private life
The Argentinians at the law school booked the room to watch the game, so the screen by the door showing room reservations read “2-4 PM: VAMOS ARGENTINAAAA” and the first row of seats was occupied by this group, in their blue and white vertical striped jerseys. Every goal, they cheered and jumped up.
There’s an essay called “Soccer Sadness” by Alejandro Zambra in McSweeney’s, which is quite good and unfortunately not online. It begins with the collective narrator — young boys — saying that they watched their fathers closely on game days, and if the team they rooted for won, it would be a day to ask for favors, money, permissions; if the team lost, the boys knew to make themselves scarce.
Watching the camera pan over the faces of the disappointed Croatian fans in Lusail Stadium, I thought of “Soccer Sadness” and the empirical evidence that domestic violence goes up massively in the wake of soccer games. A 2014 Lancaster University study cited in the Economist used northwest English police records during three football World Cups and found that domestic violence reports increased by 26% when the national team won or drew, and by 38% when the team lost. Another paper looked at specifically those abuse incidents that were alcohol-related and found these increased by 47% after an England win. Intimate partner violence (IPV) against women in Colombia on the national team’s game days went up 38 and 25 percent during the 2014 and 2018 World Cups and almost 50 percent during the Copa America in 2015 (The Nation).
Argentina won today. It was very hard for me to feel happy. I wanted to be. The room had gotten blue-dark in the gloaming. People stood up, talked soccer or commiserated about upcoming finals. I couldn’t stop thinking about women getting beaten after soccer games. And how much men are allowed to live, really incentivized to live, in a separate world from women. (In general, people — myself included — who live in relative comfort can go a very long time without thinking about the negative externalities of their beautiful game(s). The human rights abuses of this year’s World Cup host country could be its own essay.)
I think all the time about gender and the separation of worlds: for love and relationships and anticipation and the body. Now I’m thinking about sports. It wasn’t part of my life as a kid, and so like anything you didn’t really grow up with, it remains slightly mystifying to me. I wrote about playing soccer badly. I witness sports fans’ esoteric rituals of self-harm, like waking up obscenely early and daytime binge drinking and screaming at the top of your lungs, with the wonder of an alien who’s landed on a distant, glimmering planet.
Soccer also throws into stark relief the contrast between public and private life, who gets protection and adulation and support. In soccer there is a public record of men fouling men. You get instant replay and you see them rolling on the grass, getting bowled over like ninepins, yelling at the ref.
The Nation’s piece on soccer and domestic violence talks about Bruno Fernandes de Souza. In 2010, the Brazilian goalkeeper was convicted for murdering his girlfriend and feeding his dogs her remains. When courts failed to rule on his appeal in a timely manner, he was released and signed to a second-division Brazilian team where fans chanted “We are all Bruno” as he played.
Where the fuck is the referee?
It’s strange, to me, that Martha Nussbaum commented in her recent interview in the New York Times, “The fact that more women and children don’t get raped and tortured and so forth is due to the fact that we’ve invented deflections, like professional football and other competitive sports, as an outlet for the aggressive instincts that men have had over the centuries.” (To her credit, she followed up with “I think that’s not working real well.”) There’s the biological essentialism of assuming that “men” = “aggressive instincts,” but there’s also something inaccurate about using the term “deflection” for a social activity that regularly begets violence.
Much feminist activism over the years has involved forcing society at large to confront the injuries of women — from truth-telling memoirs to #MeToo posts. Raise your voice until they hear you, raise the protest sign so high they won’t be able to look away.
Against this, the wiliness of patriarchy means it turns to a recourse more subtle than contesting violence in the home is not bad; instead, powerful men say that what happens behind closed doors is not a matter for public concern. From The Nation’s piece: “A 2014 poll of government officials in Colombia found that over half believed that domestic violence ‘should be resolved in privacy.’”
Screw private life. Who does private life serve, anyway? Just the people who can afford it, the people who get to close their doors. (Where was privacy for the mothers on welfare surveilled by the state to check compliance with the “man in the house” rule?) Screw privacy as permission for IPV and protection for perpetrators. Screw privacy as a way to castigate women who write about sex for stepping outside the bounds, being unseemly. Screw privacy when it’s this drawer to store all the uglinesses we aren’t solving fast enough, shoving them in there like the unfolded clothes you stuff willy-nilly into the dresser when you have visitors.
There was a point in my life when I was so bored by boys (it was mostly boys) talking about their favorite sports teams winning and losing that I wished I could have screamed at them, “Too much information!” or “That’s not my business!” In other words, to use the cudgel of private life to redirect a conversation to a place I liked better. But that’s the thing with sports, that they were never not my business, even if I didn’t like them — that regardless of my ignorance or inattention, people would go riot in the streets, there would be a whole Sports section of the newspaper, that my statistics teacher would use the Super Bowl teams as examples in class and expect us to remember the outcome. I had to live in your world, and you didn’t have to live in mine.
We pay greater attention to eleven men in shorts running around a field than to the gender-based violence affecting far greater numbers in the aftermath. Men’s play is profitable, and women’s suffering is a liability. I will never not think it’s a mad world. I will watch the game tomorrow.
Lead image: “The Birth of a New Hero” (2008), Tung-Ming Chin.
somewhat related:
Anne Helen Petersen’s Culture Study piece, “Against Kids’ Sports”