soccer bonoboism leads the way
I’m writing this on the day that Australia plays England in the FIFA Women’s World Cup semi-final, and I’ve been a soccer aficionado, and mediocre player, from my earliest youth, when no such competition for women existed. In fact the women’s game had a rather messy start internationally in the 1970s, when many countries first ‘permitted’ women to play the game. The first fully-fledged FIFA World Cup was held in 1991, and the women’s game has caught on rapidly since then, with soccer now registering as the most popular sport for women in this country. The current competition, co-hosted by Australia and New Zealand, was being judged the most successful in its brief history before even the halfway point was reached.
All of this is intrinsically interesting to me of course, but it also allows me to expatiate once more on female-male differences and the advantages of a female-dominated WEIRD future.
But before continuing, I’d like to reflect on the ‘WEIRD’ acronym. I adopted it some time ago without giving it too much thought, as a semi-useful term encountered in my readings, somewhat synonymous with the terms ‘Western’ and ‘First World’ (as opposed to ‘Third World’, but I’ve no idea what happened to the Second one). None of these terms really fit, and as for WEIRD, ‘western’ seems meaningless in global terms, ‘educated’ depends on the type of education being posited, but literacy and numeracy would be included, and a modicum of scientific knowledge, and some analytic skills. ‘Industrial’ now quite likely refers to more or less post-industrial societies such as Australia, and ‘democratic’ might even include such quasi-democracies as the USA. Yet the term does have some value, as long as you don’t scrutinise it too closely, and its currency influenced me to buy and, so far, learn much from Joseph Henrich’s book The WEIRDest people in the world, an exploration of the generally more individualist, non-clan, non-lineage based world it refers to, and its recent history of success. So that’s my excuse.
So the first point I would make re women’s soccer compared to the men’s game, is an elaboration of an earlier point I’ve made about women hugging and men shaking hands when meeting or parting. This is on a spectrum of course but there’s no doubt that women are more often huggers and men shakers. The World Cup is of course the most high-stakes soccer tournament there is, so the competition is especially fierce, with every game after the group stage being ‘winner take all’. And very few players will get to play in such a tournament twice, so losing isn’t a viable option. It’s been remarked on more than once how often the winners in this year’s tournament have huddled together with the losers, comforting and supporting them in their despair. Of course it’s only a game and all, but it’s just an addition to the multifarious examples of women supporting women, in matters great and small. Not that the games themselves aren’t fiercely competitive, with fouls aplenty, but generally without the biffo that sometimes spoils the male game, both on the field and among the supporters.
I also note that the game has helped to normalise female-female sexual relations, as one might expect in a microcosm in which females dominate – a bonobo humanity, so to speak. Of course, it’s a tiny-teeny microcosm, but it’s growing, and it’s getting more attention worldwide. All of this is a good, for more than just soccer.
Australia lost its semi-final, but let’s embrace the cliché, soccer, and female empowerment, is the winner.
References
Joseph Henrich, The WEIRDest people in the world: how the West became psychologically peculiar and particularly prosperous, 2020
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