The birthplace of Islam in the 7th century, Saudi Arabia, which occupies most of the Arabian peninsula, became an independent kingdom in 1932 and, after the end of World War II, grew to become a major economy, revolutionized by the exploitation of the area’s oil resources. It is the world’s second top oil producer after the USA, accounting for 13.2% of the world’s oil. Saudi Arabia (population 31,500,000) is ranked 18th richest country in the world.: wi

But there are strong objections, which seem to crystallize around four main concerns. The kingdom’s human rights record, which includes issues such as the suppression of dissent, lack of freedom of expression and use of capital punishment, is often raised.

Like other Gulf states, Saudi Arabia has faced allegations of exploitative labor practices, particularly involving migrant workers and, despite promises of reform, questions about workers’ conditions during the preparation for such events persist.

Homosexuality is illegal in Saudi Arabia, and same-sex relationships are punishable by imprisonment, flogging, or even the death penalty under Sharia law. This contrasts sharply with FIFA’s promotion of LGBTQ+ rights and inclusivity.

Arguably, the most powerful objection is Saudi Arabia’s subjugation of women. The kingdom now allows women to participate in the workforce and drive cars unaccompanied, but guardianship laws that require women to obtain permission from male relatives for many activities and limited representation of women in leadership positions reflect deep-seated social inequality. Despite this, I believe Saudi Arabia is an appropriate host and offer ten reasons why.

1. Promoting ethical labor practices

Saudi Arabia’s World Cup preparations will involve many large infrastructural projects, and FIFA’s oversight should ensure these adhere to global standards. Over the next decade, FIFA’s inspection teams will monitor construction sites to safeguard workers’ rights, promote ethical labor practices and insist on compliance to its own standards. This decade-long timeline gives Saudi Arabia an opportunity to demonstrate its commitment to improving working conditions, addressing past concerns, and setting new benchmarks for fairness and safety. By making transparency and compliance a condition, FIFA can leverage its influence to leave a lasting legacy of ethical labor reform in the region.

2. A wider conception of inclusivity

FIFA’s stated mission is to celebrate cultural diversity. This presumably means the organization is prepared to embrace different cultures, regardless of whether their values and norms differ from Western equivalents. But FIFA’s adoption of inclusivity as an animating principle is, at present, limiting: It effectively excludes nearly a quarter of the world’s population, who subscribe to Islam. For this group (numbering about 1.9 billion), same-sex relationships are a sin and women are not equal to men. As such Muslims’ fundamental beliefs contrast with FIFA’s commitment to LGBTQ+ rights and women’s status in terms of rights and opportunities. FIFA has approved of players wearing rainbow colors and promoted women’s football to signify its resolve. By selecting Saudi Arabia, FIFA may broaden its conception of inclusivity by welcoming nations with different and possibly conflicting religious beliefs.

3. Productive dialogue on LGBTQ+ rights

Hosting the World Cup in Saudi Arabia will surely promote dialogue about differences in approaches to LGBTQ+ rights. No one is naïve enough to believe Islam will change dramatically, if at all. But there is at least the possibility that religious and cultural differences can be addressed in a respectful and constructive manner. While significant cultural gaps exist, the visibility of LGBTQ+ issues during the event could encourage awareness and sensitivity, promoting incremental progress. The World Cup’s traditional role as a unifying force could highlight the importance of diversity and inclusion.

4. Advancing women’s rights

Saudi Arabia has made some strides in improving women’s rights, and hosting the World Cup could accelerate this progress. The event’s global spotlight will encourage the kingdom to further expand opportunities for women in sports and beyond. Recent developments, such as the introduction of women’s sports leagues, indicate a willingness to evolve. A World Cup’s emphasis on equality and inclusion would act as a stimulus, pushing for greater gender parity in sports while inspiring young Saudi women to break barriers and participate fully in social change.

5. Women’s rights in other Islamic territories

While it’s a lofty ambition, the World Cup in Saudi Arabia could also catalyze deeper global dialogue on women’s status in Islamic societies. While the kingdom has made progress, significant cultural and religious restrictions remain. By hosting the tournament, Saudi Arabia would face international expectations to showcase advancements in women’s rights. This external pressure, combined with internal aspirations for modernization, could foster more material changes, providing a platform for discussions about balancing tradition with contemporary gender equality. This sounds quixotic but the World Cup could help redefine how women participate not only in sports but in wider society.

6. Only Gulf States can afford global sports tournaments

World Cups and Olympic Games are increasingly expensive to stage, and by 2034, only a handful of nations may possess the resources or the political will to host such massively costly events (Qatar is estimated to have spent $220 billion on the 2022 World Cup). Saudi Arabia’s substantial financial capacity makes it an ideal candidate to sustain these costs and one of only a handful of countries prepared to. This pragmatic adaptation reflects the new reality of global sports, where Gulf States are becoming central hubs for high-profile events (see 10, below). FIFA’s decision acknowledges this reality, ensuring that the World Cup remains a sustainable and spectacular global celebration despite mounting financial challenges. After 2034, countries outside the Gulf may not be able to afford the World Cup or, for that matter, the Olympic Games. Saudi Arabia, together with Qatar and the United Arab Emirates may become permanent homes.

7. “Sportswashing” is a misnomer

Critics often accuse Gulf States of using sports to improve their international image, a practice known as “sportswashing.” Yet, hosting high-profile events inevitably has exactly the opposite effect, drawing global media attention to a country’s human rights record. By selecting Saudi Arabia, FIFA will guarantee that critical issues — such as labor rights, freedom of expression, and gender equality — remain in the media. This scrutiny will put pressure on the host nation to address their limitations, leveraging global attention to drive meaningful change or face the consequences of bad publicity. The World Cup’s visibility thus becomes a tool for accountability and meaningful change rather than mere optics, or image management.

8. Saudi Arabia will build state-of-the-art stadiums

The stadiums built for the Qatar World Cup in 2022 received widespread acclaim for their innovative design and advanced technology. Saudi Arabia is likely to follow the pattern, constructing state-of-the-art venues that will no doubt set new standards for sports infrastructure. These facilities would serve not only the World Cup but also future sporting and cultural events, providing lasting value for the kingdom and the broader region. By investing in cutting-edge infrastructure, Saudi Arabia would ensure a world-class experience for players, fans, and broadcasters alike, leaving a legacy of excellence in global sports.

9. Growth of the Saudi Pro League

The Saudi Pro League has not yet emerged as a significant player in global soccer, even though it now boasts several world-class players like Cristiano Ronaldo and Neymar. But, by 2034, this competition could rival the English Premier League, Serie A and La Liga, showcasing top-tier talent and competitive matches. Hosting the World Cup could solidify Saudi Arabia’s position as a global soccer hub, drawing attention to its domestic league and boosting its credibility. Increased investment in local clubs and player development would further elevate the Pro League, creating a sustainable ecosystem for soccer within the region.

10. The tectonic plates of sports are shifting

The Gulf States have made their intention signally clear: They want to be sports’ center of gravity. They have monopolized world heavyweight boxing title fights, created a LIV golf tour to rival the PGA, staged F1 Grands Prix and hosted an ATP Tennis Open. It’s possible that Qatar will petition for a tennis Grand Slam that will rival Wimbledon. Fans may balk at the idea, grumbling that there is no natural tradition of sports in these areas. But the clink of coin can be heard everywhere. No one knows for sure why the Gulf states want to “own” professional sports. They lose prodigious amounts of money on it. There is a certain cachet in staging prestigious sports events, for sure; but do the wealthy territories need status, distinction and acclamation? The nearest we can get to an answer is another question: Why does the billionaire art collector David Nahmad want the largest collection of Picasso paintings in the world? He currently has about 300 works and explains, somewhat inscrutably, his artworks are “as dear to him as children.”

[Sport and Crime by Ellis Cashmore, Kevin Dixon and Jamie Cleland will be published in March 2025.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Ten Reasons Saudi Arabia Should Host the 2034 FIFA World Cup Finals appeared first on Fair Observer.

But mental health issues were not ascribed to a now-infamous unnamed mother from Cheshire, England. This woman trapped her baby in an underbed drawer for nearly three years, keeping her alive by feeding her with a milky breakfast cereal through a syringe. She afforded her child no medical care or proper food and did not permit her to leave the drawer for long periods. The woman had other children apart from this one; the number of children and their ages were not disclosed.

The hidden child was discovered only by accident, when the mother’s partner used the bathroom and heard noises in her bedroom. The child was suffering from malnutrition, dehydration and a cleft palate.

When questioned, the mother revealed that the baby girl had been born in a bathtub at her home in March 2020. She didn’t tell the father, as they had an abusive relationship. Instead, she kept the baby a secret from him and the authorities. So, the child was never provided with medical attention nor even registered at a register office. There was no legal record of the birth. Perhaps the most chilling court testimony came from a caregiver now looking after the child who said the three-year-old girl, once recovered, had needed to be taught to smile and “didn’t know what food was.”

The court’s neglected options

The woman’s defense attorney claimed her mental health, a volatile relationship with the abusive father and the Covid-19 lockdown had combined to create an “exceptional set of circumstances.” Regardless, the court sentenced her to seven-and-a-half years in prison.

Under Section 37 of the UK’s Mental Health Act 1983, if a defendant is found to be suffering from a mental disorder at the time of the offense, they can be sentenced to hospitalization rather than prison. The court might have sent the defendant to a secure psychiatric hospital if it deemed her unfit for a prison environment due to her mental condition. There were other options.

In England, if the court determines that a defendant’s mental health issues are present but not severe, it may issue what’s called a Mental Health Treatment Requirement. This order permits the individual to receive psychiatric treatment and supervision while living in the community, rather than serving a prison sentence. In some exceptional cases, the defendant can be found not guilty by reason of insanity if they are considered to have a mental disorder that prevented them from understanding the nature or consequences of their actions at the commission of the crime. This is not the same as having a mental health condition because it suggests an inability to comprehend the criminality of their actions.

None of these options were taken. The verdict’s implication is that the court considered the woman to be of sound mind, in possession of her faculties and had the capacity to think clearly. This strikes me as, in its own way, every bit as bewildering as the woman’s horrifyingly transgressive behavior. At a time in history when celebrities habitually claim to suffer anxiety, distress and miscellaneous other ailments associated with mental illness and are readily believed, how is it possible to conclude the woman is compos mentis (having control of one’s mind)?

Scant evidence shows the woman’s motivation. During an interview with police, she said she had not known she had been pregnant and was “really scared” of giving birth. Remember, she already had children. She added that the underbed drawer was never closed and that the child did not remain in it at all times. But the girl was “not part of the family.” Puzzlingly, none of her other children reported the extraordinary presence of the child in the drawer.

Comparable cases

As uniquely grotesque as this case is, it resembles several other instances of extreme cruelty, the most notorious being in Amstetten, Austria in 2008. In this gruesome case, Josef Fritzl kept his daughter Elisabeth locked in a cellar from age 18 to 42. During her time in captivity, Fritzl raped her thousands of times, fathering seven children with her. Fritzl was jailed for life by a court in 2009, but he spent the time in a psychiatric institution until 2024, when he was diagnosed with dementia.

That’s not all. David and Louise Turpin abused their 13 children at their home in Perris, California. The couple was exposed in 2018 when one child, 17-year-old Jordan Turpin, escaped and called the police. They pleaded guilty of torture and were sentenced to life in prison. There was no indication that the court found the parents to be suffering from significant mental health issues that would have mitigated their sentences.

Cases of cruelty to children by parents and stepparents are grimly repetitious. Ten-month-old Finley Boden was murdered by his parents, Stephen Boden and Shannon Marsden, in Chesterfield, Derbyshire in 2020. Eleven-year-old Roman Lopez was tortured and killed by his stepmother in Placerville, California, also in 2020.

In 2021, a 17-year-old girl was discovered in Floreat, Western Australia and admitted to Perth Children’s Hospital in Nedlands. She was severely malnourished, infantilized and kept captive by her parents, both female. The girl weighed under 62 lbs, well below the healthy parameters for a young woman of her age: 105–150 lbs. The girl was homeschooled and allowed limited interaction with peers at dance school. The parents will undergo psychological assessments before sentencing in January 2025. 

