Thierry Henry's Handball and the Philosophy of Sport

See the player in the blue t-shirt? She is Dr Emily Ryall, Senior Lecturer in the Philosophy of Sport at the University of Gloucestershire. She is a committed, competitive sportsperson and a University lecturer, thus embodying the Corinthian ideal of amateurism. As a girl with a Ph.D. who plays rugby, she is reshaping the myths of womanhood. Discovering Dr Ryall, and that there are entire University departments dedicated to the Philosophy of Sport, are some of the few good things to have come out of the Thierry Henry handball incident.

BBC Radio 4 had a story last week on Henry's handball. It featured Simon Barnes, the chief sports columnist for the Times, and Dr. Ryall. Both of them let Thierry Henry off pretty lightly. Neither of them focused on the thirty seconds immediately after the goal, when the Irish players were animatedly appealing to the referee, when Thierry Henry had ample opportunity to 'fess up.



Simon Barnes thinks "sport is no longer about building character, it reveals character"; so Henry's handball was a part of the great spectacle of sport because it gives us an insight into Henry's flawed genius. Dr. Ryall thinks intent matters: the fact that Henry did not intend to cheat makes a difference to her. Which is a very interesting moral argument. For instance, the business leaders who destroyed Enron (or Lehman Brothers for that matter) surely did not intend to do so. Unlike Henry, it is not at all clear that anyone at Enron cheated. But does positive intent absolve them of blame? Things are certainly not working out that way, certainly not in the court of public opinion.

Personally, I find the lack of censure for Thierry Henry, in the court of public opinion, more shocking than the handball itself. People, in all walks of life, will always have opportunities to cheat. Some people will always take the opportunity and cheat. But overall, people will cheat less if they are constantly reminded that cheating is bad, and that honour matters.

Dan Ariely, the behavioural economist, demonstrated this in a neat experiment. One group of students took a test, and were paid according to the number of correct answers they self-reported. Another bunch of students took the same test after having sworn not to cheat. The bunch who swore not to cheat consistently gave themselves lower and more accurate scores than the "control", despite having exactly the same incentives and exactly the same opportunities to cheat.

Many people describe Henry's handball as "understandable", which is true, it was understandable. But in being understanding of Henry's understandable behaviour, we, collectively, are diluting the social norm that cheating is bad.

The Universal Soldier. In Afghanistan

The war in Afghanistan is not going that well. It is not clear what exactly the fighting is for. Young soldiers are getting killed. There is no end in sight.

Yet, Sam Kiley, a British journalist who just brought out this book on touring with the paratroopers of the 16 Air Assault Brigade in Helmand province, reports that the troops are committed and motivated.

Why? In part, says Mr Kiley, it comes from “a basic male instinct” to prove yourself. In part it is about fighting for your friends and, when they are killed, about avenging them. Above all, it is about sheer thrill. As one Para quoted by Mr Kiley says during a battle: “Living the fucking dream mate.”

Without having read the book, my instinct is that Mr Kiley is telling it like it is, no spin. The Para living the dream is a Universal Soldier.

He's five foot two, he's six feet four
He fights with missiles and with spears,
He's all of thirty one, he is only seventeen,
He's been a soldier for a thousand years.

He's a Catholic, a Hindu, an atheist, a Jain
He's a Buddhist and a Baptist and a Jew,
He knows he shouldn't kill and he knows he always will
Kill you for me my friend, and me for you.

He's fighting for Canada, he's fighting for France,
He's fighting for the USA
He's fighting for Russia, he's fighting for Japan...

The Universal Soldier is an archetype; vigourous, integral, eternal. He can pack more life into two days of intense experience than most mortals can in entire lifetimes (refer E. Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls).

Yet, this is almost certainly not what Donovan meant when he sang this song in the sixties. Donovan was the guy who replaced Bob Dylan in the Joan Baez sets at the Newport Folk festival, when Bobby quit being political and broke up with Joanie. Donovan had picked this piece up from a Canadian songwriter called Buffy Sainte-Marie. She was a sixties anti-war protester, a pacifist pointing an accusing finger at the Universal Soldier:

He's the Universal Soldier and he really is to blame,
His orders come from far away no more,
They come from here and there and you and me,
And brothers can't you see,
This is not the way we put an end to war.

