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After their team’s recent manhandling by the Yankees, Sox fans are starting to suspect they’ve been cursed again. But they’ve got it all wrong. Yes, they’re back to being the Yankees’ bitches, but this doesn’t have to be a bad thing. In fact, being a bitch can be fun! I say, stop whining about it. Embrace your inner bitch, Sox Nation!

The truth is, that World Series win put the pressure on. And it started to dawn on Sox Nation that it’s not easy being the alpha dog. Not to say that it’s necessarily easy to lie on your belly with your bum in the air taking it from the alpha dog, either. But it’s hard for different reasons.

What’s happened here is pretty simple, actually. Sox Nation is having a bout of performance anxiety. It’s not a curse. Counseling is often very effective. It happens when you’ve been a bottom all your life and then all the sudden you’re expected to turn around and play the top. And just because you did it once in 86 years doesn’t make you Jeff Stryker. But that’s OK. What if everyone in the world was Jeff Stryker? Well, it’d be pretty boring.

Sure, once in a while it’s fun to pretend. Sometimes you pretend so good it almost seems real. But once you’ve shot your wad, the doubts start crowding in, the anxiety, the little voices. You can’t think with both heads at once, guys.

Let’s look at the facts here. It was mere hours after the Sox won the World Series in ‘04 that the hand-wringing began. They won on the 27th of October, and by the 29th there was an article in the New York Times (I know, I know, but bear with me, here) entitled “With Nothing Left to Win, Fans of Red Sox Suddenly Feel a Loss.” This was only the first in a slew of articles to detail the incipient stages of the coming identity crisis for fans.

“It didn’t take long to go from ecstatic to existential,” the article opened, quoting one devoted fan (who happens to be a Pulitzer Prize-winning expert on genocide at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard): “A team that loses in some ways is going to be easier to identify with for most Americans than one that wins. Are we going to become that which we can never imagine being? Are we winners now, and does that make us sort of less empathetic, less humble? That’s what being on the other side of the jackboot for 86 years leaves people able to do. Yankee fans don’t feel for what we’ve gone through. Are we going to become like them?”

(This from a woman who had just returned from Darfur where she was investigating reports of genocide—luckily she was able to hear the game on web radio while she was in Africa conducting her research.)

Anyway, in the World Series victory (and the reverse of the curse) she saw “a chance for a city to lighten up by removing its chip. ‘Maybe it will just become about a baseball rivalry instead of a humiliated city,’ she said. ‘It could make baseball less about the meaning of life and more about just baseball.’ And, she said, almost as if to reassure herself, ‘that wouldn’t be such a bad thing.’”

Well, no such luck.

Like I said, this was only the very first stirrings of panic in Sox Nation. But once again, it’s reaching a “fever pitch,” if you will. It turns out Sox fans didn’t know how to be winners, after all. But then maybe it’s not really about winning or losing in the final analysis. I know you’re accustomed to looking at this as a rivalry, but, really, it’s a relationship. And this was, well, a little role-reversal. It’s healthy. It can be fun once in a while. Spice things up!

But you have to be prepared to be out of your comfort zone, and Sox Nation wasn’t. At first it was liberating, but soon Sox Fans were scared. Who were they now? What was expected of them? Could they continue to play the role convincingly? With those little voices in their head whispering their doubts? They held it together respectably for awhile, but their latest repeated impalement on the great Yankee beef bayonet has brought all those fears to the fore.

What is needed here is an intervention.

Sox Nation could learn alot from Cesar Millan (the “dog whisperer”), and gay sex. Here’s how:

First Cesar Millan. One episode of “The Dog Whisperer” dealt with this little fluffy white dog–I think its name might even have been Fluffy–but he acted more like Kujo. Cesar quickly diagnosed the problem: the dog was being forced to be the alpha, when he wasn’t really alpha material. And all the stress of being made to act like an alpha was making him cranky, and he snapped at everyone at the least provocation.

Sound familiar, Sox fans?

Once the trouble was diagnosed and appropriate measures taken, everyone was much happier. Fluffy no longer felt pressured to act like something he wasn’t, and his mood changed entirely. Placid, loving, full of puppylike joy. The lesson here: not everyone’s an alpha, and not everyone has to be.

OK, so. What could Sox Nation learn from The Joy of Gay Sex?

Well, first of all, in gay life there are “tops” and there are “bottoms”. Sometimes, to be cute, gay guys refer to their roles as “pitcher” and “catcher,” respectively (there are also those who claim to be “versatile,” or “switch-hitters,” but let’s keep this simple).

Gay guys know that when boys get to balling, whether it’s baseballing or any other kind of balling, they can’t all always be pitchers. Someone’s got to play catcher, too. Sure, pitchers get the prestige, but if you want to know where the real power lies…there was a letter to the editor in the Globe today that sort of sums it up:

“LOST IN all the gloom over the Red Sox’ swift collapse has been the evidence to answer that most perplexing of baseball questions: Who is the league’s Most Valuable Player? With all due respect to Big Papi and Derek Jeter, the MVP for 2006 is now abundantly clear: catcher Jason Varitek. The Red Sox captain would appear to be worth about 50 wins a season to this year’s version of the Sox, as their 60 percent winning percentage has dropped by half in the month since he was injured. Those of us who bemoaned his inconsistent hitting early in the year now understand his true value to the team, especially to its young pitchers who have lost all confidence without his leadership.”

Just like the wikipedia article on “bottoming” says: “The terms ’submissive’ or ‘passive’ have been used for ‘bottom,’ though these may be confusing as the sex in question needn’t be part of a dominance relationship, nor is the bottom necessarily any less ‘active’ than the top.”

See, there’s no shame in being a bottom, Sox fans. In fact, methinks you all protest too much. The fact is, the man who can take a good, er, drubbing from another man might actually be the bigger of the two. But you’ve got to relax, loosen up a little, if you want to enjoy it. And take it like a man, for pete’s sake! All this hand-wringing and these bouts of out-and-out hysteria every time you do what comes natural’s getting old. There’s no shame in being a macho bitch, Sox Nation, it’s the whiny bitches we’ve all had it up to here with.