Sources of mental illness

All these cases elicit our incredulity. It’s difficult to believe let alone understand behavior that causes pain and sustained suffering to children from the very people who bore them. Explaining it in terms of the social circumstances of the torturers and killers is a tall assignment. However, we can sometimes discern patterns of intimate partner violence, coercive control and other kinds of domestic abuse, compounded by relative cultural deprivation and the failure of care organizations.

These are the kind of social conditions under which mental illness develops. Dysfunctional families, traumatic events, convulsions and conflicts are all potential triggers. Mental health maladaptation has its source in circumstances, but it manifests in a way that demands a particular response. Locking people up is a crude rejoinder.

In other words, mental illness, disorder or, to fall back on today’s favored term, issues, have their origins in social experiences. But they express themselves in thoughts and actions that persuade us they are purely individual properties. Perversely perhaps, mental illness often coexists with a rationality: People who harm or kill children typically employ manipulation, intimidation and isolation, all of which require some degree of planning and consideration of what’s likely to happen in the future. The perpetrators mentioned so far and, indeed, all other known or unknown child tormentors and killers behave in accordance with reason and even logic. This does not mean they are mentally well: They are not. They do have mental problems.

This should make us reflect when we say, “mental health issues.” Obviously, this is a kaleidoscopic term, not a description of a single malady. It is a constantly changing pattern or sequence of experiences and states. Describing perpetrators of violent crimes against children as “monsters” is trite and misleading. Their actions may appear inhumanly cruel and violate every known assumption we harbor about loving filial relationships. But they are unmistakably, harrowingly human and betray facets of family life we prefer to deny.

Every way I think about the hideous case at the center of this piece, I arrive at the conclusion that the woman, now presumably serving her seven-and-a-half years in prison, is not mentally well. And I mean genuinely. Her punishment seems more of a sacrifice than corrective or reparative action. 

We blithely use mental health issues to describe the relatively mild discomforts of celebrities yet avoid applying it to people who clearly are mentally unwell and often in dire need of treatment. My argument in no way removes the woman’s actions from what they are: abhorrent, sickening and unutterably loathsome. This should not preclude recognition that the perpetrator is afflicted nor closer examination of the sources of her affliction.

[Ellis Cashmore’s “The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson” is published by Bloomsbury.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post What Happens When We Ignore Genuine Mental Illness? appeared first on Fair Observer.

In honor of Jones’s passing on November 3, 2024 at the age of 91, I’d like to retell the story of this groundbreaking partnership.

Something in my head

Jones was on the film set of The Wiz, a film version of a Broadway musical based on the 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, starring an all-black cast. Diana Ross played Dorothy, originally Judy Garland’s role. Jackson, part of the Jacksons, was also in the film. At the time, he was a known commodity, but far from being the world-renowned figure he became.

Director Sidney Lumet was a friend of Jones’s and wanted the composer/producer to provide orchestral gravitas for The Wiz’s soundtrack. Jones wasn’t impressed by the musical, but apparently felt he owed Lumet a favor or two. He and Jackson didn’t know each other before the film but struck up a serviceable working relationship. Jones later told The Hollywood Reporter’s Seth Abramovitch that he remembered Jackson approached him with a task: “I need you to help me find a producer,” he said. “I’m getting ready to do my first solo album.” (Truthfully, he had made two previous solo albums.)

The two men discussed the possibility of renewing that relationship again on the projected solo album for which Jackson had already written three songs. Jones became curious about how Jackson was able to write songs without a musical instrument. According to Time’s Steve Knopper, the conversation went something like: “I hear something in my head. I make the sounds with my mouth.”

On hearing this, Jones grew interested. “There’s an instrument that can make the sounds you want. I can write anything down on paper,” Jones replied. “If you can hear it, I can write it down.” We’ll never know whether Jackson’s career would have soared and crackled like a rocket or merely hissed like a squib had Jones not been intrigued and agreed to work on the mooted album.

Transformation

All the same, inviting Jones to take the weighty role of producer carried some risk. Like any entertainer, Jackson must have been aware of audience expectations: they must have been sharpened to a point by the then-popular Philadelphia Sound and the Saturday Night Fever disco that captivated the public in the mid-1970s. The sweet-sounding Jacksons were perfect for the late 1960s and early 1970s. But against a background of Sylvester’s thumping synth on “You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)” or Chic’s twanging bass lines on “Dance, Dance (Yowsah, Yowsah, Yowsah),” the brothers sounded tame and, perhaps worse, quaint.

The last thing Jackson wanted at his pivotal stage in his professional life was to sound old-fashioned. So, Jones, for all his mastery, wasn’t an obvious choice. He was 45 in 1978. Five years earlier, he had produced Aretha Franklin’s “Hey Now Hey (The Other Side of the Sky),” which lacked Franklin’s gutsy blues quality and hadn’t overly impressed critics or consumers. His own double-album, I Heard That!, had been released to little impact in 1976.

Somehow, Jackson became convinced Jones could provide him with the kind of transformative makeover he wanted. Perhaps it was a compelling incongruity, like casting Charlize Theron as prostitute-cum-serial killer prostitute Aileen Wuornos in Patty Jenkins’s 2003 film, Monster. It looked so odd, it might just work. Known for her glamor, Theron gained weight, wore false teeth and turned herself into a believable Wuornos. Jones seemed such an unusual producer for Jackson’s project, it too might yield something surprising.

George Benson, once a guitar prodigy who grew to prominence with his distinctive style of soul-infused jazz, once reflected on his own particular relationship with Jones. For years, Benson was discouraged from singing by his record company. Jones produced his breakthrough album Give Me the Night in 1980 and issued contradictory advice. “Quincy Jones looked at me and said: ‘I know you better than you know yourself.’ This made me feel angry, though I didn’t say anything. But he was pushing me to do things that didn’t come naturally to me,” Benson told the Financial Times’ David Cheal. “He was always pushing me to do things. He persuaded me to sing in a way that didn’t feel comfortable.”

Once outside his comfort zone, Benson sang in the unnatural way Jones suggested and the process yielded a record. “And it was a smash,” he said. The album won him three Grammys in 1981. Jackson never said Jones pushed him in the way Benson described, though the product of the collaboration suggests Jackson might also have been displaced from his comfort zone — with similarly agreeable results.

Life ain’t so bad at all

Those results were well-received, though not ecstatically. Rolling Stone’s Stephen Holden called their album, Off the Wall, “A slick, sophisticated R&B-pop showcase with a definite disco slant … A triumph for producer Quincy Jones as well as for Michael Jackson.”

There was disagreement over Jackson’s voice. New Republic’s Jim Miller discerned that, “Jackson’s voice has deepened without losing its boyish energy. He phrases with delicacy, sings ballads with a feather touch.” But the Los Angeles Times’s Dennis Hunt thought, “The adolescent frailties that linger in Jackson’s voice are nagging enough to, if uncontrolled, undermine good material and production.” In the end, though, he commented, “Thanks to producer Quincy Jones, that didn’t happen here. The result is one of the year’s best R&B albums.” Presciently, Hunt wondered, “Is it possible that he’s outgrown the Jacksons?”

Between them, Jackson and Jones captured the audacity of a notionally prosperous, upwardly mobile African-American population. They were willing to take risks, avoiding a disco saturation but absorbing enough of the euphoria that animated dancefloors around the world. They added lush arrangements that might, with another artist, have sounded too sickly, or worse, clichéd. Here, they sounded innovative and sophisticated.

Even the cover art radiated aplomb: 21-year-old Jackson was wearing black tie, tuxedo and loafers. He seemed to be searching for something. His right to be free from his brothers? Or family, perhaps? Or more likely, self-validation: with Jones, he seemed to discover a license to be a fully-fledged independent artist.

Sure, he had released four solo albums before. But none came close to Off the Wall in terms of artistry and imagination — and maybe irony. The expression “off the wall” meant unusual or strange, and the chorus of the title song was, “Life ain’t so bad at all if you live it off the wall.”

Reviews for The Wiz bore no resemblance to the warm approval Off the Wall had drawn. Time expressed the film critics’ consensus in its headline, “Nowhere Over the Rainbow.”

Off the Wall is regarded as a classic. It won a Grammy in 1980, multiple American Music Awards in the same year. It was inducted into the Grammy musical Hall of Fame in 2007. It reached number ten on the Billboard Hot 100 and spawned four Top 10 hits, including “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough” and “Rock with You” — both number ones.

Yet, as often happens when two artists collaborate and produce a creation for the ages, they had a falling out.

The sour aftermath

“Mr. Jones and Mr. Jackson had worked together for years, forging one of the most productive and profitable relationships in pop music,” The New York Times’s Colin Moynihan reported. “The two worked together on albums … that sold tens of millions of copies and catapulted Jackson — already famous from his days in the Jackson 5 — into superstardom.” And yet, years after Jackson’s death, Jones found himself in court, head-to-head with the Jackson family.

They had continued to work together. Jones produced two more Jackson albums: 1982’s Thriller, which became the best-selling album of all time; and 1987’s Bad, which was the first album to have five consecutive singles reach number one on the Billboard Hot 100. Cumulatively, they have sold over 100 million copies.

The three albums were made and released at a time when music videos were hitting their stride and practically every record had a short companion movie. Jackson and Jones never fought or, as far as we know, even argued. But the release of Kenny Ortega’s 2009 film, This is It, a documentary feature based on rehearsal footage shot while Jackson was preparing for his proposed comeback in 2009, brought conflict. Jackson died on June 25 of that year and never made a comeback, of course.

Songs originally produced by Jones were included in the film’s soundtrack album. Jones filed suit against the Jackson estate, claiming, as Rolling Stone’s Miriam Coleman summarized, “under the contracts, he [Jones] should have been given the first opportunity to re-edit or re-mix any of the master recordings and that he was entitled to producer credit for the master recordings, as well as additional compensation if the masters were remixed.” Obviously, no one could have foreseen how such an opulently smooth album could lead to legal convulsions decades later.

In 2013, Jones claimed Sony Music Entertainment and Jackson’s estate owed him close to $30 million in royalties for edits and remixes of music he produced with Jackson during their collaboration. Four years later, in 2017, a jury in Los Angeles County Superior Court decided that Jones had not been sufficiently rewarded by the Jackson estate for the use of records Jones had produced and which were featured in This is It. The court awarded him $9.4 million in 2017.

Three years later, a California appellate court reduced this to $2.5 million, this being the amount due to Jones for the use of his master recording and other fees. It seemed a bitter conclusion to a relationship that, in many ways, remolded Jackson into a legitimate icon. While Jones maintained his dispute was not with Jackson himself, journalist Martín Macías, Jr. quoted the Jackson estate’s attorney as saying: “Quincy Jones was the last person we thought would try to take advantage of Michael Jackson by filing a lawsuit three years after he died asking for tens of millions of dollars he wasn’t entitled to.”

Jones too seemed to turn vindictive. While he’d enjoyed an amicable relationship with Jackson over many years in the 1970s and 1980s, he later reflected, “He [Jackson] was as Machiavellian as they come.” In a 2018 interview with Vulture’s David Marchese, he declared, “Michael stole a lot of stuff,” meaning his compositions incorporated passages from other artists’ music.

It was a sour end to an artistic collaboration that ranks with the greatest of modern times. Nothing will, in practice, diminish the significance of Off the Wall. It is established in pop music’s pantheon. For all his colossal contribution to music, Jones’ elemental role in the creation of Jackson’s album will be his defining achievement.

[Ellis Cashmore’s “The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson” is published by Bloomsbury.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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It seemed an extraordinary crime, though, in a sense, it was less extraordinary than it seems: children kill their parents more often than readers might suppose. It’s called parricide and the most recent instance of this emerged recently in Great Baddow, Essex, in England, where Virginia McCulloch, now 36, poisoned her father with prescription medication that she crushed and stirred into his drink and, in the attorney’s words, “beat her mother with a hammer and stabbed her multiple times in the chest with a kitchen knife bought for the purpose.” This happened four years ago. She stored the putrefying corpses at the family house until discovered by police.