Fighting a fighting archetype, huh? Who would've thought...

The Sound of the Fury

...Peter Jackson, requiring a wrathful army for Helm's Deep, bravely ventured onto a cricket pitch, during a break, and asked twenty-five thousand fans to roar in unison. They obliged.

From the New Yorker

The Post-Feminist Goddess

Patriarchal cultures generally build their female characters around two polarized archetypes: the Madonna and the Whore. And so real women casting around for raw material with which to build their identities are forced to make a false choice between these archetypes, and therefore between virtue and sexuality. So, since the days of The Female Eunuch and The Feminine Mystique, one of the themes of the feminist movement has been to create icons who break this polarity, icons who are both caring and potent, who are both babes and moms, and who keep their lives on the rails.

From these icons, real women can more easily learn to be… like Angelina Jolie?

Naomi Wolf, the feminist intellectual, thinks Angelina Jolie is the iconic woman who brings it all together. In this article, Ms Wolf writes that

Angelina Jolie... for the first time in modern culture, brings together almost every aspect of female empowerment and liberation... she broke through into mass-market consciousness with her turn as cartoony superheroine Lara Croft... sexy and daring, confrontational and independent...

When Maddox appeared... Jolie revealed a new vision of single motherhood... tender, glamorous, and complete, father figure or no father figure in the picture... she blurs the conventional boundary of what female stars are supposed to do — look pretty, emote, wear designer clothes — by picking up Princess Di's fallen torch and wrapping her elegant bone structure in a shalwar kameez to attend to the suffering of Afghan refugees in Pakistan

So she becomes what psychoanalysts call an "ego ideal" for women — a kind of dream figure that allows women to access, through fantasies of their own, possibilities for their own heightened empowerment and liberation.

The article is a fun read, until you realize that it is not meant to be ironic or tongue in cheek. Is this really Naomi Wolf, the daughter of the legendary Bay Area teacher/poet Leonard Wolf, the Rhodes scholar who advised Al Gore when he was America’s next President, who wrote The Beauty Myth – a book about how modern women have freed themselves from all the traditional feminine myths, except the myth of beauty?

And is she really touting Angelina Jolie as an ideal? The same Angelina who broke off all relations with her abusive dad, french-kissed her brother in public, had a lesbian girl-friend, hit on a married colleague, and wore a vial of her boyfriend’s blood as a pendant. Never mind the bit about being the archetypal ideal woman. Is Angelina even just okay?

Moonballs from Planet Earth would like to propose an alternative feminist icon who brings it all together: Donna Sheridan, the character played by Meryl Streep in Mamma Mia. Donna is a mom, an entrepreneur, has a ton of fun with her girl-friends, doesn’t know which of her old boy-friends is her daughter’s dad, and lives on to enjoy a happy ending.

There’s a fire within my soul
Mamma Mia, here I go again,
My my, how can I resist you?

Sweets for the sweet, but not for Barbie (2)

The last blog post was about Barbie, much reviled by feminists for warping the way girls think about themselves. My take was that Barbie was mostly harmles, and that self-destroying Ophelia was a more scary archetype. To which Radhi had a very interesting comment: "But in our real worlds - madness, despair and anguish are also true, tantalising and in a weird way... much more interesting".

Very true. Which is why Ophelia and Hamlet are compelling characters, but dysfunctional human beings. All happy families are alike, and therefore a bit boring. Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way, and therefore interesting. Compelling stories are almost always about the darker side.

This is why the Ramayana generally makes for a less gripping story than the Mahabharata. Because Rama works great as the maryada purushottam, but he isn't designed for drama. In the Mahabharata, even the Pandavas include Dharmaputra the gambler, and Arjuna, the androgynous warrior.

