THE SECRET LURE OF SPORT
by Roland Barphe, director of media studies at the Polyvalente de St-Tite, founder of l'Organisation Uni du Film Original Québécois (l'OUFOq), and editor of Excressences
(translation by Finnbar O'Hara)
One hundred years ago the most popular sport in North America was horse racing. The greatest sports superstar of the era was a horse: Dan Patch.
Today the most popular sports are those which involve human participants. They are also those which involve abuse of balls.
Baseball players hit balls with sticks. Football players kick balls, basketball players bounce them and throw them through hoops, tennis players bat them with rackets, golfers whack them with clubs.
For abusing their balls athletes are paid sums of money that even as recently as 20 years ago would have seemed ridiculously huge. Vince Carter's salary with the Toronto Raptors, for example, is larger than the combined payroll for the 103 Members of Provincial Parliament who also work in Toronto.
What is more, athletes' enormous salaries are considered justified. The citizens become enraged when their elected representatives' salaries increase, but sigh with relief when one of their sports heroes condescends to stay with their favourite team because his salary has been increased to an annual sum greater than any 10 or 12 average supporters of the team are likely to make in combination over their lifetimes.
Significantly, I referred to the sports hero in the last paragraph as he. For the most part only male athletes receive enormous sums for abusing their balls. Female tennis players earn huge sums, too, but not as much as the male players with their more powerful strokes and hence greater power to abuse the ball. And a large part of the attraction of women's tennis is the pulchritude of the participants; the adulation of Anna Kournikova, a player who has never won a tournament, provides evidence of this.
Of course the semiotic significance of men abusing balls is not difficult to appreciate, but the important issue is to explain how over the course of 100 years people's interest in the abuse of symbols of masculine fertility and potency increased so dramatically. The answer lies in developments occurring in the middle of the last century.
The ascendancy of ball-abusing sports began in the 1970s and accelerated after 1980. What preceded this development was what in the 1960s was called sexual liberation.
The introduction of the birth control pill gave the people of the 1960s the idea that, since they could now, or so they thought, control the female reproductive system, they could dispense with the elaborate cultural customs regulating sexual intercourse. In short, they decided they could sleep around.
This change was justified as liberation from the shackles of an outmoded morality irrelevant to the realities of the modern world. By liberating ourselves from this outmoded morality we would become better human beings.
As it turned out, the only thing that got liberated was our gonads. We did discard the outmoded morality irrelevant to the realities of the modern world, but we replaced it with an up-to-date morality which was also irrelevant to the realities of the modern world. Our fantasy of control of nature was shattered by nature's reassertion of itself. We could control the reproductive system, but were less successful in controlling sexually transmitted disease or the social consequences of sexual licence.
Approaches to dealing with sexually transmitted disease illustrate the semiotic quandary in which we find ourselves. Public campaigns against sexually transmitted disease rarely make the obvious point that it is impossible to transmit diseases sexually if you do not engage in sexual intercourse. Early campaigns used to claim that whenever you slept with someone you were also sleeping with everyone else they had slept with. Nevertheless, you were still supposed to sleep with them, because sex is liberating, right? The solution was to "use protection," advice which continues to be given today.
Protection has become identified with condoms. However, condoms don't even prevent pregnancy, and our susceptibility to sexually transmitted disease is greater than susceptibility to pregnancy.
Meanwhile single motherhood, a state which in the early years was, we often forget, assumed to be a beneficial development for women (who needed men like fish needed bicycles, remember?), turned out to be associated with economic and social privation. It need not be, of course, but the crucial point is that we cannot accept the implications of the fact that it is.
The founder of semiotics famously noted that any semiotic system is a system of values, but is taken for a system of facts. The myth of sexual liberation still rules, and it says that sexual licence is good. I call it a myth, but to most of us it is an article of faith. Can we have misgivings about what we believe is the key to our happiness on earth? No, we cannot. We must deal with our misgivings unconsciously.
We have done that by idealizing childhood, that time before sex, and trying to return to it. We have turned out backs on adulthood and taken up childish things. For example, popular entertainment these days is ruled by the childish.
In the 1960s and1970s comedy featured satirists like Mort Sahl, George Carlin, and Robert Klein. Today it features Tom Green. At the movies the same difference between the two eras may be illustrated by the difference between two enormously successful comedies, M*A*S*H* and There's Something about Mary. As for television, Star Trek, a fantasy of a world in which childlike crew members are protected by a wise and fatherly captain, was cancelled after a brief run in the 1960s because few people watched it. In the 1980s, though, it was revived and became one of the most popular and profitable entertainment franchises ever.
And we have flocked to sport. The sports we flock to are those we played in childhood. Furthermore, the symbolism of ball sports is an explicit rejection of adulthood, and of adult sexuality in particular.
The idea of every type of ball game is to remove the balls from play. Baseball fans have come to worship the home run, for example. In football the first thing a player does after crossing the goal line with the ball is to drop the ball. In golf the ball is made to vanish into a hole. Sports are elaborate pageants dedicated to making our balls disappear. Modern professional sport is a myth of castration.
What is the point of this castration? It is to return to the charmed state of childhood, before sexual hormones started to flow in our bodies. We cannot admit our fear of adulthood to ourselves, so we must express it unconsciously.
Sport allows the spectator not only to watch the playing of children's games, but also to act like children themselves. In the 1960s an adult wearing a baseball cap was almost certainly a baseball player. These days adults who are not baseball players wear not only team caps but also sweaters, jackets, pants, and numerous other items plastered with team logos. Their interest in the sports of their childhoods has skyrocketed at the same time that their interest in adult preoccupations has dwindled. Voter turnout at election time is down, attendance at sporting events is up.
The question remains of why the imagery of our fantasy of childhood is male. The reason is that female sexual symbolism has connotations of motherhood. The primary female sexual symbol these days is the breast. The breast is used to feed children, so since we worship childhood we can scarcely attack what nourishes it. Male imagery lacks parental connotations, and so is more appropriate for use in our childhood fantasy.
McLuhan observed that modern North Americans are attracted to images of speed and violence. That is why people flock in their millions to watch ritual re-enactments of castration, and then honour the symbolically castrated as role models. Having paid homage to the moral superiority of life without sex, the believers then feel that they have atoned for the obsessive sexual activity of their everyday lives and are free to return to it, just as Christians who have taken part in the ritual sacrifice of the mass feel free to return to the obsessive breaking of Christ's commandments which has always been characteristic of Christian societies.
So now that you understand the questionable motives of your actions, you may go and get some.
The Secret Lure of Sport © Coolth, 2001