There are other comparable murders in recent times. 1998, Auckland, New Zealand: Matthew and Tyler Williams, aged 14 and 13, killed their parents.1998, Beverly Hills, California: Lyle and Erik Menendez killed both parents. 2011, Port St. Lucie, Florida: Tyler Hadley pummeled both his parents to death after they refused to let him host a party at the family home. 2013, Albuquerque, New Mexico: 15-year-old Nehemiah Griego killed his parents and three younger siblings. 2015, Broken Arrow, Oklahoma: Robert and Michael Bever, murdered their parents and three siblings in a mass stabbing. There have been related cases, for example, that of Jennifer Pan, who hired assassins to kill her parent in Ontario, Canada: She was sentenced to life in prison after being found guilty of both first-degree murder and attempted murder. 

Parricide in history

Abhorrent and unnerving as parricide strikes us, it was prevalent in the medieval era (specifically, the 11th–14th centuries). Disputes over succession and land ownership were usually the source of dynastic violence: Younger children, ambitious or desperate for control but blocked by their parents, killed fathers, sometimes mothers and occasionally siblings in their pursuit of control.

Even in territories dominated by cultures that encouraged honoring and respecting, as well as loving parents, and norms that emphasized filial duties, there are examples of children either killing or trying to kill their parents. Most famously, Aurangzeb, the sixth Mugal emperor of India (1658–1707) — famous for building the Taj Mahal in memory of his wife — imprisoned his father and killed many of his male relatives in his rise to power. While technically not a case of parricide, Byzantine Emperor Constantine VI imprisoned and reportedly blinded his own mother.

Historical cases of parricide are often intelligible in terms of ancestral struggle, though we should also remember current conceptions of the family as a cohesive, supportive natural unit in which love, caring and unselfishness are taken as natural, are products of a relatively recent understanding of the conjugal family. Earlier forms of the family tended to be different.

Multi-dysfunctional families

One of the most ferocious critiques of the family, particularly the modern nuclear family, was that of R. D. Laing, who challenged the assumption that the arrangement was wholesome and beneficial to children. Laing’s argument about the impact of family relationships on mental health offers a way of comprehending contemporary parricide. For Laing, our image of the family has been pasteurized. His own account is more adulterated: The family is often a multi-dysfunctional amalgam from which children sometimes escape bruised, if not permanently damaged emotionally and cognitively (and sometimes physically). The family imposes roles, identities, and expectations on individuals in ways that can lead to anxiety, distress, sometimes schizophrenia and what we today euphemize as “mental health issues.”

Children, on Laing’s account, sometimes experience a suffocating sense of captivity and believe there is either no escape from family demands. Parricide, from this perspective, would be a violent attempt at liberation or self-assertion. In all of the cases in recent history, Laing’s approach appears to have relevance.

So, why do some children embark on the putatively forbidden path while others think about it and then withdraw just in time for them to leave home feeling virtuous? In other words, if Laing it to be even half-accepted why isn’t parricide most widespread? Here I ask readers to ask a question usually ignored by criminologists and other social scientists. Not, “Why do children kill their parents,” but, “Why do so few children kill their parents?”

Why isn’t there more parricide?

What if we tried to explain conformity instead of spectacularly conspicuous divergences from socially accepted standards? Philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) did exactly this, of course, his aphorism being “The life of man [is] nasty, brutish and short.” Human beings are driven principally by selfish concerns, the fear of extinction being the primary one. So, the “natural” condition of humanity is warlike: Society, as we know it, is an artificial apparatus to accommodate the coexistence of divergent, self-seeking individuals at once. We frame rules, laws and norms so that over time, we become conventional, behaving in a way that meets others’ expectations. Mostly.

The disorienting implication of Hobbes’ thoughts is that we are all not just capable of but have an inclination or natural tendency to behave in a way that serves our own interests, no matter what the cost to others. Why don’t we then? Travis Hirschi, an American criminologist, in the 1930s, supplied an answer: We learn to conform and tend to remain compliant with rules by forming affiliations that secure us to conventional society.

In Hirschi’s model of society, individuals are stitched into conventional life in four ways: attachment, investment, beliefs and reputation. The most important one is attachment to parents, peers and other people who matter to us in some way. Hirschi also believed that as we mature, we invest in society, specifically the years we spend in formal education and in pursuing our careers and starting a family. In many cases, individuals acquire a reputation that they try to maintain or enhance. In other cases, individuals fail to reach the standard, status or rank they had been aiming for. Our attachments prevent us from breaking rules or norms. When they are loose, slack or broken, the probability of transgressive behavior becomes pronounced.

The fathomless McCullough case

We know little of the McCullough case at the moment, though Hirschi’s theory gives it a shape. But there are other perplexities: Virginia, the self-confessed killer, had three sisters, none of whom has been implicated. During the investigation and trial, there were no allegations against these siblings for complicity or involvement in the murders or the subsequent concealment of the bodies.

It seems the siblings were unaware of their parents’ deaths and had somehow been reassured by Virginia that their parents were either unwell or away from home. Virginia contrived an incredible and — at least to this writer — implausible series of excuses for years. Statements from the siblings during the trial suggest they trusted Virginia. One sibling referred to their parents as “blameless victims.” 

Even in the context of other cases of parricide, the McCullough killings are staggering. The actual killings are explicable in terms of misfiring family dynamics and the failure of at least one family member to experience little or no meaningful bonds with wider society. But storing what must have been two rotting cadavers at the family home for four years without arousing the suspicions of neighbors, care agencies, or other family members takes some fathoming. This is a case that is destined to confound us for years.

[Ellis Cashmore’s “The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson” is  published by Bloomsbury.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Swift’s recent endorsement of United States presidential candidate Kamala Harris may conceal more than it reveals. After all, everyone knew her political allegiances lay with Democrats; none of her 284 million Instagram followers or anyone else would have been surprised that she wants Harris to win the forthcoming election. Maybe the endorsement is something more: advance notice that Swift intends to become a political presence in the future. If so, she could run for president in 2028. By then, she’ll be 39 years old. John F. Kennedy was 43 when he was elected in 1960, making him the youngest elected president in US history.

A new day?

Preposterous as it sounds, remember: In May 2015, Donald Trump was known principally for the NBC television show, The Apprentice, which he had fronted since 2004. He’d made his political views well-known, taking out full page ads in The New York Times and The Washington Post criticizing US foreign policy in 1987. In 1999, Trump briefly explored running for the Reform Party’s nomination for president in the 2000 election, though he withdrew.

So when Trump announced his candidacy as a Republican in June 2015, it came as an outrageous surprise. He’d never held political office of any kind. Only one other president had been elected without political experience: Dwight Eisenhower’s background as the Supreme Commander of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Europe during World War II provided him skills that translated well to the presidency. He served two terms as president, from 1953 to 1961.

Eisenhower was a product of a different age in US politics. Trump is very much part of an age when the US struggles with a political bipolarity: Policy vs passion, logic vs emotion, wisdom vs relatability. Politicians are elected as much for celebrity appeal as leadership capability. Voters seem ready to believe they are much the same thing. How otherwise can we explain Trump’s success in 2016?

Two years after Trump’s election, Oprah Winfrey seemed poised to turn the 2020 election into a showbusiness extravaganza when she said she was “actively thinking” about running for president. At least, that was the inference from her speech at the Golden Globes. “A new day is on the horizon,” she prophesied. In 2018, Oprah was at her persuasive peak. She was arguably the single most influential person in the world and would have made a formidable contender, despite her political inexperience. Oprah was a rare celebrity, praised for her moral authority, venerated for her inspiration and respected for her support to countless women. She seemed kissed with purpose — her destiny was surely the White House.

Trump actually named Oprah as a possible running mate when he was considering putting himself forward with the Reform Party in 1999; it’s doubtful she would have been interested.  She settled into a kind of trusted advisor role, dispensing wisdom and assistance without showing any ambition for power. Today, Oprah has lost her momentum, though her coruscating endorsement of Harris was a reminder of her presence. She remains an interested party.

Public face and private life

Traditional politicians like senators and governors have, in recent years, lost immediacy. They project personae and exude authority in a carefully stylized and practiced manner, using the media in almost the same way Bill Clinton (president 1993–2001) or George W. Bush (president 2001–2009) did. By contrast, figures from entertainment know how to make themselves believable. They engage audiences by sharing ostensibly private insights and exchange the experiences that shape or scar them.

Swift, like other celebs, makes no attempt to separate her public face from her private life. She surpasses arguably every artist in history in her ability to share personal experiences through her music. Her fans wax about how her music speaks to them personally with insight and vision. Many of her fans are too young to vote now, but not in four years.

Some readers will think I’ve stumbled Lewis Carrol-like down a rabbit hole leading to a land of magic and strange logic. I remind them that in 2016, Trump secured 304 electoral votes compared to opponent Hillary Clinton’s 227, winning the presidency. He may yet be re-elected. Swift will not feel intimidated by her lack of political worldliness, sophistication or practical knowledge. After all, Trump had none of these benefits.

In 2018, Swift publicly supported Democrats in her home state of Tennessee, causing a surge in voting registrations, especially from young people. It was the first sign of political engagement among her fans. The following year, she spoke out in favor of the Equality Act. In her 2019 music video for “You Need to Calm Down,” she promoted the petition for the act. She was an active supporter of the Black Lives Matter movement as well.

So perhaps it makes sense for her to maintain her position on the sidelines and encourage advocates, but without risking what could be a damaging misstep. A-listers like Barbra Streisand and George Clooney have stayed in their own dominion while earnestly making their political preferences heard. This would be Swift’s safest choice. After all, you can have too much of a good thing and no one in history has ever been as ubiquitous, audibly as well as visibly. Could audiences just get sick of her?

One of the verities of celebrity culture is that it values change, freshness and novelty. Swift has been on top longer than most. Maybe she recognizes this herself and is already plotting a segue into politics. It’s not exactly a logical move: That would be to sidestep into movies. Not that this is without perils: Madonna crashed as spectacularly as she succeeded in cinema.

The sanest thing to happen to the US

Celebrity times demand celebrity politicians — or politicians who are prepared to greet Oprah’s “new day” and entertain as much as govern. In showbusiness, Swift has reached Parnassian heights: astral record sales, unsurpassable box office and unbelievable social media followings. Artistically and commercially, she is at her zenith, cleverly integrating critiques of patriarchy into her songs when she conveys how even unmistakably successful women are still liable to run into misogyny.

But is it all just too trivial? The state of the world is grim and nothing Swift does will change that  right now. But the winds are blowing in her direction: The post-Harvey Weinstein tremors have destabilized patriarchy and the #MeTo movement remains a force. Would Sean Combs have met with instant condemnation and been reassigned as persona non grata were his transgressions known ten years ago? Censured, castigated, deplored, perhaps; but probably not canceled, as he surely will be. The historical privileges of manhood are disappearing.

Will Swift feel like culture-hopping from music to politics? It may be a leap too far, but no one can ignore her unstoppable influence. Much, I believe, depends on the outcome of the November election. If Harris wins, Swift will devote more time to championing her, perhaps closing the distance between herself and the Democrats, but not maneuvering into the political mainstream. If Trump wins instead, Swift may take the leap of faith and embrace the impossible, as giddily disturbing as this sounds today. Given modern America’s history, Swift’s leap could be the sanest thing to happen to the US.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson, Elizabeth Taylor and Celebrity Culture.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Does Taylor Swift Want To Be a Genuine US President? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Republican candidate George W. Bush stood and started to answer this question before the chair interrupted him and warned he was digressing. “Help me with the question,” he requested after getting tongue-tied. The questioner wanted to know how he was personally affected. Democratic candidate Bill Clinton took his turn to answer. He stood, walked toward the audience and spoke, not to the audience but to the woman who had asked the question. He motioned to her, his eyes fixed on hers. “In my state, when people lose their jobs, there’s a good chance I’ll know them by their names.”

It was a transformational moment in politics. Of course, we didn’t know it at the time, but on October 15, 1992, at the University of Richmond’s Robins Center, politics changed. The hapless Bush was aloof and seemed almost contemptuous while Clinton interacted relaxedly with the audience without feints or deviations. It was as if he was having private conversations that could be heard, not overheard.

Outside politics, cultural change was turning us all into voyeurs. I don’t mean that people started to take an unwholesome pleasure from watching others engaged in sex or suffering in some way (although some might have). No, the new voyeurism involved the guiltless enjoyment of observing or eavesdropping on private conversations and discovering intimate details of others’ lives, particularly through television and, later, social media. This reflected a growing fascination with the personal and often unfiltered experiences of others. We called it curiosity. It soon extended into politics.

