My daughter’s mixed rugby team taught me that boys will be boys
Anyone who thinks that “toxic masculinity” is woke nonsense has obviously never watched under-nines mixed rugby. After a season of standing on the touchline while my daughter spent as much effort tackling the behaviour of her team-mates as the legs of her opponents, I’ve seen more visual metaphors than a pharaoh’s tomb.
Fatherhood is a process of constant readjustment, or put less delicately, the management of failure. At first you hope to apply the lessons of your own childhood, then you downgrade that to a hope that you will learn from experience, before finally settling for barely educated guesses. Even with that knowledge, my daughter Penny’s sporting travails on Sunday mornings assumed a significance I could never have foreseen.
Last year, Penny decided she wanted to try rugby and joined a club I had once played for in my teens. So, well placed to help, I accompanied her to training and matches and was relieved to see her apply her trademark fearlessness in the mud with a group of 20 or so children, all but three of whom were boys.
Week after week, I watched the boys lash out at each other over some perceived slight, throwing punches and swinging wild kicks more comic than dangerous. There was lots of sobbing (their pain threshold seemed significantly lower than that of the girls). They over-celebrated every tiny victory to inflict maximum humiliation. They whispered insults to the girls out of the earshot of adults. Sometimes the boys refused to accept the coach’s decisions, as if the rules were an inconvenient brake on their individualism.
But what jarred most and filled me with that burning sense of fatherly injustice was the refusal of any of the boys to pass to a girl, despite the encouragement of the coaches. The girls – all excellent players – had to pass to each other; it was their best hope of getting involved. When the boys had the ball, they would rather run backwards or into touch than pass to a girl, so passages of play often fell into a familiar pattern of zigzagging futility.
One of the mothers and team organisers said to me: “At this age an all-girl team would smash the boys. They can strategise and work together. The boys wouldn’t know what to do.”
Penny is a blue belt at karate, so this stand-off had nothing to do with any perception of weak feminine physicality. The club is a great community hub and has been supportive throughout, but when the coaches introduced a rule that every phase had to involve at least three passes as a way of stopping the ball-hogging and glory hunting, the boys made secret pacts with each other, passing it back and forth three times so they could then revert to headless chickens, unburdened by anything as tedious as teamwork.
Penny never complained about cuts and bruises, but we walked home after each match talking with disbelief at how the boys had acted, and her frustration chipped away at my heart. I could see her confidence deflating.
I suspect the boys’ attitude was warped by the mere presence of girls in “their” space, which is a dispiriting thought. As is the conclusion that I was watching young males repeat patterns of behaviour in which females will always be an “other”. (Penny has recently started playing cricket, too, and the boys’ behaviour is just the same.)
It’s important to keep in mind that at this age, boys are generally less physically and emotionally mature than girls. These boys are not the embodiment of evil; they are just children. But still.
There are probably women reading this mouthing the words “No s--t, Sherlock”, but it wasn’t so much what these observations revealed, rather the stark clarity of it all – the unmasking of a little version of society in real time on the gloop of a rugby pitch.
Boys forgive one another for mistakes they wouldn’t tolerate from the girls – dropping the ball, getting pushed into touch. It’s like a mini-rugby version of a woman being ignored in a business meeting.
One of the lesser privileges of being a parent is to discover your own shortcomings. I have no doubt that I exhibited similar behaviour as a boy and that this mutated into adulthood. Watching Penny play rugby wasn’t a Damascene conversion, but it’s sobering that it took having two daughters to force me to acknowledge the full depth and breadth of misogyny – a thread that runs from children’s sport all the way up to our most important institutions. Typical: you think you’re the big man, but the only things you really learn about fatherhood are what your children teach you.
I was rather relieved when two daughters turned up in my life. There was something about the idea of having a son that filled me with a dread of repeating the corrosive and unfixable relationship that I had with my own father. The thought of trying to “do it right” and somehow avoid the mistakes of the past seemed just too daunting. Perhaps I feared I wasn’t up to the task.
In defence of the boys – and masculinity – experience shows that they are less prone to the sustained campaigns of poisonous psychological warfare that blight girls’ relationships at school. For Penny, as for her older sister, classroom nastiness is the first of many injustices that can leave a parent quaking.
It’s not just the immediate pang you feel for a wrong done to your child, but more the lingering helplessness: their first day at school, when they are ill, when they are bullied. Then there’s the helplessness to come: when they have their heart broken, when they stay out all night, when they leave home. Helplessness is the default state of all parents, good or bad, aware or ignorant.
Watching Penny play rugby also left me with the sensation of time passing. It was the existential equivalent of an earworm. All that live-in-the-moment guff becomes more difficult when the moment increasingly feels like something that is moving – or disappearing. The danger is that you become conscious of yourself watching a person you love existing without you, rather than just cheering them on. It’s as if me standing on the sidelines is the biggest metaphor of all. A prelude to a goodbye.
Penny, of course, wants to play next season. That’s my girl. She thinks the boys are idiots. She also thinks I’m an idiot. She’s half right.
