Tani Newton
The dust has settled on the Olympics, but we are still left to deal, mind-bogglingly, with the vexed issue of men participating in women’s sports. Who would have thought, when feminism began, 200-odd years ago, that it would end like this?
Actually, someone did. One of America’s finest theologians, Robert Lewis Dabney, predicted a good deal of what is happening in the modern world with quite chilling foresight. Writing in the 19th century, as he listened to the growing roar of the “women’s rights” movement, he foresaw how it would alter woman’s relationship to man:
Instead of being the dear object of his chivalrous affection, she becomes his importunate rival, despised without being feared.
Dabney is worth quoting at some length on this:
Physically, the female is the “weaker vessel.” This world is a hard and selfish scene where the weaker goes to the wall. Under all other civilisations and all other religions than ours woman has experienced this fate to the full; her condition has been that of a slave to the male – sometimes a petted slave, but yet a slave.
In Christian and European society alone has she ever attained the place of man’s social equal, and received the homage and honour due from magnanimity to her sex and her feebleness. And her enviable lot among us has resulted from two causes: the Christian religion and the legislation founded upon it by feudal chivalry.
How insane then is it for her to spurn these two bulwarks of defense, to defy and repudiate the divine authority of that Bible which has been her redemption, and to revolutionise the whole spirit of the English common law touching woman’s sphere and rights? She is thus spurning the only protectors her sex has ever found, and provoking a contest in which she must inevitably be overwhelmed.
This is, I suggest, the big picture, without which day-to-day events may indeed seem inexplicable or current debates too complex to analyse. We don’t want to zoom out and look at the big picture because it is too unpalatable or socially suicidal to suggest that the celebrated victories of “women’s rights” – including the right to participate at every level in aggressive male sports – have come at the cost of women’s traditional right to expect courtesy and consideration from the other sex. The battered women staggering off the sports field and out of the boxing ring may or may not have realised that they can’t eat their cake and have it, too: if they want to do everything men can do, then they will have to take a man’s chances doing it.
Not that this in any way excuses the despicable men who do these things to them. I won’t waste time trying to think of words bad enough to call them. The point is that (although having separate categories for women’s sport has clouded the issue) women are now participating in sporting activities that run contrary to all that is feminine. It is too late at this point, in fact it is laughably absurd, to bring up women’s physical delicacy in their defence. If they want to play at being men, how can they object to men playing at being women? Disgusting as it is, there is a kind of rough poetic justice in it.
To quote Dabney one last time:
When the family shall no longer have a head… when the mother shall have found another sphere than her home for her energies… the last remains of social order will speedily perish, and society will be overwhelmed in savage anarchy.
(All quotations are taken from Dabney, RL. (1999) Robert Lewis Dabney: The Prophet Speaks, Ed Douglas W Phillips)