Political celebrities who seem like real people

Celebrity culture was, for many, a Trojan horse: Innocuous-looking enough to allow into our lives but baleful in its consequences. Our captivation with the lives of other people seems perfectly natural now. But it wasn’t in the 1970s. The misleadingly inoffensive horse entered in the 1980s, so that by the early 1990s, it had already taken up residence. Impatient with entertainers who were cautious about sharing details of their private lives, audiences wanted everyone to be like Madonna: unsparing in their distribution of the minutiae of their lives. 

Audience appetite was for real people —  not the disproportionately impersonal and untouchable godlike characters who dominated public life for most of the 20th century, but people who resembled the other people they were supposed to entertain. 

This affected politicians. It seems laughable that we once looked up to them. For most of the 20th century, they were guardians in a benevolent moral and ministerial sense. The electorate admired, respected and, in some cases, idolized these near-transcendent beings. By the 1990s, however, audiences no longer admired politicians from afar; they wanted close-ups. What’s more, they demanded access to their private lives, blurring the lines between public service and entertainment.

Clinton seemed to understand the power of ordinariness. The folksy, down-to-earth charm that characterized him and allowed him to face several accusations of impropriety and an impeachment with equanimity made him one of the most popular presidents in history.

Clinton’s kind of ordinariness became a valuable resource. Audiences responded to politicians who mirrored themselves: They may have had more power, authority, status and attention; they may even have led more opulent lifestyles; but, unlike politicians of earlier eras, the new breed could and probably should exhibit the same kinds of flaws and problems as the people who followed them. So, Clinton’s sex scandals, far from being a source of damnation, worked like a celebrity benediction. There had been sex scandals before, but never anything approaching Clinton’s triple obloquy. The media, which by the early 1990s were ravenous for scandal, covered it extensively.

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Bush’s struggle to connect with the audience starkly contrasted with Clinton’s approach, highlighting a shift in what Americans began to value in their leaders. Bush followed Clinton to the White House. He was prone to gaffes, making him the object of parody and criticism, especially after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the subsequent US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq.

By contrast, Bush’s successor Barack Obama masterfully balanced the demands of celebrity culture with a scandal-free image, projecting the persona of a cool president. He had suaveness, eloquence and an uncommon ability to connect with a broad range of people, from appearances on talk shows to a preparedness to share his taste in music (he was known to favor Beyoncé, Tyla and Kendrick Lamar.)

Harris, Trump… and Oprah

Obama’s successor, Donald Trump, entered politics as a fully formed celebrity in a similar way to President Ronald Reagan and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger — all three were well-known entertainers before their forays into politics. Trump hosted The Apprentice for 14 seasons from 2004 till 2015, so, by the time he won election in November 2016, he was an established figure in the media and popular culture.

Trump may have lacked Clinton’s magnetism and Obama’s relatability, but he could challenge both with his sex scandals and ability to dominate the news cycle. He had little experience in public office but was adept at maneuvering the media. Perhaps he still is. But is his audience still excited? Or are we witnessing Trump fatigue?

Audiences like novelty, freshness and new personalities. If Trump’s celebrity appeal begins to wane, Kamala Harris emerges as a pristine face in American politics. Despite being vice president since 2021, she’s relatively unknown. She’s probably the least-known nominee in living memory. She didn’t even benefit from the exposure of going through primaries. Ironically, this might not be such a bad thing.

Her paradigm will surely be Oprah Winfrey. A proven kingmaker with her pivotal “We need Barack Obama” speech at Des Moines, Iowa on December 8, 2007, Oprah has already given Harris her seal of approval.

Related Reading

Do Celebrity Endorsements Help or Hurt Politicians?

As far as I’m aware, there is no celebrity equivalent of osmosis in which style, knowledge and appeal can pass from one person to another. If there were, Harris should learn how it works. Harris’ campaign already has an Oprah feel: The “Joy” theme is confection, though not meaningless confection: It suggests Harris will, if elected, be a person who brings great pleasure and happiness — as celebrities often do.

The most amusing political spectacle in history

It seems frivolous to discuss celebrity culture in the solemn context of politics. But let’s face it: politics is no longer solemn: The dignity that once seemed to ennoble politicians has vanished and whatever they say seems glib or, at best, rehearsed. Small wonder that audiences expect value-for-money entertainment from politics. Politicians, at least the successful ones, know this and often respond in a way that elicits a reaction. Trump has an intuitive grasp of this: His bombastic statements and bumptious behavior guarantee him an expectant audience and a breathless media. His dismissal of a miscellany of accusations with a shrug gives him a certain sheen. He also recruits established showbusiness stars, sometimes to their chagrin (Abba asked Trump to stop playing their music at his rallies).

Like everything else, politics changes. Some might despair at the prospect of politics succumbing to trashy and meretricious celebrity culture. But voters demand it: They want politicians who are as imperfect as they are, empathic enough to be relatable, unpredictable in a way that keeps everyone curious and, above all, entertaining. And, if they’re not, they’re gone: There are plenty of politicians with presidential aspirations who rose to prominence but not for long. Who remembers Deval Patrick, Jim Gilmore or Lincoln Chafee — all hopefuls from recent political history?

Voters are accustomed to being entertained by all manner of celebrity, some weaponized with talent, others just disposable and quickly forgotten. Harris and Trump both want to convince voters that they’re not celebrities but serious politicians. That means much of the campaign will be about trying to command the media’s attention and shape the way it presents the candidates, whether as impressively august with superabundant leadership skills or just pretenders. This guarantees the campaign will deliver a theatrical, extravagant and probably the most amusing political spectacle in history.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of Celebrity Culture, now in its third edition.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Voters Want Politicians Like Trump and Harris to Be Celebrities appeared first on Fair Observer.

Twenty-two years later, the news broke: Bennifer is over — again. In the interim, there had been an engagement, two marriages (to other people), five children, more than 18 new fragrance endorsements, a few box office bombs, several spells in rehab and an Oscar. And, for a while, the kind of media delirium that produces headlines like “BEN AND JEN: BODY LANGUAGE: WHAT IT MEANS,” “J.LO: ‘BEN DEFINITELY WEARS THE PANTS’” and “STRIPPER TELLS OF NIGHT WITH BEN.” Perhaps the most memorable was “BEN AND JEN SAY ‘NOT YET.’” In September 2003, Lopez visited her spiritual guide, spent two hours with her, then announced she was calling off her hugely publicized wedding with Ben Affleck. So the most recent breakup conjures a sense of déjà vu.

Here’s my question: Why? No, not why does this pair keep getting together, splitting up and then kissing-and-making-up before parting again? The more interesting question is: Why on earth are we so fascinated by them? For that matter, why are we fascinated by celebrity couples and their endless caprice?

Taylor-Burton: The beginning of celebrity couple coverage

Precedents can be found in the life of Elizabeth Taylor, whose combustible affair with Richard Burton imploded in 1974, after 12 years, only to regenerate itself in 1975. They married each other for the second time, but this marriage ended in less than a year. Taylor’s volatile romance is customarily considered the first modern celebrity coupling in the sense that it was copiously covered by the media. Because of this, it effectively promoted audience interest in how the other half love.

The Taylor-Burton amorous entanglement was a commodity — open, visible, public — compared to, for example, Ava Gardner’s erratic but essentially private romance with Frank Sinatra in the same period. With Gardner, the media were made to work for their stories.

Taylor, probably more than Burton, practically handed out press packs. Their relationship was a romance in the golden age of the American dream factory. As such, it was glitzy, glamorous and, at times, gaudy. There might have been some hesitance, perhaps even reluctance to stampede into Gardner’s and Sinatra’s private lives, especially as there were spouses and, more importantly, children to consider. Were the media likely to contribute to marital disharmony and even the sadness of innocent children merely by reporting the relationship? Taylor removed those kinds of uncertainties. She practically directed events, which involved double-home-destruction on a catastrophic scale.

Taylor, like Gardner, reminded the world that women could be and often were prime movers in relationships. Sinatra went on to become one of the preeminent entertainers of the 20th century. But during the marriage (1951-1957), Gardner, not he, was the main attraction. One inquisitive enquirer once asked her why she stayed with the 119-pound Sinatra. Gardner replied “Well, I’ll tell you — nineteen pounds is cock.”

Similarly, Taylor was the force field that pulled in media from all over the world. Being the consummate Hollywood star — Burton had learned his art on the stage — Taylor knew the value of ostentatiousness. She behaved as if she were always in front of a camera. She usually was.

Tabloids and the new voyeurism

There was nothing comparable until 1999, when Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt appeared together at the Emmys and announced a relationship that was, for all intents and purposes, conducted in front of cameras. This included a lavish Malibu wedding in July 2000. The marriage lasted until 2005, by which time J.Lo’s epic relationship with Affleck was known, had taken over as the celebrity coupling du jour and, in time, supplied a narrative of Homeric proportions.

There were other breakups that took the entertainment world by storm: Britney Spears and Kevin Federline separated in 2006. Justin Timberlake and Cameron Diaz broke up in 2007. But Lopez and Affleck was epochal: It characterized a period when the media’s interest in the unappetizing areas of celebrity life was rising and audiences gave their approval to the increased coverage. One way they did this was by buying tabloid magazines.

Sales of the likes of Us Weekly, People and Star have slipped in recent years as social media has become the main conduit of celebrity gossip. But their impact in the early 2000s was appreciable and played no small part in cultivating our near-voyeuristic interest in glamorous couples. It could be plausibly argued that there was little new in this. Some might maintain that audiences had long been attracted to dreadful experiences while they remained at safe distance. Living through awful times vicariously may have its rewards: Just imagining how others feel rather than actually feeling is a pain with its own analgesic properties.

The decision by Aniston and Pitt to split and Pitt’s subsequent romance with Angelina Jolie was the affair that shook tabloid journalism. It alerted editors that audiences enjoyed learning about how people who otherwise led charmed lives were just as susceptible to the same painful ordeals and privations as anybody else.

This is part of the reason for our prolonged captivation with Lopez and Affleck and, to a lesser extent, other celeb couples. We might envy their lifestyles and adulation. We might even engage in wish-fulfillment and imagine what the world must be like with an A-list partner. Yet, there is gratification in learning that even the world’s most fabulous couples experience mundane squabbles and domestic discord, reminding us that beneath the glamor, they too are just as human as we are.

Performative coupledom and authenticity

That’s not the only reason we’re drawn to celebrity couples. Harper’s Bazaar writer Marie-Claire Chappet uses the term “performative coupledom” to describe the way many couples like J.Lo and Affleck present themselves to the media for our delectation. Chappet argues that celebrity couples are not passive recipients: They pull out as many stops as they can to maximize the inquisitiveness of the media. Coupledom can be a valuable and highly commodifiable item.

Chappet also suggests there is a kind of synergy in performative coupling. “Just look at Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez,” she writes, “both huge stars whose wattage flickered all the brighter once they got back together. In fact, in many ways, this couple are the ultimate embodiment of this trend.” The colossal coverage given the latest breakup underlines her point.

Neither party swept gracefully upwards after the 2003 breakup. Affleck had scored a triumph with his Oscar-winning film Argo, but had featured in flops, too. He struggled with alcohol dependency and had at least three periods in rehab. Lopez’s career also seemed to spiral downwards when she appeared on the television series American Idol. But to her dubious credit, her Super Bowl halftime show appearance in 2020 elicited 1,312 complaints from viewers to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC). She was 50 years old at the time and most of the complaints were about the sexual explicitness of her performance. The latest rift will surely regenerate interest in the ill-starred duo.

No celebrity couple is perfect. Even the best-matched partnerships hit unexpected and often hidden snags, obstacles that complicate or even destroy relationships. If a couple is seen as just too good to be true, the adage kicks in: It usually is. Celebrity couples must have the imprimatur of genuineness to captivate us. This means extremely short affairs, like Kim Kardashian’s 72-day marriage to Kris Humphries, are dismissed as stunts. Or, in the case of Britney Spears, whose marriage to Jason Alexander lasted 55 hours, they’re viewed as false-starts.

The seeming contradiction between an authentic relationship and performativity is smoothed over by audiences who like to see people at their best and worst. Today’s celebrity-savvy audiences suspect staging here and there and accept it. They are celebrities, after all. But couples must humanize themselves and remind audiences of their authenticity with everyday emotions, quarrels and fall-outs that serve to maintain captivation. An occasional rage helps, too.

