I came across an article on my phone about a women’s rugby championship. It is unseemly for women to play rugby, and they will never be any good at it. It is a game made for men and increasingly for monsters. In the days when it was still a genuinely amateur sport, those who played it were of ordinary dimensions and often young men who went on to sensible careers in medicine, law, business, and the like.
Now, however, the sport is professional and played by men who seem to be eight feet wide and run straight into one another, very fast and often headfirst. Not surprisingly, a significant proportion of them suffer from traumatic dementia very early in their lives, and some, understandably though I do not think justifiably, try in the early stages of their sad condition to obtain financial compensation. The sport has become so violent that even people who are not unduly sensitive to violence shrink from observing it close-up.
Freud might have taken these women’s desire to participate in a sport that is so radically unsuited to them as an instance of what, in one of his absurd speculations about the psychology of women, he called penis envy. I think, rather, it is a sign of the masculinization of at least some women, who are responding to the overvaluation in our culture of the exercise of power as the supreme end in life. The exercise of all power is fleeting, sporting prowess being among its most fleeting forms; but the illusion dies hard.
Theodore Dalrymple, “All in a Day’s Irk”, New English Review, 2025-08-29.
December 20, 2025
QotD: Women’s Rugby
Comments Off on QotD: Women’s Rugby
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
