Women! Don’t celebrate the Soccer World Cup. It's a global celebration of rape.

Football is Sublimated Gang Rape

21st November 2022 

Over these next few weeks, we are going to be bombarded by the media with World Cup football. This essay takes a radical feminist perspective arguing that the World Cup is bad for women and bad for the planet. The first reason is football’s promotion of misogynistic masculinity and glorification of rape culture. I will show how the game itself is a sublimated game of gang rape and the goals at either end of the pitch symbolise the women to be violated. The second reason football is terrible is that instead of observing the World Cup, as if it were a global religious ceremony, everybody on the planet should be focussed on how to solve climate change. We’re in a climate emergency and we have not got long to fix our planet’s broken life support systems. This is not a game and there is no planet B. Breaking down men’s addiction to rape, and the symbolic replaying of rape seen in the football World Cup is essential stopping climate breakdown.    

Football is sublime sexism. It is sexism structured so you don’t even see it.  Liberal feminists applaud the little girl with long blond ponytail playing with the boys. Radical feminists want to dismantle the game. The beautiful game is actually a sublime game in which the violence against women is made into vapour, made symbolic and invisible.  

Football is notoriously sexist. It is riddled with scandals from commentators making sexist comments when unbeknown to them, their microphones were still on, to players and managers assaulting women and children. Barely a week goes by when you don't get a footballer up in court for having abused or raped a woman. This hotbed of misogyny is encouraged by the game of football itself, which is a game of dissimulated group rape. Many people deny this, saying it's just a nice friendly sport that brings families and communities, nations and during the World Cup, the planet, together in celebration. But whilst it is a friendly sport, there is by no means there's nothing going on here.  

Football both glorifies male bodies and constructs masculinity. It celebrates the physical reality of male bodies, venerates whatever male bodies have that differentiates them from female bodies. It's a sport designed to showpiece and reward the superiority of males: greater height, speed, reaction time, upper body strength, kicking power. Glory is given to young men throughout this quasi-religious global festival. You can almost hear the Christian songs: “Oh come let us adore him” and “praise him, praise him”. To illustrate how football prioritises male bodies let’s reverse the scenario. Imagine that our ancestors had devised a game for communities to play that was all about having babies and feeding them in their first year. Clearly females are the best at gestating babies and breastfeeding. Imagine that every four years, there was a global celebration of the ability to grow babies and to give birth. What if there were competitions in every town to see who is the best having periods? The winner could be the young woman with the most perfectly regular menstrual cycles, or the mother with the most children. Oh, come let us adore her. Or there might be contests to see which team of people had the smallest food carbon footprint and lo, teams of females who are on average smaller would always win because they need fewer calories to survive. People would say it's not fair because you've already made it impossible for males to win the menstruation games, particularly if you say that this competition had to be done with no drugs and no surgical intervention. Males who tried to join the competition by taking drugs would be kicked out. Imagine if this game became a global obsession, glorified by the media, by the governments, by companies, local authorities who built stadiums to celebrate these feats of femaleness. Visualise women in sororities flooding in and out of town on Saturday afternoon to celebrate motherhood, of massive public stadiums glorifying the ability to give birth, while men stayed at home folding the nappies and ironing their wives' maternity gowns, depressed that they were so inferior, that they could never compete. Imagine if to make matters worse, men were allowed, or encouraged to compete in the name of equality, but kept failing miserably and blamed themselves for just being worse than women. If you are interested in considering this role reversal, this work of imagining has been done in a fantastic book by Gerd Brandenburg, Daughters of Egalia.  Instead of a football World Cup there is a regular Menstruation Games, which is a celebration of the ability to give birth. The satire is a useful way of illustrating just how unfair its reverse, patriarchy is. Equality feminists, at this point, might chime in that football is not against women, it’s just pro men. Nothing wrong with giving men something to shine at. They might add that if women were given a fair chance to play football, they could join the ranks of players, enjoy it and as more females played, the sexist jokes and assaults would wither away as men found out that women are people too. It doesn’t work like that though. If you accept that football provides the gold standard value for bodies, you accept that male bodies are the best bodies.  

