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
December 19, 2023
QotD: The art of the Millennial celebrity memoir
I have a cactus-like indifference to celebrity, to Danny Cipriani, to anyone over whom the kaffeeklatsch gushes. Danny was a gifted athlete who drained his Superman abilities in pursuit of celebrity. Little is more tragic than wasted talent.
The Romans thought celebrities were mentally deranged, and to be avoided. To this day, we’re yet to discover the secret behind their vastly superior self-healing concrete. The Romans had a point.
Anyway, Danny’s sex life, as documented in his book, would blush the cheeks of a Roman senator.
Danny has bedded scores of beautiful women. This happens when one is Hollywood handsome, rugged, cocky, and a known shagger. At the height of his bedhopping campaign, Danny featured permanently in the tabloid press, each week a new beauty attached to his arm.
In short, Danny could indulge himself senselessly and did so with the atomic energy of a nymphomaniac in the waiting room at Dignitas.
Reader, that’s it. That’s the story. A young man blessed with opportunities to shag beautiful women indulged those opportunities to shag beautiful women.
[…]
This book could have been a tweet.
Christopher Gage, “Spare a Thought: The inexorable rise of pitybragging”, Oxford Sour, 2023-09-12.
November 22, 2014
QotD: The first “American” college football game
… the first college-football contest was not played in 1869 between Rutgers and Princeton, but in 1874 between McGill and Harvard. The game the two New Jersey schools played was something close to soccer, with players (25 per side) allowed to kick the ball or bat it with their hands, and points scored by kicking the ball into the opponents’ goal. This game spread to a handful of other northeastern colleges in the next few years, under varying rules.
Meanwhile, Harvard played a different, more rugbyish game that allowed the ball to be carried and thrown. In 1874 it agreed to a two-game series in Cambridge with McGill, which also played a rugby-type game. The first game, played on May 14 under Harvard’s rules, was an easy victory for the home team. The next day they played under McGill’s rules, which permitted more ball handling, used an oval ball (unlike Harvard’s round one), and scored points with a “try,” similar to the modern touchdown. The contest ended in a scoreless tie, but Harvard’s players decided they liked McGill’s rules better than their own.
The “Boston game” soon became more popular than the kicking-oriented variety, and when representatives from four American colleges met in November 1876 to standardize football rules, they largely adopted the McGill/Harvard version. So while the 1874 game was quite different from today’s football, it is at least recognizable as an ancestor, whereas the game Rutgers and Princeton played in 1869 was an evolutionary dead end.
Fred Schwarz, “Why American Football Is Canadian”, National Review Online, 2014-11-13.
November 10, 2013
QotD: The New Zealand rugby team
There is a saying that you do not beat New Zealand — you just get more points than them at the final whistle.
Tim Worstall, “About next week’s rugby”, TimWorstall.com, 2013-11-10
