Football does not arouse my interest to any great degree. I can appreciate a good match, and will happily watch one, but I have none of the religious attachment to club and game that is so common amongst my peers. I will watch a Scotland game, and even manage to get close to caring on occasion, but I have no need to.
All the above refers to men’s football though. When it comes to woman’s football my interest is even less, tending towards the non-existent. The same could be said for women’s rugby, a sport that I have, in general, a much greater interest in to begin with. I realised this today when seeing the Germany-Canada score in the Women’s World Cup. The result was there, and I was uninterested to the degree that it actually stood out to me.
Why is this? I know that women’s football is a skilful as men’s, possibly even more so. I know that the players are as committed and hard-working, again possibly even more so (no multi-million pound salaries for them).
Similarly, I know that women’s tennis is arguably better to watch due to there being fewer players who can just blast their way to victory, but that doesn’t stop me finding it vaguely uninteresting beyond the often edifying physical spectacle. At a rational level, I disagree utterly with any sexist framing of women’s tennis as just a chance to ogle some highly toned flesh, but when it’s on that is exactly where my mind goes.
Thinking about it, part of the answer may lie in the role of fantasy in the psyche. The rational part of me knows what I should be experiencing when watching women’s sport, but that is exactly where my emotions don’t go. This suggests that we are looking for an answer that lies with the irrational, a possible first clue towards the role of fantasy.
Looking a little deeper, it seems to me that men’s sport is appealing to me to a degree that women’s is not because I cannot use the female player as a substitute for myself. At some level I can see me in Maradona’s boots as he weaves his way through the English team (a piece of football that should be appreciated by everyone, fan or not, for its sheer beauty of motion), but I can’t begin to do the same with whomever would be the female equivalent. A female player cannot allow me to vicariously live their skill and potency, and so there is something missing in the response I have to them that is present with male players.
Rugby would seem to be open to a similar explanation – I have lived those actions, and at some level, however subconscious, may wish that it was me that was playing the roles that I can see on screen. The similarity between me and the player may allow me to mirror their action internally to a far more satisfying degree than is allowed by even the seemingly slight difference that exists between me and a woman.
Rugby is open to the fantasy explanation at other levels too. The players are amongst the finest physical specimens that one will come across, and, shallow as it may be, I think that there is a vicarious pleasure in seeing the body perfected in that way; one that cannot be had with a female player as that cannot be my body that is taken towards perfection in the way seen. There are obviously homoerotic undertones to that, which I would quite happily admit to, and which just serves to add another layer of fantasy.
Finally, with women’s tennis fantasy is playing a strong role, but it is pushing in the other direction. I cannot engage in sympathetic fantasy with those players as it can never be me out there facing up to one of the Williams sisters (whilst there is scope for a sympathetic fantasy in the case of the person facing Roger Federer). Instead the subconscious elements that are activated are those that mesh with the most immediate fantasies provoked by the female players, namely the basic sexual ones. Because these are the scripts that are put in motion, rather than ones that are focussed on the player as player, the rational side that knows that the skill level here is higher, the technique better to watch, has much more of a job to do to raise this aspect of the scene into primary place.
Speculation certainly, but I think it might go some way to begin explaining why I’m left so cold by women’s sport. Of course, they might just be rubbish (or I might just be a bit of a twat).
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