When we watch football is we are buying in to a system of values that glorifies maleness, males in general and glorifies brotherhood, the fraternity, the packs or gangs of men working together, to score. Football is metaphorical sex. Scoring goals is sublimated sex. In other words, it’s not actual penis in vagina sex. It’s men kicking a ball into a hole, as if the ball were the penis and the goal the vagina. The players are a band of brothers. The goals at each end are metaphorical young women, the most prized sister to be defended by her brothers in the team. We watch the men score goals: get things into holes. The core of patriarchy is scoring as dominance, it is scoring sex. It is sending something into a receptacle which is woman. Andrea Dworkin writes brilliantly in her book Intercourse about how the act of penetration of women by men is central to patriarchy. Much of the time the penetration of women by men in sex is private, in the bedroom, and/or with the consent of the woman. It is often an act done between two individuals, although dripping with the horrifying meaning of patriarchy for any woman conscious of it.  

In football, men get to collaborate in their penetration. Men do this together. In football men are organising, thinking, planning, preparing and then trying to symbolically gang rape the woman of the opposition. The opposition men are defending their own woman, their woman, their collective woman. They are defending a thing that they own. They own their own goal, that is their women. The players and their supporters are hoping to leave their goal unpenetrated, (a virgin), untouched by the opposition. Each team wants to get as many balls as many times into the opposition's hole, the receptacle. The goal symbolises the owned woman or the women, the young women of the opposition. Football is thus a way for men to celebrate and reconfirm their identities, their masculinity, which as we are seeing is exceedingly toxic. The game sets up a situation in which it is socially acceptable to watch non-consensual penetration by young men of a hole (woman). The point of the game is to dominate by one means or another the other team and force penetration. They set the game up so men can enjoy watching this sublimated gang rape and deny that’s what they are loving. The competition between the men might well just be to set up a situation where the sublimated rape happens.  

Let's just imagine that this thesis of mine is correct. Imagine you're watching France play football against England and you're thinking the French men are working very well together, and they are passing the ball around from one to another, trying to penetrate the defence, to score. Imagine it’s not what we’ve been told, a family friendly wholesome game. Let yourself see that it is a rape. They are collectively orchestrating a rape. Imagine it’s not a goal with white posts and a net, it's a woman standing there in a white dress and fishnet stockings. Each band of brothers is trying to penetrate the opposition’s woman. Just like they do in war, when the victors celebrate by raping the conquered women.  

What rot, I imagine you saying. What supporting evidence is there to back up this preposterous theory? Well the strongest incrimination is that for men, sport is about sex and sexuality. The constant slur from men is that women doing sport are lesbians. They must be lesbians, say men, because what's the attraction otherwise? This slur has always been a bit of a mystery sportswomen. Why would doing sports have anything to do with sexuality? Why on earth would playing football or rugby or doing a sport at a high level indicate anything about your sexuality? The reason is because for men, sport is sublimated sex. They know either on a conscious level or subconscious level that what they are doing is constructing their sexuality, their brotherhood, collaborating to score sex with the woman of the conquered opposition, whether that be the town next door, the town up the valley, or the town at the other end of the country, or another nation. They know that the holes and goals are vaginas, be it in golf, football or rugby. What’s even worse for women is that these competitions are not just about getting one over on the men of another country, they are about getting a leg over the women of a conquered country. We are the goal, the penetrated, the prize. To the players, football is at the end of the day, a great game and they end up, both sides, as the best of friends, brothers in the warm locker room, then the bar coming together. Possibly even the English and German troops in that Great War Christmas football match were coming together in a complicity that the first and final and common enemy is woman. We women/goals are left, bereft, raped, in our white dresses and fishnets on the cold pitch, alone, until the men come to use us again, to play on us.  

Feminist football is an illusion. Equality feminists argue that participating in football on an equal basis with men and having equal airtime and equal money, would solve the problem. Antoine Duval, for example, wrote a paper in June 2022, critiquing FIFA (the global governing body of football) for giving more money to men, more executive positions and keeping most female players outside the scope of any protections afforded to male players. As the World Cup started Beth Lindop argued that women footballers should be celebrated because they are more ethical, more supportive of lesbian and gay rights and pulling bigger and bigger crowds. None of this prevented Gianni Infantino, the head of FIFA forgetting that female half of the population exists in his opening day press conference.  

Female football commentators wear ridiculously high heels, short skirts and bare legs – probably the price they have to pay to get the job. They need to show young women, the population watching that they're not lesbians and that they are willing to be feminine, the goal when off the pitch. They're paid role models, playing this dual role of goal and player in order to hoodwink the women and girls at home. 

