys on the team wear armor; the girls on the cheerleading squad wear skittish little skirts and bows in their hair.

The culture of football – and if you don't think it has a culture, I invite you to spend an October Saturday in Oxford, Mississippi or Athens, Georgia – at once venerates and disses the feminine. The team mascot at Texas A&M University is a collie bitch named "Miss Reveille". The cadet who looks after her must sleep on the floor if she chooses to lie on his bed, and everyone addresses the dog as "Miss Rev, ma'am". At least good manners are prized in college football.

Equal opportunity, however, is another animal.

Women play ice hockey and rugby at university, but they don't play football. Not big-time football. Oh, there's been a handful of women on high school or small college teams. Erin DeMeglio played quarterback (third string) for her high school in Florida. Brianna Amat earned the place kicker position at Pinckney High in Michigan, booted the winning field goal against Grand Blanc at Pinckney's 2011 homecoming game, and was crowned Homecoming Queen. Erin DeMeglio also won Homecoming Queen. The newspapers carried pictures of them in their tiaras, rather than in their helmets.

Katie Hnida, another kicker, made the squad at the University of Colorado in 2000, but left after she said she was raped by another player. Colorado's head coach, Gary Barnett, denied that the assault happened, arguing instead that her problem was poor performance:

You know what guys do? They respect your ability. You can be 90 years old, but if you can go out and play, they'll respect you. Katie was not only a girl, she was terrible. She couldn't kick the ball through the uprights.

Actually, she could kick it through the uprights: Hnida transferred to the University of New Mexico, where she became the first woman to score in a Division I-A football game.

So, how can I love a game that teaches men that brute force solves everything, that masculinity is all about muscles and that women should be there to serve them, just as the university serves them with a free education, good food, and adulation – as long as they're talented athletes?

I can't excuse the bad behavior simply because the players are also exploited (though they are). Many come from poor families, while their coaches can make many times the salary of the president of the United States: Nick Saban of the No 1-ranked University of Alabama is on nearly $6m a year; the relatively impoverished Jimbo Fisher of No 11 Florida State is paid $2,750,000 a year. The players, whose prowess makes millions for their universities from television rights, sales of kit, souvenirs and the like, don't get a dime.

Indeed, the distinguished historian Taylor Branch says college sport exudes an "unmistakable whiff of the plantation". Hard to argue with that: you go to a game at Florida Field or Tiger Stadium and can't help noticing that most of the fans are white, while most of the players are black.

I know, I still haven't answered the question of how a feminist can love football. Maybe, it's because I'm not sure myself.

I can point to the beauty of the play: the gloriousness of an 80-yard punt return, the balletic grace of a receiver leaping to catch a perfectly thrown spiral in the end zone, and yes, the courageousness of a hell of a tackle, too. But perhaps, it's also a perverse regional amour propre: I'm from the American south, home of politicians who say evolutionary theory is a satanic plot, preachers who insist that Jesus rode to church on a dinosaur, and that continuing racist hangover from secessionism and segregation. College football is one of the things we're actually good at and admirable for.

College football gives us a tribe to belong to, an identity, atavistic and irrational as that is. We are who we are because we are not those assholes who support Clemson or Auburn: we are better-looking, smarter, stronger, more virtuous and way cooler. In 13th-century Florence, it was the Guelphs and Ghibellines; in 21st-century Iraq, it's Shia and Sunni. In Florida, it's Seminoles and Gators.

Our team is virtuous, brave, strong; their team is full of crazy people and criminals. If their team wins, the moral order of the universe is affronted. If my team wins, the heavens sing out with joy.

It ain't right. It ain't rational. But it's deeply human.