I must admit that I haven’t been watching the Woman’s Euros currently being played, and in fact have actively avoided it. To be honest I find it rather unseemly. I know it shouldn’t, and that we should all now embrace that kind of thing; yet somehow the sight of twenty-two women running around a football pitch as though they were men is somehow unedifying.

However, it seems to me that that brings about a paradox which needs to be unpacked: These women want to play football; they do so because they like playing the sport. Women play in their own leagues separately from men because women are biologically different from men, with different speeds and abilities. If women played against men, there would be very little competition. Yet if that is so, why is there an increasing eagerness for the woman’s sport to be perceived on a par with the men’s, with the same high wages etc; and if the two manifestations of the sport are so different that they need to be kept separate, why do women seem to be playing increasingly masculinely, almost imitating men? Frankly, it seems to me that the women’s sport wants to hold two positions at once: the same but different. The women want to attract spectators so they play more and more like men, but in doing so they erode what makes their sport different from the men’s, and frankly the more unseemly I personally find it.

Mind you, this is a paradox or contradiction we’re seeing more and more of these days. People try to hold two conflicting rhetorical positions, seemingly without understanding either. We find it in concepts like ‘high functioning autism’, where apparently fully self-aware people claim to be autistic, apparently without grasping the fact that autism is a profoundly debilitating neurological condition. It is an example of what could be called ‘cakeism’ – of wanting to have a cake, and to eat it. In turn it’s also rather like Joseph Heller’s famous Catch 22, where to be grounded for insanity, a fighter pilot must apply to be grounded for insanity, the act of which is taken as a sign of his sanity. In other words, increasing numbers of people seem to want to hold two or more mutually exclusive cultural or social identities, but in so doing strip those identities of any real meaning. To attract the acclaim of men’s football, women must play more and more like men; but in doing so their sport looses it’s identity…and point.