You can see, reading this essay how unsatisfactory it is for women to agitate to be allowed to play the oppressor role in this battle of the sexes. From a radical feminist point of view, it's absurd to think it would be progress to participate in the sublimated humiliation and rape of women and in the construction of a male sexuality based upon fraternities, groups of men raping the women of other groups of men.  And it seems absurd also to men because men know that at its heart, football is about that central sex act, rape. Men know what they're doing in football and so it's only with reluctance that most of them let their daughters do it. They'll try to steal their daughters away from it.  

All this is packed into moments of insight experienced by women and girls participating in sport or watching it. It might be a girl notices the boys on her team don’t pass the ball to her, a woman in a mixed team misfires a shot and hears the men snort derision or a snipe about women running funny. Participating the horror and the gut-wrenching nastiness of the whole charade, either as a player or spectator, is a bit like pronouns. It’s a way of saying I'm accepting the system and I'm going to go along with it. The problem is that by going along with it by pronouns or by going along with football as a female and participating in it, you are condoning it. For those of us who have played a lot of football, at the same time as knowing it's the beautiful game and loving it, we also know that participation in it is propping up patriarchy, glorifying maleness, and promoting misogyny and rape. It's a bittersweet beautiful game. As girls we are encouraged to play it, but in playing we realise we are completely snookered. If you play football it looks as if you're supporting it, but you will be reminded of your inferiority every time you play. However, if you don't play it and you miss out on the beautiful game.  

Ironically today, despite how sexist they are, patriarchal institutions such as the media, governments and FIFA are promoting female football as a form of equality feminism. They are promoting women’s football not because they have suddenly seen the feminist light, but because it serves their purpose. It’s a great deception. The myth of equality wastes women’s time by giving women something to do and giving us an illusion of progress. Women are getting more access to football. Women’s football gets mainstream media time. Female players are paid, enjoy it and of course, there are benefits for them. It’s fun. You can enjoy sisterhood, you might get very fit, you might get a girlfriend. You might get to travel the world. But there is a price to pay in that the underlying message of the game is the humiliation of women. There might even be guilt caused by the realisation that you're participating in rape culture. It’s interesting how patriarchal institutions such as banks, businesses, governments, media collude to work together on something like this. At the same time as quite vigorously and seemingly benignly promoting women’s football, they are collaborating to redefine the word women to include men who choose to identify as women. Unpicking how that happens is beyond the remit of this essay but I’ll take it up in a future essay.  

 In men’s eyes, females who play sport are positioning themselves as the scorer rather than the goal. Men want women to be the goal, the receptacle, the hole that the ball is put into. You might also be competing against the men for the holes, for scoring and that's very unattractive to men because they don't want competition. Some women try to pander to patriarchy by putting on high heels and make up after a match, performing femininity to signify both submission and heterosexuality. Why would elite athletes wear high super high heels and revealing clothes if not to signal that the moment they are off the pitch, they know their place.    

How could football, this supposedly lovely thing that brings people together, be so pernicious? Well it happened in history. In ancient Rome, families went to see wild animals killing Christians, or slaves fighting for their lives against gladiators. In Medieval England, families would go to see executions.  

This is a type of war, but not the war between brothers, it’s a sex war on women. One of the hints that this could be true is that women generally don't like watching football and very often they actively dislike it. And men quite like women not watching it. Men are mostly very happy to go to the football with their mates, or to take their sons while the girls stay with the mothers. Often, it turns out that the girls themselves chose not to go, possibly because they sense what is really going on. If you watch a football crowd, streaming into or out of a stadium for every one woman there are ten or more men. There are never groups of women who go to the football together. The only women you see are with a husband, I suspect because the husband hasn't got any friends. Or they may go as a family because it's a time to be together. As to the nature of the women’s game, everybody knows that they're not respected. They're barely paid. They're paid a fraction of what the men are. Most women don't want to go to witness a game - they don't want to go and witness gang rape. They know that's what it is, without being conscious of it. The point of this essay is to make clear: this is what you're watching. This is what you're supporting. 

We should not be glorifying football because it is part of the construction of rape culture and the perpetuation of rape culture. It is especially pernicious in that it is not obvious or clear that it’s rape culture. The sublimation means men can do it in plain sight, with their families, on the sofa with a beer, with the children around. It’s a dissimulated enactment of violence against women – rape – that can be both enjoyed by men and denied by men. It's both unclear and clear. The global festival of football that is the FIFA World Cup is a worldwide festival of rape, enjoyed by men but it’s meaning is denied to women. It is a global gaslighting conspiracy.  