J.Lo and Affleck may be waving goodbye to each other, but they might just as well be waving a banner bearing the slogan, “This is our pitch for immortality.” Individually, they’re probably worth a lot less than they are together. But even breaking-up unites them as far as the media and its audiences are concerned. The heartbroken pair appear to be marching toward celebrity immortality. Meanwhile, we wait for the reconciliation.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of Celebrity Culture, now in its third edition.]

[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post This Is What Makes Celebrity Couple Drama Interesting to Us appeared first on Fair Observer.

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Possible overtones?

Invited to respond, Argentinean President Javier Milei and Vice President Victoria Villarruel shrugged and said Fernández was just being truthful. Aurélien Tchouaméni and several other players on the French national team are of Cameroonian descent. Ousmane Dembélé is of Senegalese, Mauritian and Malian descent.

Days later, football fans in Argentina were repeating the chant. Fernández was investigated by association football’s world governing organization, FIFA, which has prioritized the fight against racism in the sport. The players can be suspended for up to 12 matches if the chant is found to be racist.

Is it racist?

I asked a Spanish-speaking friend for a translation of the comments, and he confirmed the above is accurate. He reckoned the chant had racist “overtones,” meaning it implied that to be properly French, you had to be white. I accept there were overtones. I also accept that the verse was derogatory and insulting to France’s black players. But I am still not convinced this is racism. Then again, racism itself changes.

The myth of race

In 1950, UNESCO published a significant report titled “The Race Question.” This report was one of the first major efforts to expose the scientific invalidity of race as a biological concept. It concluded that “for all practical purposes, ‘race’ is not so much a biological phenomenon as a social myth.”

Despite its mythic status, no one doubted the devilish concept’s potency. “Racism” referred to thoughts and theories predicated on the validity of “race” and the corresponding assumption that the human population was divided naturally into a hierarchy, with whites permanently at the top.

“Racialism,” on the other hand, described language or behavior that reflected those beliefs. So, racialism, or racial discrimination as it was often called, was obviously much more damaging to groups conceived as lower in the purported hierarchy. Anti-discrimination laws and policies were designed to manage racialism rather than educate people.

During the 1980s, the terms racism and racialism converged in academia, public discourse and policy discussions. “Racism” increasingly described both the belief in racial superiority and the resultant discriminatory behaviors. The focus shifted to recognizing that racist beliefs and actions were part of a larger, interconnected complex of injustice and subjugation.

Institutional racism

The term “institutional racism” was first used by Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and Charles V. Hamilton in their influential book Black Power: The Politics of Liberation. Over time, the term became closely associated with the UK’s report on the death of Stephen Lawrence, published in 1999. In this case, institutional racism was defined as “the collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their color, culture or ethnic origin. It can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes and behavior which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.”

According to the report, institutional racism is not only about overt acts of racism but also about the more subtle and systemic practices that lead to unequal treatment — what are now known as microaggressions. Institutional racism and plain racism were soon used interchangeably to mean widespread discrimination.

The parameters have shifted so that the concept of “race” is no longer germane. In 2018, for example, many people from Wales felt they were discriminated against on the grounds of national identity. Under the UK’s Equality Act 2010, these concerns could be considered justified. The Welsh were a “protected group.” The defining feature of racism, in this conception, is not “race” but vulnerability to discrimination. 

The Boy Who Cried “Wolf”

The benefits of categorizing racism in this way are many. Groups that have been treated wrongfully or prejudicially, be that presently or historically, are protected by law and can use the emotively powerful claim of racism in their defense. Offenses motivated by a victim’s supposed ethnicity, nationality, religion, sexual orientation, disability or similar characteristics are now grouped collectively as hate crimes. The defining characteristic is the perpetrator’s intention, not the victim’s attributes. A claim of a racist attack on a cisgender, fully abled, while male heterosexual has merit.

But there are dangers, the most obvious one captured by the phrase “cry wolf.” The fable of the tricksy shepherd boy who playfully misleads people with false cries of, “Wolf!” is illuminating. When a wolf actually does appear, others are so used to the boy’s stunts that no one takes notice. Repeatedly claiming “racism” calls attention to an unpleasant and widespread presence, but may also devalue such claims. The enlargement of the concept to cover all manner of discrimination tends to trivialize racism in the form it once had.

Racism has disfigured America’s history from the 17th century and Europe’s from the 1950s. It has provoked slave uprisings, riots, protest marches and other forms of civil disobedience. Torture, mutilation and death have been its grimmest byproducts. To cluster these sins under the same rubric as microaggressions against the Welsh lessens their significance in the eyes of many.

Racism in the Fernández case

I am certainly not condoning the behavior of Fernández and his teammates. It was not just careless, but wrongheaded, pernicious, arguably defamatory and possibly malicious. France’s black players were subject to abuse on social media following their World Cup defeat to Argentina in 2022, so these kinds of irresponsible deeds can have consequences. But was it racist?

Fifty years ago, no. Thirty years ago, still no. In fact, in 1998, France won the FIFA World Cup with a multicultural team that included Zinedine Zidane, Patrick Vieira, Lilian Thuram and Marcel Desailly, among others. Had Fernández’s video been released then, it likely would have been ridiculed and dismissed as a case of “sour grapes.” But today we err on the side of assuming malignancy.

The impact of racism has been diluted by our eagerness to recognize it in any situation in which hatred of particular groups is involved. This is not a bad thing and in a great many instances, there has been a racist component buried among other sordid motivations. Yet the danger lies in spurious attributions. Some offenses, even hate crimes, are not impelled by spurious beliefs about race and should be treated as conceptually distinct.

None of this excuses Fernández et al. But perhaps we should laugh at their idiocy and childlike attempts to make fun rather than dignify them — which is what we do when we endow them with serious motives.

[Ellis Cashmore is the editor of Encyclopedia of Race and Ethnic Studies]

[Emma Johnson edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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It was the most potent celebrity endorsement of a political candidate in history. Distancing herself from partisan politics, Oprah insisted she was acting out of a sense of obligation: “I feel compelled to stand up and speak out for the man who I believe has a new vision for America.”

She closed with gravity, drawing on Ernest J. Gainer’s 1971 novel The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, which tells the life story of a woman born in slavery at the end of the American civil war. The book recounts how each time a new baby was born, its mother would take it to Jane Pittman, who would hold the baby John-the-Baptist-like and wonder aloud whether the child would be the deliverer of black people: “Is you the one?  Oprah refined the grammar, changed the context and answered affirmatively that Obama was indeed The One.

Rarely, if ever, has a single affirmation been so pivotal: It was less an endorsement, more a proclamation. But is a thumbs-up from rapper-turned-country music star Kid Rock going to make much difference to Donald Trump’s chances at this year’s presidential election? For that matter, is anyone’s endorsement going to make an impact? I can think of one, but more on that later.

More than entertainers

Politicians have attracted endorsements from popular entertainers since the 1950s. Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, in 1952 and 1956, recruited the likes of Bing Crosby and Ethel Merman at a time when the popular assumption was that Hollywood stars were communist sympathizers.

Frank Sinatra re-recorded “High Hopes” complete with the line “Vote for Kennedy” as part of JFK’s successful presidential campaign in 1960. Around the same time, Britain’s Labour Party leader Harold Wilson received conspicuous support from the Beatles. Twenty years later, Sinatra donated $4 million to Republican Ronald Reagan’s successful presidential campaign.

Jane Fonda threw her weight behind Democrat George McGovern in the 1972 presidential

campaign. Fonda’s endorsement aligned with her opposition to the Vietnam War.

Celebrities, including athletes, have been conspicuous in every postwar US presidential campaign, though basketball star and shoe endorser Michael Jordan famously remained absent from a Senate race in 1990 explaining — when invited to endorse Harvey Gantt, an African-American Democratic candidate in North Carolina — “Republicans buy sneakers too.”

Bill Clinton garnered support from celebrities, including Barbara Streisand and Whoopi Goldberg, during his presidential campaigns in 1992 and 1996. The value of Michael Jackson’s endorsement was arguable. While Jackson was an immensely popular and influential figure with a vast global fanbase, Jackson faced allegations of child sexual abuse. (He was eventually cleared.)

Since Clinton, celebrity endorsements for presidential candidates are a required part of campaigns. The 1990s witnessed an expansion of the roles of showbusiness entertainers: Perhaps they felt the need to demonstrate they were more than entertainers and held solid beliefs, values and commitments. Politicians enthusiastically gave them a platform and what evidence there is suggests they benefited.

Risky business

In 2016, Trump counted Mike Tyson and Kanye West among his celebrity endorsers. While Tyson was a convicted rapist, having African Americans among his cohort presumably lent Trump credibility among blacks. Black voters make up about 11–12 percent of the US electorate and Trump lobbied for their votes, though he managed only 8% of black votes in both 2016 and 2020.

While West, or Ye, as he prefers, had previously favored Democrat candidates, his approval couldn’t have done Trump any harm. Today, Ye is kryptonite (the fictional green mineral that weakens Superman). His flip-flopping was one thing, but his antisemitic remarks in 2022 persuaded sportswear manufacturer Adidas that it should cancel his best-selling “Yeezy” line, valued at $250 million per year.

Adidas’s experience with Ye may have chastened political candidates. Popular, black and seemingly multitalented — he designed his own clothes range — Ye imploded with an unexpected stream of invectives. He did have a history — having described slavery as a “choice” in 2018 — so Adidas must have known he was a risk. As are many other celebrities, of course. Many rose to prominence after scandals and know how to ride them like surfers conquering waves, transforming controversy into a vehicle for even greater fame.

Consumer culture

Endorsements have been integral to consumer culture, which began properly in the economic prosperity following the end of World War II in 1945. Hollywood stars appeared in advertising campaigns, and their effect on sales was encouraging enough to persuade ad agencies to pay for their services.

Today, they pay mightily: in 2015, LeBron James signed a multi-year deal with Nike valued at $1 billion. James used his platform, including social media and public appearances, to express his support for Joe Biden and his running mate, Kamala Harris, in 2020. Political candidates don’t pay endorsers, of course.

The value of celebrities to advertisers is reflected in sales: Some individuals, including Oprah, Jordan, George Clooney and Jennifer Aniston, can pitch for almost anything and make it sell. On the other hand, Rihanna didn’t work for Nivea, which dropped her in 2012. Often, the relationship is symbiotic, with celebrities enhancing their reputations by associating themselves with popular brands.

However, selling things, inanimate material objects, is one thing; selling living sentient beings is another. Politics, like every other aspect of society, has been penetrated by celebrity: Votes are cast as much for people as what those people stand for. Ideals, values, policies and commitments will always feature in the mix when voters decide. As will relatability: Politicians strive to make voters think they share their concerns, identify with their problems and understand their feelings. When they can’t do it, they hope their endorsers can.

Convictions or self-aggrandizement?

Oprah was so influential she shooed off disbelief. Her blessing was strong enough to convince, even empower voters. But she was extraordinary. Other celebs elicit a note of cynical perspicacity. Voters suspect them more than respect them.

I have only inference and extrapolation to back up my claim. A recent research project, in which I was involved, centered on sports fans’ reactions to athletes, clubs, sponsors or entire sports leagues that push boundaries and make pronouncements on causes, such as war, racism and LGBTQ+ issues. A swath of fans detected their sermonizing was largely self-aggrandizement, as if saying, “We want you to take us seriously and accept that we truly believe in this cause [whatever it is].” If their gestures and pronouncements do little else, they prove athletes know how to read the room: They are aware of voguish attitudes and values and adapt themselves to suit them.

It may be fallacious to use the same logic for voters. Or it may be instructive. If the latter, celebrities see elections as pretexts for posturing and, ever-eager to provide an illusion of depth to further their ambitions, they offer their support. In this sense, presidential elections offer painless opportunities to burnish any celebs’ profundity. At least, if we follow the logic. Joe Biden’s alarming performance in front of 51 million American viewers recently may give prospective endorsers cause for thought. How much burnish is there in associating with a faltering politician?

What about Taylor?

The endorsements ringing for Biden sound like cracked bells: Barbra Streisand, Julia Roberts, George Clooney (since retracted, however) and others, including Robert De Niro, have all made their allegiances known before. Apart from the aforementioned Kid Rock, Donald Trump has only a handful of celebs, most of pensionable age, in his corner.

