Women’s football

Today I turn this blog’s attention to the women’s football World Cup. This, I guarantee, will be the last time I write about football, so enjoy it whilst it lasts! Now, obviously I’ve been out of the country, so can’t comment on whether the aforementioned World Cup has had the impact of a World Cup of the male variety. I probably wouldn’t have noticed even if I’d been here. Of all sports, I feel football is the most ludicrous. It’s a game of posturing, and arrogance. What I’ve never quite understood is why the women’s World Cup can’t happen at the same time as the men’s, firstly to capitalise on a wave of excitement and patriotism and secondly to save us all from what I consider to be somewhat tragic attempts to market the women’s game by using the tropes and cliches of male football. I’m not here to make judgements about whether or not women’s football is exciting to watch. All football is boring in my view. But what annoys me is the way that it gets talked up by the media. Firstly, no discussion about the current World Cup seems complete without some sort of discussion about equality and gender identity. There’s always the implied threat that if we don’t watch it, or take it seriously, we’re somehow being sexist. ...And then there’s the advert. The one that gets played constantly. The one I can’t avoid when I’m channel-hopping to avoid watching the football. The one with the female football player walking over a moorland. She talks about “fifty years of hurt” and in a somewhat knowing way, flips that oft-trotted-out phrase into a discussion about the hurt that female footballers have endured in the process of trying to gain recognition. She speaks in a sort of “I’m-not-an-actress-I’m-a-real-person-who’s-too-cool-for-inflection” monotone and if the advert isn’t cringeworthy enough, it ends with a long list of the achievements of English women footballers. But just like one of those cheesy pundits from the 1990s, she gives all the women nicknames, the last of which is Nobsy, which is too ironic to be true! When same sex marriage was granted to us in 2014, the thing which annoyed me most was a sort of latent sense which existed within the dominant heterosexual community that LGBT marriage was all about lost sinners learning to behave like proper people. It was like we’d been let into some sort of special club with special rules. Marriage was an institution that we had to ape rather than define in our own terms. Or we’d somehow destroy it. When Nathan and I got married, aside from the deeply repugnant, oft-asked “joke” about “which one’s the bride?”, we had to endure questions about what sorts of flowers we wanted, what we’d be wearing, what kind of cake we’d like... the answer to all of these questions was “we don’t care. These are all the tropes of heterosexual weddings. Don’t assume we’ve grown up dreaming of our wedding day, because getting married was illegal for us until yesterday.” So we did things OUR way. Of course, some LGBT people want weddings which feel traditional and heteronormative, but there are plenty more who have realised that we can make our own rules regarding everything from fidelity to who makes the breakfast. The thing about equality is that it needs to be about an oppressed community finding their own way. Making their own rules. Celebrating differences, not aping the more dominant force. If women’s football is to break away from constant comparisons to the men’s game and constant misogynistic remarks about it not being as popular and therefore not having the right to be monetised in the same way, it needs to decide what makes it unique. And that, my friends, is what true diversity is about. The celebration of uniqueness.