A further problem is that football is a diversion from revolution. Football diverts frustration the energy of potentially revolutionary groups into safe channels. Sometimes, this is just in a sublimated way by shouting and chanting. Sometimes the anger and frustration is played out on the football pitch or on the terraces or in the stadiums or sometimes it spills over into actual fighting of two teams against each other onto the streets. You can have a fight on a Saturday night. And you can also be part of this mass movement. So that desire to work collectively to overthrow our oppression gets subverted. There is a euphoria of being together and of brotherhood, of chanting and singing and aiming for a goal and the ups and downs of winning and losing. Some of what men are frustrated about, the inequality, the grind and relentlessness of work can be relieved now. What is little recognised is that the frustration of men is channelled away from the class struggle into the sex class struggle, the struggle between men and women.  The brotherhood that there is around football is a brotherhood of men, and it is against women.  

The evidence for this is that the police put more forces on duty on the night of the football match because there is more violence against women by men who were at the match and it comes from them whether their team wins or loses. The anger gets turned against women. Football is not just a cosy, cuddly brotherhood of men bonding, being kind to each other and when the sexism has withered away they will include women. It's actually a brotherhood, a class formation, against women.  

Karl Marx called religion the opium of the masses, arguing that religion took away the pain felt by the potentially revolutionary working class, but was addictively unhealthy. I suggest that football is the opium of the men. Frustrated angry men are channelled into a class solidarity not marching to bring down capitalism on the streets but chanting to score more goals on the terraces, where they can experience conflict, collective action and get a sublimated sexual release when their side scores a goal. Their revolutionary energy is turned away from the bosses and back onto their old enemy, the female sex. The whole world roars as the act is done, the central act of our culture, rape. Every cheer for a goal is a cheer for a rape.  

Football is like opium, maybe nice, but destructive. The more you participate, the more misogynistic you get. The truth that if it were socially acceptable to watch gang rape men would watch porn with their families on a Saturday afternoon. But it is not socially acceptable so men have created this game which simulates rape but can be presented as wholesome. Men have always found it quite nice to be able to do it in public. It’s like autogynephilic men who used to dress up in private, now wanting to do it in public and looking for ways to sanitise it. Football sanitised rape a hundred years ago so successfully that most of us can’t see the rape behind the game. They are doing the rape in public, to a global audience and being glorified for it. 

The final reason we are making mistake in participating in this football rape culture is because it is diverting us from the critical need to save the planet. We need to focus our energies right now on that. This FIFA World Cup is not just time off, relief from us all fighting climate change. It actually means people everywhere are avoiding the situation and it's taking our eyes off the climate catastrophe unfolding. Our eyes are on this football when our eyes should be on the globe. It should be on our planet and on fixing it. There should be three weeks of global action on climate change, right now. But instead of the eyes of the world being on the Climate Summit in Egypt, COP 27, almost everyone is watching the football.   

We need to realise that men are addicted to porn, violence against women and football as a sublimated expression of that and they will not give it up without a bitter fight. The rape of women is linked to the rape of the planet so to solve one, we need to solve both.  

Women getting behind “our” men to rape “their” women is not a great idea. We women can feel like men for a while, on the sports field, feel like winners. And it is fun playing football. But it's a drug. Just as you shouldn't be taking opium you shouldn't participate in football culture. We should reject the whole thing. It's dripping misogyny and it's a diversion of our revolutionary potential. 

What we want to do is save the planet. We need to see this as the most important thing we are doing for the next next few decades. Everybody needs to be involved. You can’t have your football and your sustainability too. We are going to have to transform the way we live and our systems, our aims, our culture, our our recreation, our habits, everything. It is essential that we stop burning fossil fuels as soon as possible. We need to draw down carbon from the atmosphere into carbon stores for instance, trees, the soil, the biosphere, and find alternative sources of energy. We should join the environmental organisation Deep Green Resistance and work towards this. In tandem with this women should join with Women’s Declaration International to fight against rape culture in all its forms.   

As an afterthought, I want to add that just because men want to glory in their own bodies and their dominance over women through football, the way forward is not a role reversal in which women get to boast about our bodies and belittle men’s. What we do want is to work together, all of us, to work on saving the planet from climate breakdown. We don’t want to redress the balance by glorifying females by having menstruation games or pregnancy parties. We want to change the terms of the focus and move beyond the rape culture.