The unique figure in modern cultural history is, of course, Taylor Swift. She bridges many gaps, between pop and art, poignancy and jubilation, intensity and matter-of-factness. Is the gap between entertainment and politics one she aims to traverse? With 283 million followers on Instagram, she’s not hard to imagine running for the presidency herself. There’s even a conspiracy theory about her political ambitions. In the meantime, no human being has more

influence. Her endorsement would match Oprah’s.

Some celebs have genuine convictions and nail their colors to the mast without considering whether publicizing their political preferences will affect their careers. Others are primarily concerned with boosting their reputations. I sense that voters think they are all in the latter camp. So, why are politicians so keen on having them in their corner?

Oprah and Taylor are sui generis: They are both unique, albeit in their different ways and capacities to galvanize voters. No one else presently comes close and, while this year’s presidential candidates clearly welcome support from any quarter, the support of celebs is probably worthless and, if the message of our skeptical sports fans is any gauge, counterproductive.

[Ellis Cashmore’s latest book is Celebrity Culture, 3rd edition.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Do Celebrity Endorsements Help or Hurt Politicians? appeared first on Fair Observer.

On June 14, Germany will host one of the two biggest sports tournaments of 2024. EURO2024, as it’s called, is association football’s second biggest men’s event after the quadrennial FIFA World Cup. In July, the Paris Olympics will follow. In the absence of a deus ex machina, both tournaments will take place while military conflict rages in Ukraine and Gaza. Will either or both sports events become platforms for protest against the wars?  

The wars have prompted almost continuous remonstration of one kind or another, primarily in support of a ceasefire, around the world. University campuses, embassies and streets have been sites of protest. The recent Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö, Sweden, provided an attractive showcase. On the day of the competition’s grand final, 10,000–12,000 protesters gathered on the central Stortorget square of the Swedish host city before marching toward the contest venue, waving Palestinian flags and shouting “Eurovision united by genocide” — a play on the contest’s official slogan, “United by music.” Earlier, there had been a more modest pro-Israel demonstration. Neither side missed the golden opportunity for widespread publicity.

Eurovision draws a formidable 162 million TV viewers, who will have been aware of the railing. But this figure is eclipsed by the viewers who watch football. 5.23 billion cumulatively watched the 2022 edition of the European Football Championship, according to the Union of European Football Associations — that’s nearly 122 times the combined population of Ukraine, Israel and Palestine. Any march, blockade, sit-down or exhibition is likely to be seen worldwide.

Sports and politics have a long history together

Despite sports administrators’ refusal to acknowledge it, the affinity between sports and politics is undeniable. A political ideal inspired the modern Olympic games: Their creator, Pierre de Coubertin (1863–1937), reimagined the ancient Greek religious, literary, musical and athletic festival as stripped down — a good-natured competition between nations and one with substantial symbolic value. Having witnessed the Franco-Prussian War (1870–1871), the rise of nationalism and militarism, colonial conflicts and the events that would eventually lead to World War I, de Coubertin suspected a multi-sports event could bring nations together. So, a large part of the games’ remit was to counterbalance the gathering forces in late nineteenth-century Europe.

The 1900 Paris Olympics, integrated into Exposition Universelle, an international event showcasing technological and cultural achievements, would have encouraged De Coubertin, an enthusiastic propagandist for world peace. He was less encouraged by the 1936 Berlin games in the year before his death. The Berlin tournament was an effective showcase for Nazis’ administrative expertise and competence: It staged arguably the most successful sports tournament up to that point in history, featuring 49 nations. The games were also intended to promote the destructive ideology of an “Aryan race.”

Sports has also been deployed as a conduit of opposition and, at times, at least appeared to influence social and political change. Many people credit the international sporting boycott of apartheid-era South Africa (from 1964 to 1992) with helping to end segregation and bring about the rise of the African National Congress (ANC) led by Nelson Mandela in 1994.

In 1977, Commonwealth nations agreed to exclude South Africa from international competition in Gleneagles, Scotland. The ban effectively froze South Africa out of major sports and turned it into a pariah state. Teams and individuals refrained from visiting or competing against the country, although not all observed the ban. 

It is satisfying to believe sports, activities that ostensibly promote unity of action and feeling, played a part in ending a regime based on racist separation and abominable inequality. But there’s no hard evidence to corroborate this unless we rely on conjecture and inference. On the other hand, the boycott certainly did not harm the anti-apartheid movement.

Dramatic protests by athletes

Disruption and mayhem can catalyze new friendships and insights, like breaking eggs to make omelets. At the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City, two African American athletes dramatically revealed their disdain for the US by bowing their heads and raising their gloved fists defiantly while on the victory rostrum. Tommie Smith and John Carlos are now hailed as fearless pioneers who changed the world’s perception of the American Dream. However, they were condemned and expelled from the games at the time.

Cultural rehabilitation came slowly and the “black power salute,” as it became known, is now regarded as a totemic moment in the history of modern USA. It’s tempting to exaggerate its impact, but the symbolic demonstration of resistance has become critical over the decades. Smith and Carlos captured the rebellious mood of the 1960s when much of the USA was affected by civil uprising.

Similarly, Colin Kaepernick’s motion in 2016 engaged a nation horrified by the deaths of two black men on consecutive days in July in different parts of the USA. Police officers fatally shot both Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, the former in Louisiana and the latter in Minnesota. In August, Kaepernick, then playing for the National Football League’s (NFL’s) San Francisco 49ers, refused to stand during the playing of the American national anthem. “I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of color,” Kaepernick told NFL Media in 2016. He dramatized his stand further when he dropped to one knee during the anthem. It synced perfectly with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement that had emerged three years earlier and set off a chain reaction.

Sports brings many benefits — is world peace one of them?

Over the following years, European football embraced the knee gesture and encouraged observance before games. Other sports were not so keen. Thomas Bach, president of the International Olympic Committee, warned athletes against political protests, calling on them to avoid “divisive” statements that could overshadow the world’s biggest sporting event. “The podium and the medal ceremonies are not made … for a political or other demonstration,” Bach said prior to the Covid-delayed Tokyo games in 2021.

US shot-putter Raven Saunders, who is queer, fashioned her own protest as she collected her silver medal, crossing her arms representing, in her words, “the intersection of where all people who are oppressed meet.” 11 other Formula One drivers joined Lewis Hamilton as he took a knee before the start of the Styrian Grand Prix in Austria.

Just Stop Oil, a British environmentalist group that opposes the use of fossil fuels, spectacularly ambushed the World Snooker Championships in Sheffield, England, in 2023, leaping on the baize-covered tables and releasing a cloud of orange powder that disrupted the competition and provided impressively colorful images for the media. The same group staged a less publicized demonstration at Wimbledon in the same year. Earlier this year, hundreds marched to the World Athletics Indoor Championships venue in Glasgow, Scotland, to protest the Gaza conflict. Palestine players wore keffiyehs (Bedouin Arab headdresses) when they entered the field against Australia in November 2023.

The toxin of the Ukraine and Gaza has by now envenomed the political atmosphere in much of the world and opposition to the wars manifests in rallies and marches somewhere practically every day. In this cultural climate, it would be unusual if EURO2024 and the Olympics’ Stade de France did not become protest sites. No one would be caught by surprise. Almost everyone can foresee at least one disruption to the competition. Most fans won’t encourage it, but these are exceptional circumstances in which to pursue what are, after all, trivialities. What’s a trophy or a medal in the context of widespread bloodshed?

Sports have no real reason to exist at all. They won’t save the planet, cure chronic disease, end social inequality or deliver peace on earth. Only fantasists believe campaigners for world peace can bring an end to the two military conflicts. Even concerted demonstrations from fans, players, teams and even organizers are unlikely to make impressions on the perpetrators of war. Like most political protests, their impact would be, at best, part of a cumulative dissent. And, at worst, futile. But is futility such a bad thing? Isn’t any form of protest better than no protest at all?

[Ellis Cashmore is a co-researcher of the report “Will EURO2024 struggle to keep war protests out of football?” published in Soccer & Society.]

[Liam Roman edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post A Sociologist’s Perspective on the Olympics and EURO2024 as Protest Platforms appeared first on Fair Observer.

Cashmore defines celebrity culture as “our tendency to have our values, practices and habits affected by figures who have risen to prominence (some would say undue prominence because it’s not proportionate to their accomplishments).” Notice that celebrities are referred to as figures and not people. Cashmore makes the distinction because celebrities are more products of our imagination than they are the flesh-and-blood person behind the fame. By existing in our imagination, they are independent of time and space and can be anything we want them to be. 

But what separates a celebrity from an ordinary person? 

When asked if an ordinary person could become a celebrity, Cahsmore replied, “Not without the help of a legion of followers.” Despite many, many people trying to grow a following online, the vast majority fail at becoming a true celebrity. Every so often someone does manage to pull it off by doing something crazy but this fame is often fleeting. Not many have the staying power within our imaginations. 

The deciding factor of celebrity status is, ironically, we, the public. Anything can make someone a celebrity provided we find it interesting. Our perception of them makes them interesting. What makes a famous person a celebrity is the public: We turn them into celebrities. 

A normal person can become a celebrity in a short amount of time provided they get national attention. They simply have to occupy people’s minds (for example, winning the lottery or a reality TV show).

Before the year 2000, movies and TV were the established methods of gaining fame, but now we all carry phones with us. We essentially carry celebrities with us and in a moment’s notice can summon them for our entertainment

Some people, like Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian, caught onto this trend early. They realized that social media were not just a presence but a force. It doesn’t matter what you say or do as long as the media notice you. Paris Hilton was more than “famous for being famous”; she was famous for appearing. The media trailed her because we were interested in her.

Kim Kardashian saw this and realized she could make it better by using social media and she exploded in popularity. Kim started as an assistant for Paris, but eventually eclipsed her.

Nearly any kind of notoriety can transform into stardom. Oscar Pistorius, who was already famous to a degree as a paralympian, became infamous after shooting his girlfriend, Rea. This rocketed him from being known within the sports world to international stardom. Pistorius’s audience mushroomed because people who weren’t interested in running were intrigued by the murder trial. It’s a combination of our fascination with killing as well as how much we enjoy seeing the rise and fall of our celebrities.

Related Reading

What Makes a Child Murder Another Child?

Another key ingredient of being a celebrity is appearing to be relatable — this is key to the transformation into celebrity culture. It’s like “the larger-than-life characters have come down to earth,” Cashmore explains. Our affection for celebrities is rooted in our love of how ordinary they are.

How does celebrity culture affect us?

Celebrity culture is “inescapable” and “a defining aspect of culture today,” whether we like it or not. Cashmore clarifies, “The main way is that it affects the way we spend our money. We can’t untangle celebrity culture from consumer culture.”

Celebrity culture encourages us to buy things that we don’t need but things that we want. It exists not just to sell us specific products but instead to advertise a way of life in which we are rewarded for owning the commodities we see they have. While this encouragement may not be overt endorsements we do our best to mimic celebrities.

While Cashmore asserts that celebrity influence is often overestimated, there is a chance that this could change in the future. 

We live in a time where people who are famous not for their leadership or anything related to politics, can still earn a reputation (think Arnold Schwarzenegger or Donald Trump). It seems like simply being known is half the battle in politics. As long as you can provoke strong emotion, you’re in business. The worst thing that can happen to a celebrity is that people stop caring. 

Cashmore noted, “I wouldn’t put it past Kim Kardashian or Taylor Swift to someday make the transition to the political playing field.”

How long can we expect for Celebrity Culture to last? Cashmore reminds us that “a change is hardly visible on the horizon let alone an end. Celebrity culture is here to stay, it seems.”

[Beaudry Young wrote the first draft of this piece.]

The views expressed in this article/video are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post FO° Talks: Celebrity Culture: More than a Figment of our Imagination appeared first on Fair Observer.

Calocane, a 32-year-old male, fatally stabbed Barnaby Webber and Grace O’Malley-Kumar, both aged 19, and Ian Coates, a school caretaker, in Nottingham, England, on June 13, 2023. He also drove a stolen van at three pedestrians. Calocane was charged with murder and three counts of attempted murder. He was a dual Guinea-Bissau/Portuguese national with settled status in the UK and an engineering graduate from the University of Nottingham.