But the thing about great stories is that they don't just entertain. They shape our ideas of who we are, and how the world works. And these ideas, especially when taken aboard in childhood, can be self-fulfilling life scripts. Which, I guess, is why the stories of Rama and Buddha and Jesus are told over and over again. Not because they are entertaining, but because they just might do a bit of good.

Iconic pop culture has as much power as religion in shaping the mythos, and with it individual destiny. Life imitates art. Star Wars, Sholay, Enid Blyton, Hardy Boys, PG Wodehouse, Batman comics, Peanuts... they all exert mythic power. And there are good myths and bad myths. For instance, Princess Diana seemed in thrall to the same tragic myth as Marilyn Monroe.



Almost a century before either of them came Empress Sisi of Habsburg Austria, stuck in a loveless marriage to an imperial heir, who "became known not only for her beauty but also for her fashion sense, diet and exercise regimens, passion for riding sports, and a series of reputed lovers. She paid extreme attention to her appearance and would spend most of her time preserving her beauty". Empress Sisi refered to herself in poetry as Titania, the fairy queen who falls in love with the donkey-headed "mechanical" Nick Bottom. Titania, unlike Ophelia, survived her stupid infatuation.

And, to come a full circle, where does Barbie line up in this pantheon? Mostly harmless feels like a fair summing up.

Sweets for the sweet, but not for Barbie

Barbie is right up there, along with McDonald’s and the Marlboro Man, as a capitalist icon that liberals love to hate. Not without reason. Barbie is anatomically inaccurate. She might psych women into body-image anxiety. She could trap girls into limiting self-concepts. And so, for a while, my wife and I very deliberately did not buy our daughters Barbie dolls.

But our daughters were gifted Barbie lookalikes. They did watch Barbie movies at friends' homes. Barbie stuff gradually found its way into our lives. And, having now experienced* quite a few Barbie movies, I am convinced Barbie is Mostly Harmless.

What I like about Barbie is that she is a survivor. She is kind to animals, helps her friends, goes on adventures, solves riddles, sings songs, rides on dragons, defeats the baddies. She generally gets herself a hunky boyfriend. But she is the protagonist. The movie is about her. The boyfriend is an accessory. This is in sharp contrast to the standard template Bollywood script, where the only point of being the heroine is to be the hero’s conquest. This probably does hurt the way many Indian women construct their identities, playing bit roles in their own lives.

Sure, her emotional range is an ideal set up for a Botox-enhanced adulthood. And Barbie is never revolutionary. She does not rage against the machine. She will never be out there on the perimeter, like Janis Joplin, Medha Patkar or Maya Lin. Barbie goes with the flow. When it was cool for women to be Stepford wives, she was a Stepford wife. When it became cool for women to be doctors and pilots, Barbie became Doctor Barbie and Captain Barbie, all splendidly kitted out. Maybe she is more like a Griha Lakshmi than a Bhadra Kali... which, actually, is okay.

The archetypal young woman I find scary is not Barbie, but Ophelia. Barbie survives. Ophelia didn’t. When an envious sliver broke off a slanted willow, Ophelia and her weedy trophies fell in the weeping brook, she chanted snatches of old tunes as one incapable of her own distress, or like a creature native and indued unto that element. Too much of water hast thou, poor Ophelia, and therefore I forbid my tears, for Barbie would have swum to shore.



* I don’t think I’ve ever watched a Barbie movie end to end, but I have watched some pivotal scenes multiple times

The Girl on the Half Shell

Just made sense of a lyric I've heard many times before, but never quite understood. "The girl on the half-shell" from Joan Baez's Diamonds and Rust, as in

... you burst on the scene
Already a legend
The unwashed phenomenon
The original vagabond
You strayed into my arms
And there you stayed
Temporarily lost at sea
The Madonna was yours for free
Yes the girl on the half-shell
Would keep you unharmed...

This refers to Venus emerging from the sea, as, say, depicted by Botticelli. Joanie referred to herself as both the Madonna and the girl on the half-shell in those days.