The humiliation of women in sport demeans us all
Hugo Gurdon
Video Embed
Retired members of the U.S. women’s soccer team lost 12-0 last week to a hotchpotch of men, one of them 46 years old, from a fourth-rate team named for the Welsh town of Wrexham.
Twelve goals in a soccer match would normally be as eye-popping as 100 points in an NFL game. But the shock, if one can call it that, was ameliorated by the event being a lighthearted confrontation in The Soccer Tournament, a banally named competition modeled on the World Cup, with many rules changed to make scores higher, play easier, and injuries unlikely.
INFLATION ISSUE STILL LOOMS FOR BIDEN DESPITE PROGRESS
The last point is crucial, for men dominated the competition and their size and speed advantages over women would otherwise have made mixed-sex matches dangerous. They nevertheless made the U.S. women’s games farcical. The Americans lost all three, conceding 24 goals while scoring just one.
It may seem humorless to quibble about such an unimportant affair. But there are reasons for regret beyond the fact that $1 million was at stake and the women stood no chance of winning it.
First, their matches required fakery, with players and commentators colluding in the disingenuous pretense that this was a real sporting event rather than a charade with the result never in doubt. Before the match, Heather O’Reilly, a FIFA Women’s World Cup champion and three-time Olympic gold medalist, shouted with defiant bravado that the Wrexham team was “about to go down!” Standing next to her was the barrel-chested 46-year-old Lee Trundle, grinning from ear to ear at the comedy they were about to perform.
It was mildly fun and charming all the way up until the match began. But then, Trundle scored four times, his team was up seven goals after 20 minutes, and every highlight was of the men in red running rings around the women in white or powering through them.
TV commentators tried to make it exciting, talking about Wrexham “knocking at the door,” as though it was difficult to get through the female defenses. They cooed, “Look at that respect,” when a Wrexham player shook the U.S. goalkeeper’s hand after she made a save. On and on went the lugubrious fiction, fooling no one. A Wrexham player interviewed on the sidelines supported the fairy tale of stiff competition by commenting, “So far, so good,” as though the Welshmen were being sorely tested when, as he spoke, they were up five goals after 17 minutes of play. In the end, even the commentators were wryly chuckling.
The walk-over reminded me of a point made by the late great war historian John Keegan after the first Iraq War. He blasted the BBC for trying to stoke anxiety by pretending that Western victory was ever in doubt. He accused the broadcaster of trying to turn a foregone conclusion into a cliffhanger. He was outraged that people working in what was supposedly the truth business sacrificed their duty to the shallow goal of making something more exciting and compelling. Slaughtering truth on the altar of narrative is what much journalism now does.
Soccer is, of course, vastly removed from war in importance, but pretending that women playing men involves real competition requires a similar decision to ignore the truth and stick mendaciously to a preferred fiction demanded by ideological orthodoxy.
Despite its light spirit and the fact that the result did not matter, The Soccer Tournament was regrettable because pitting even the best female soccer players against professional male ones can end up only as a premeditated ritual humiliation. It is humiliation not just for the women, but also for the men. The Wrexham players eventually seemed to realize this as the match went on: Their early celebrations gave way later to mere awkward handshakes when they scored their eighth, ninth, 10th, and 11th goals. There was none of the delight and excitement so clear in a match unadulterated by falsehood.
Something of the same is apparent whenever post-pubescent men and women face each other in most sport, whether it be swimming, cycling, running, or, God help us, mixed martial arts. One traditional boys’ school in the Washington area, recognizing the indignity of young men agreeing to be involved in such a contest, chivalrously cedes any wrestling bout scheduled against a girl from the opposing school.
There is an extra dose of dishonesty when male athletes who identify as women take on female counterparts in sports at a high level. The scenes they produce are ideologically obligatory and may even be superficially amusing. But they are a disgrace to the immediate participants and to the wider culture in which we are all involved. Women are being horribly deprecated, and men are being unmanned by going along with it.