Over the next several months, it emerged that Calocane had been known to mental health services since 2020 and had been prescribed treatment. Police also pursued but did not arrest him for allegedly attacking two people weeks before the stabbings.

While in custody awaiting trial, Calocane was transferred to a “secure hospital setting” and assessed by forensic psychiatrists. Forensic psychiatrists have expertise in both psychiatry and the legal system. Their work involves conducting evaluations to assess issues like competency to stand trial, criminal responsibility and other mental health-related aspects of legal cases.

The forensic psychiatrists’ conclusions were presented to the judge. He declared himself “satisfied” that Calocane was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia and converted the charge to manslaughter on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

“Malign forces”

Paranoid schizophrenia is a subtype of schizophrenia, a severe and chronic mental disorder. The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition, better known as the DSM-4, defined it by “preoccupation with one or more delusions or frequent auditory hallucinations.” (The Fifth Edition, however, no longer recognizes “paranoid schizophrenia” or other subtypes.)

Calocane experienced paranoid delusions in which he believed he was being targeted by “malign forces” and agencies such as MI5 (Britain’s domestic counterintelligence agency) which were controlling his thoughts and behavior. The symptoms apparently began in 2019.

Auditory hallucinations (i.e., hearing voices) reinforced his beliefs. Calocane’s thinking seemed muddled, and it’s possible that his inability to distinguish between reality and delusions impacted his judgment. He may not have lacked the ability to distinguish between right and wrong, but his condition could have affected his ability to assess situations accurately. If this sounds unclear, that’s because it is. This is why the legal system accepted diminished responsibility and committed Calocane to a medical facility where he would presumably receive psychiatric treatment. But it was a controversial decision.

Had the forensic psychiatrists not persuaded the judge, he would almost certainly have imposed a lengthy prison sentence, probably life. Instead, the judge accepted Calocane’s guilty plea of manslaughter and handed him a restricted hospital order. In the UK, if judges determine that an offender poses a danger to the public, they can invoke section 41 of the Mental Health Act and commit the offender to an indefinite period in a special hospital where physical security arrangements are the equivalent of a prison’s. (There are nearly 8,000 people currently living under such conditions in the UK. Historically, the Moors murderer Ian Brady, Peter Sutcliffe aka the Yorkshire Ripper, and infamous gangster Ronnie Kray, all spent periods of their sentences in high-security hospitals.)

The parents of Webber and O’Malley-Kumar were understandably enraged by what they regard as leniency shown to their children’s killer. As far as they were concerned, it was murder, and Calocane should have been charged accordingly. Webber’s mother Emma declared that “true justice has not been served” and accused the police chief of having blood on his hands.

“This man [Calocane] made a mockery of the system and he has got away with murder,” added Coates’s son.

The medical model of mental illness

The case forces us to think about mental health, but not in the almost-comfortable way we ordinarily turn it over in our minds. Rock stars, athletes and other celebrities habitually solicit public sympathy by professing their so-called mental health issues, typically undiagnosed and self-treated.

According to the World Health Organization (WHO) 301 million people worldwide suffer from anxiety disorders and over 280 million people have depression. The WHO estimates that 1 in 8 people worldwide suffers from some mental disorder. Most of these people are functional in the sense that they hold down jobs and get through their days, perhaps with the help of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) like Prozac or monoamine oxidase Inhibitors like Elavil.

Graver forms of mental illness such as schizophrenia have typically been treated with antipsychotic drugs since the early 1950s. The first known antipsychotic medication was chlorpromazine. Care providers also employ non-pharmacological methods such as cognitive behavioral therapy and group therapy, but medication adherence is crucial for managing symptoms. It seems Calocane had refrained from taking medication, presumably antipsychotic drugs.

In the 1970s, psychiatry underwent a revolution. Mental illness came to be considered distinct and separate from physical health. Practitioners rejected the “medical model” which assumed that mental illness always had a physical basis. They considered it a crude, reductive simplification that was easy on the intellect, but of limited value in understanding. Unlike physical ailments that may have visible symptoms, mental health issues were more elusive, making diagnosis and treatment challenging. The subjective nature of the mental added another layer of complexity.

I learned from lodestars of the movement like Thomas Szasz (1920–2012), R.D. Laing (1927–1989) and Thomas Scheff (b.1929) during my own undergraduate studies. Each of them offered ways of analyzing mental illness as the result of experiences in social contexts, whether the family or large-scale institutions. All emphasized the importance of response, reaction and cultural labeling in affecting our understanding and treatment of people considered, rightly or wrongly, to be mentally ill. These and other sociologically inclined scholars were critical of the medical model’s indifference to social influences.

Yet treating mental illness as a disease, even metaphorically, has proven both intellectually appealing and practically favorable. The catalytic effect of Prozac (fluoxetine) in boosting the popularity of the medical model shouldn’t be underestimated. The US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) first approved it for prescription in 1987. Since then, Prozac has been widely prescribed for the treatment of depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, panic disorder and several other mood disorders. This popularity led to the proliferation of other SSRIs.

Despite the simplification involved, approaching mental illness as analogous to physical sickness has yielded colossal benefits. As well as removing much, if not all, of the stigma traditionally associated with mental illness, it has facilitated more open discourse and, by implication, enhanced inclusiveness. No one today feels embarrassed by declaring themselves to be experiencing mental health issues — “issues” now having replaced “problems,” “difficulties” or “troubles.”

Also, by considering mental health in the broader framework of illness, society is compelled to recognize the interconnectedness of mental and physical well-being. This approach promotes a more holistic understanding of health. But, the medical model, though serviceable, should be approached with caution. Mental illness is analogous to, not the same as, physical illness. We need to respect the unique features of mental health conditions, especially when it comes to a case like Calocane’s.

Liquid society

Unlike medical practitioners, sociologists like me tend not to see the world in terms of types or categories; rather, we see it as sequences of moments in perpetual flux. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of liquid modernity emphasized the fluid and uncertain nature of relationships, institutions and other social phenomena.

While Bauman didn’t study mental illness, his approach would probably emphasize constantly changing patterns rather than identifiable, diagnosable types. Recently, mental health professionals visualize mental health as lying on a spectrum. Yet even this seems overly reductionist. One may be at one end of a spectrum or the other, but the spectrum itself does not change. Instead, imagine mental illness as a kaleidoscope — a mix of changing elements, confused, chaotic and unpredictable.

The mental illness may be permanent, temporary or sporadic. Its causes or antecedents may lie in physical injury or decay, or they may be congenital (present from birth). A neurobiological model of mental illness would posit that mental disorders are primarily caused by physiological factors, such as neurotransmitter imbalances in the brain. According to this perspective, conditions like depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and others would result from disturbances in the functioning of neurotransmitters.

On the other hand, the causes may lie outside the individual in social experiences such as poverty, geographical dislocation or cultural disengagement. Interpersonal relations convulsed by, for example, unemployment, bereavement, the departure of a loved one or any radical change in circumstances can give rise to trauma.

Given the scope, scale and complexity of the phenomena we group together as “mental illness,” the treatment options we have available seem limited. In the early to mid-20th century, the practice of treating mental illness with physical surgery, known as psychosurgery, gained prominence. This was the period of lobotomy, which involved severing or damaging the connections between the prefrontal cortices (which govern higher-order cognitive functions) and the rest of the brain.

While lobotomy is no longer practiced, some surgical interventions, like deep brain stimulation (DBS), are still used for conditions like treatment-resistant depression or OCD. (DBS involves implanting electrodes into certain brain regions and is considered a last resort when other treatment options have failed.) But the trend has been away from invasive methods and toward medication and psychotherapy.

So, how much confidence should we have in British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak when he promises Calocane’s victims’ families that “we will get the answers”? Do we even know the questions? The Calocane case challenges us to square circles when we don’t know whether a circle means a figure consisting of points equidistant from a center, or a curved upper tier of seats in a theater. In other words, when you and I talk about “mental illness,” we don’t even know whether we are thinking about the same thing. How could we begin to talk about the diminished responsibility “mental illness” supposedly implies?

If Calocane resisted taking prescribed medication, was he exercising freely willed choice? Or was he behaving in accordance with delusions or auditory hallucinations? Can he thus be held responsible? At the moment, the answer is “no,” or at least, “not completely.” This may change when Attorney General Victoria Prentis completes her review of the case.

Still, she will discover that the case poses problems incapable of an indisputable solution. No matter how many sides to the argument Prentis considers, her conclusion will be controversial. Mental health resists pat answers; it just offers tougher questions.

[Ellis Cashmore’s most recent book is The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson.]

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post What Does “Mental Illness” Mean in a Murder Case? appeared first on Fair Observer.

On February 11, 2023, two teenagers murdered 16-year-old Brianna Ghey by stabbing in Culcheth, England. The killers have been called wicked, devilish and, most regularly, evil. None of these descriptions are in the least bit convincing. People just keep gasping, “Why did they do it?” The nowadays fashionable and utterly simplistic “hate crime” is easy on the intellect but of no use to understanding.

Two youths’ macabre experiment

Brianna was born a male in Birchwood, in the north of England. She had not undergone any gender reassignment surgery but identified, dressed and referred to herself as a woman at the time of her murder.

Her killers were both 15 at the time of the murder. Labeling their motive as transphobia is convenient, but misleading. One of the killers, a male known in court as Y, had a grim curiosity that led him to use dehumanizing language suggesting a dislike or prejudice against transgender people. “It’s a boy,” Y wrote in response to a message from his female accomplice, X, in which she referred to Brianna as “she.”

“Really all I want to see is what size dick it had,” wrote Y, revealing a grisly fascination. Britain’s Cheshire police announced that they had “no information or intelligence to suggest it was a hate crime,” though the view was not shared by many, especially not by members of the LGBTQ+ community who have been holding vigils.

In a perverse way, the manner in which the young killers planned the murder betrayed maturity. Their text messages seemed to indicate that there were four other potential victims as subjects in what might have been a macabre experiment. X messaged, “Let’s just stab her. It’s more fun.” The male Y answered,  “I want to see if it will scream like a man or a girl.” (Note the persistent use of “it”.)

The two killers went to the trouble of befriending Brianna, feigning a sort of state of mutual trust. They plotted to meet her in a lonely country park in Culcheth. Then they stabbed her 28 times in the head, neck and body. They put a certain level of thought into their method before doing the deed. But the question remains: Why did they do it?

The Bell and Bulger cases

At a certain age, children are intrigued by things beyond their comprehension. It sickens us, but there are children who want to experience the sensation of killing. Most dismember daddy longlegs or trample on small animals for no better reason than that they can. But others have more exacting curiosities.

The UK’s paradigm case was in 1968 when the 11-year-old Mary Bell strangled two boys, aged three and four, “solely for the pleasure and excitement of killing,” according to the judge. Like X, she had an accomplice. Mary’s accomplice was eventually acquitted, leaving her as the only culprit. (She was named, as will be X and Y in due course.) Mary was sent to a special security unit and released on license in 1980, when she was given a new identity. It is believed she now has a daughter. There is no way of knowing how accurate the judge’s assessment was, but maybe she really was seeking a depraved thrill.

The case was echoed in 1993 when two 11-year-old boys killed James Bulger, aged two — read that again: two. The killers dropped the child on his head and repeatedly punched and kicked him, at one point forcing batteries into his mouth, before hitting him on the head with a 22-pound iron bar. There were so many injuries that the coroner could not determine the precise cause of death. The killers were named as Jon Venables and Robert Thompson, and they were sentenced to a juvenile offenders’ facility. They were released in 2001, given new identities and granted legal anonymity for life.

Violence and the mentality of children

Morality is not innate: We learn to distinguish between right and wrong, probably from the age of four or, possibly, even earlier when we begin to internalize values and accept them as part of a natural order. From about six, children develop a more nuanced sense of morality and, later, learn to apply moral reasoning — that is, to discern rightness or wrongness in specific social settings. Empathy arrives any time after about eight. In all three cases discussed here, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another appears to be lacking. Or is it? It is difficult to believe any of the killers were not aware that they would be causing physical distress and, in the Bulger case, acute pain, to their victims.

We shouldn’t be surprised to learn how easily they subordinated this awareness to their own specific, excessively selfish interests. Adults do it all the time. Otherwise, there would be no crime. I am not arguing that child murder mirrors what goes on in society generally. But crimes of violence or crimes that involve violence concomitantly probably require subjectively depriving a person or group of people of some human qualities.

