A man’s game
This recent article by David Warren has been quoted in a few places in the blogosphere, for its quite excellent rejection of the idea of airport full-body scanners. And I do encourage the good reader to give it a read so that he or she might arrive at those paragraphs; the idea of resistance that Warren puts forth is worthy of consideration and adoption as a general practice.
But I confess that what struck me most about the article was its beginning. To be fair, I’m not exactly the world’s biggest hockey fan; I don’t mind watching a game, but I pay only peripheral attention to the NHL. (Admittedly, this has had much to do with the less-than-even-adequate performance of the Oilers over the last few years, 2006 excepted.)
Still, the point is well-made and valid:
Indeed, it is a relief to watch hockey, a game of limited consequence except that it remains a little frozen oasis of common sense. The big professional teams are all-male. The inability to skate is seen as a liability. Puck-handling skills aren’t negotiable, either.
Merit continues to be rewarded in hockey, and there is no nonsense about this. Mere “credentials” will get you nowhere. Coaches who prove useless are fired, and even overpaid players who consistently fail to contribute to overall team performance are sent, unsentimentally, down to the minors.
Refereeing is still done, so far as I can see, without any recourse to post-modern “rights language,” and an offside remains an objective thing. We have yet to see even the theatre of whining that adds a sheen of disgrace to international soccer.
Not that we should cease to be vigilant. Recent campaigns to eliminate the good old-fashioned hockey brawl — on the grounds that people might get hurt — are a cause for concern. We need to appreciate the greater evil presented by the intrusion of effeminacy into what is essentially a man’s game.
“A man’s game.” I do not doubt the power of that phrase alone to provoke people. That is why it must be allowed to stand.
It’s a typically provocative Warren opening, building to a very important point:
Among the most urgent requirements of our moment in the “evolution of western society” is to halt the progress of emasculation. An effeminate society will never withstand the challenge of psychopathic masculine aggression — in the form of, exempli gratia, contemporary “Islamism.” We need men who are men, to defend us; men who are not merely shrill, from the pain of their gelding.
We could get into a discussion about the excesses of violence that sometimes mar the image of hockey, or the drunken excesses of professional players outside of “work.” And we do well to condemn those incidents when they occur. But at the same time, we do a great wrong when that proper judgment becomes over-extended, when we argue against all violence in hockey because of a single illegal and penalty-worthy crosscheck.
Babies and bathwater. We rightly condemn excessive violence, but wrongly condemn all violence along with it. We decry a healthy (yes, healthy) of physical roughness, within specific constraints, because some exceed those constraints, and the end result is effeminate, or feminizing. We do it with hockey; we do it with schoolyards.
And as a result, everyone suffers.
Bullying is never a good thing, and worth combating. But cutting back on contact sports, discouraging roughhousing, and enacting zero-tolerance policies that punish bullies and those who defend themselves from bullies equally are not the means to do this, anymore than eliminating all contact and fighting from hockey is the way to eliminate already-illegal bone-crushing hits.
But it IS a very good way to inadequately instruct boys and men alike as to what constitutes an inappropriate means of dissipating normal male aggressive tendencies.
That’s what is meant by “feminizing,” above. Boys need aggressive play; girls don’t. If we eliminate rough play and pretend that, in regard to sports and/or the playground, boys and girls are no different in their behaviour or needs, we do boys and men a disservice.
And we also do girls and women a disservice. For who can be expected to suffer the most under a man who has not learned, as a child, which outlets for his aggression are acceptable, and which are not? Pity the women that man abuses, pity the women he uses…and pity him also!
If it is bad that men bottle up their emotions, is it not also bad that men be forced to bottle up their natural aggressive tendencies? Better a man be in control of his emotions and his aggression, able to mete out both in proper ways, and when necessary!