We are taken aback by the ferocity of children who kill, but adults do similarly. Children, like adults, victimize their peers. Fully half of child sex abuse incidents in England and Wales, for another example, are perpetrated by children. This is the recurringly reborn “monster” I mentioned earlier: it’s a cruel and daunting creature and we don’t know where it comes from or how it can be defeated.

Young killers pick on children as victims, not because they hate other children, but because they are convenient victims. Jon Venables and Robert Thompson were 11; they would hardly be in a position to kill an adult or anyone else who could fight back. Children can, however, and sometimes do kill adults too. In 2000, three teenage girls stabbed Sister Maria Laura Mainetti to death in Chiavenna, Italy. Like other victimizers, they attack whom they can.

Brianna Ghey was killed because her killers believed she would not provide resistance. Dehumanizing her was part of the method, not the motive. So, what is the motive? The same as it was for Bell and the others, perhaps.

Children live in a world in which arguments are settled usually by some form of violence either in or outside the school playground. Some even witness arguments settled at home by the same means. They also learn that larger arguments are also settled or not settled by violence.

This is not the place to go into the socio-psychological dynamics of violence or how global conflict affects the mentality of children. But we should at least recognize that the violence that horrifies us so much when perpetrated by children and adolescents is not so different from the behavior to which we are habituated. After all, no state can exist with a police force or its equivalent in armed might. Ultimate violence may not be used frequently, and official violence is deliberately under-emphasized, but it is the ultimate foundation of any social order.

Mercifully, child-on-child killings are rare. So rare that they appear extraordinary. Children are inspired to use violence by all manner of inescapable influences. They, like adults (and I mean all of us) experience the temptation to hurt others and maybe even kill them. But they and we exercise effective control over these impulses. Our sense of morality usually kicks in and, when it doesn’t, the threat of long-term imprisonment is always lurking.

But it is not so for some children. Their sense of right and wrong is either underdeveloped, buried beneath other sensibilities or possibly distorted by what they’ve witnessed at home or in their social environments. They do not have inhibitions that stop others. Or they have curiosity sufficient to overpower them.

[Ellis Cashmore’s most recent book is The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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UK Home Secretary Suella Braverman recently gave a speech on migration. She concluded a “misguided dogma of multiculturalism” had brought people into the UK with the purpose of  “undermining the stability and threatening the security of society.” It was an adventurous claim undergirded by her premise: “Multiculturalism makes no demands of the incomer to integrate. It has failed because it allowed people to come to our society and live parallel lives in it. They could be in society but not in society.”

Has multiculturalism failed? Ideals rarely fail or succeed totally, since they envision something desirable or perfect but not likely to become a reality. They offer a guide as to how society should operate. In recent years, the word itself has been replaced by “cultural diversity,” but the aspiration is very similar. Both expressions describe a serviceable model of society; neither describes reality. Let me provide a historical summary.

Brits were not ready to accept the “dark strangers”

Postwar Britain was taken aback by the appearance of what one sociologist of the period, Sheila Patterson, characterized as Dark Strangers. Patterson’s research in the early 1960s centered on “West Indians in Brixton.” Brixton is an area in south London where accommodation was cheap. It became a magnet for migrants from the Caribbean who traveled to the UK in search of work with the intention of saving for a few years before returning to Jamaica or one of the other islands. This became known as “the myth of return” because so few actually did go back. Most permanently settled in Britain. Britain’s other main migrant groups were from South Asia, in particular, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Unlike West Indians, they spoke different languages, had different faiths and often dressed in traditional clothes.

Patterson’s conclusions were essentially those of most liberals in the early 1960s. Racial prejudice and discrimination, as they were called, were temporary deviations. Indigenous whites were simply unused to different-looking neighbors with unusual accents. The presumption was that whites would, over time, become accustomed to their new confederates. Concurrently, the newcomers would assimilate, becoming absorbed in the mainstream culture to the point where they resembled whites in language, thought, ambition and, in general, outlook.

A series of disturbances labeled “race riots” — typically involving angry whites attacking predominantly ethnic minority neighborhoods — dashed these expectations. Liberals imagined that the solution would lie in controlling the numbers: if they allowed fewer migrants into the UK, hopefully assimilation had a better chance of succeeding. The Commonwealth Immigrants Act of 1962 and other legislation designed to restrict entry to Britain followed.

Assimilation abandoned in favor of multiculturalism

By the 1970s, the sons and daughters of migrants were maturing. Most had been schooled in the UK and understood Britain as their home. Their parents had settled and, while many had assimilated, many others had not.

A slew of research projects chronicled how racism, or what was then called racialism or racial discrimination, had become a feature of British society. It flared most aggressively in the predominantly white police force, which epitomized Babylon — the contemptuous term used by the then-emerging Rastafari movement, which regarded the police as oppressive agents of control. Major upheavals, variously called riots or uprisings (depending on perspective), were characteristic of the first half of the 1980s, a period when progressives dropped assimilation as a policy directive, decrying it as discriminatory. Instead, they adopted “multiculturalism.”

Part of the thinking of the time was to avoid duplicating the USA, where ethnic ghettos had appeared and blacks and Latinos seemed to have formed a permanent “underclass.” Multiculturalism was conceived as an alternative — learn to embrace rather than erase difference, but ensure there is equality of opportunity in education, the workplace and every other aspect of society. Equal opportunity is not the same as equality: as long as access is fair and evenly distributed, multiculturalism will prosper, or so the thinking went. The expectation was that all groups from whatever background would seize their chances.

Multiculturalism has been working

I’ll remind readers that multiculturalism was an ideal. It was also a sort of prescription. It was not a guarantee: Through the 1980s, racism resurfaced with a vengeance as unemployment grew and, in particular, young people found themselves hard-pressed to make progress. Various political groups conjured up a simplistic but, in the event, persuasive formula: If blacks and Asians were not in Britain, there would be more jobs available to whites. Like every historical instance of racism or its analogs, competition over scarce resources like jobs (or houses and social services) was the root cause.

Whatever anyone says, equal opportunities, as a policy, did work. It pushed employers as well as educators to revisualize how they saw the future. They widened their scopes, created more opportunities and put together the kind of circumstances in which groups that traditionally had underachieved could prosper.

If this sounds sanguine, it’s only because I am comparing the situation at the turn of this century with how it was in the 1970s and 1980s. Those who complain there has been no improvement either have short memories or haven’t familiarized themselves with the research from earlier periods. I’m not disposed to optimism, nor am I naïve enough to imagine racism has been vanquished, but simple observation tells me the UK now has more politicians — including Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and Suella Braverman herself — who come from ethnic minority backgrounds.

There are also more ethnic minorities in British universities than at any time in history. Film, television and theater represent ethnic minorities amply, often reimagining historical drama to integrate black and Asian actors into the casts. Practically every city or town in the country has mosques, temples and other places of worship for those who are not aligned with Christianity. Restaurants cater to global cuisines. Athletes from ethnic minorities have made great strides in the world of sports. So, multiculturalism, to use Braverman’s word, hasn’t failed. It hasn’t succeeded, but it was never a pass-fail thing, anyway. It was a blueprint, a plan, an exemplar — something to aspire to.

While it’s been largely supplanted by cultural diversity — which aims to go beyond accepting variety by celebrating it — I actually like multiculturalism. It implies the kind of integration I favor: not the homogenization assumed by the crude assimilationist model, but an acceptance of and respect for cultural difference. An elevation of cultural difference to the point where people become curious and want to explore cultures other than their own. That’s what has been happening in the UK. Imperceptibly perhaps, but surely.

[Ellis Cashmore’s most recent book is The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson]

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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‘No’ is, in theory, available to anyone, at any time; in practice, however, it is a word of last resort—a word of legality. A word of transaction. A word in which progress collides with reticence: Everyone should be able to say it, but no one really wants to.

Culture is forever caught between the rock of libertinism and the hard place of asceticism. Ten years ago, British entertainer Russell Brand was obscene and humorous, his comic horniness amusing a generation inured to good-natured, but boorish and anti-feminist behavior. Today, he’s deadly serious. His repudiation of claims of rape and sexual assault sound like a deathbed repentance. Maybe they are. The death in question could be that of his showbusiness career.

The once-bright spark of British comedy is now desperately claiming he performed all those sexual peccadilloes of which he perpetually boasted and which formed part of his flamboyant showbiz persona with the approval of his paramours: He said his relationships were “always consensual.” At least four women disagree with that and maintain they didn’t consent to his advances. He presumably means that none of his conquests explicitly and unambiguously said “no.”

Consent also appears in another recent case of a man accused of an unwelcome misdeed. Luis Rubiales was all mirth and jubilation when he hugged and kissed Jenni Hermoso in the celebratory aftermath of Spain’s football World Cup win. Hermoso later kiboshed the mirth and jubilation by pronouncing she did not consent to the embrace and considered it a violation. Rubiales showed no contrition and, not being one of nature’s shrinking violets, blazed back, insisting that the interaction was consensual, leaving a “he said, she said” disagreement with no objective evidence save for video.

Historically, we have often treated consent as a straightforward agreement, especially in intimate interactions: Either both parties agreed, or they didn’t. Like everything else under the sun, it has changed as social contexts have shifted. By its very nature, the concept is subjective. It relies on the individual’s willingness to engage in or withdraw from a particular behavior or activity. While it may seem simple on the surface, the complexity arises from the fact that individuals’ desires, feelings, and boundaries can and do change over time. The consent granted at one moment may not necessarily apply indefinitely, perhaps because it was distorted. By alcohol, for instance.

Alcohol

In 2011, prosecutors accused Ched Evans, a professional football player in England, of raping a woman. Evans maintained the sexual encounter was consensual, but the prosecution argued that the woman with whom he had sex was too intoxicated to give informed consent. In 2012, the jury found Evans guilty and the court sentenced him to five years in prison. In 2016, after Evans had served half of his sentence, the Court of Appeal quashed his conviction and ordered a retrial. New evidence was presented, including testimony from two men who claimed to have had consensual sex with the woman around the same time as the alleged rape. The jury acquitted Evans and he was released from prison.

Alcohol was also involved in the Stanford rape case, as it became known. A jury convicted Brock Turner, a former Stanford University swimmer, of sexually assaulting an unconscious woman outside a fraternity house. Both had been drinking. Again, consent was key: Turner pleaded innocent and claimed not only to have asked the woman “if she wanted me to finger her” but to have asked if she liked it. He claimed he heard her confirm, “Uh-huh.” Turner was released from prison after serving half of a six-month sentence many considered way too lenient. The maximum sentence Turner could have received was fourteen years.

Both cases had happened before The New York Times published a story detailing decades of allegations of sexual harassment against the film producer Harvey Weinstein. The publication set in motion a series of developments, including the rise of #MeToo. Implicit in the Weinstein case and the manifold changes it catalyzed was the provision of consent: It should be freely given, without the presence of coercion, even if explicitly verbal refusal isn’t expressed.

This came to the fore in 2018, the case of Aziz Ansari, an entertainer and self-proclaimed feminist. Writing anonymously, a woman claimed she felt he coerced her into sexual activity, though she had not explicitly said “no.” She wrote an account of her experience on babe.net, a website for young women, and soon garnered 2.5 million views.

An untamable concept

Of the many potent consequences of #MeToo, the reconceptualization of consent is arguably the most influential. Feminism has, for years, taught that sexual assault is not about sexual gratification but male power and coercion, whether by gaslighting or physical force, and that this is impelled by decades, if not centuries, of misogyny. But these reminders have become too platitudinous to be interesting. Consent can’t be analyzed with clichés: It is too fluid and heterogeneous. For example, Julian Assange, the founder of WikiLeaks, faced allegations of sexual misconduct in Sweden with the accusers claiming that sex began consensually but turned non-consensual during the act. They said he persisted in having unprotected sex with them in defiance of their insistence that he use a condom. Prosecutors in Sweden dropped the investigation in 2019.

I have no answer to the question “what is consent?” But I’m sure the Brand and Rubiales cases are just a beginning. Never before have cases of sexual assault and coercion been so dependent on subjective states — and dynamic subjective states at that. I have no idea what Hermoso was thinking and feeling at the exact moment Rubiales grabbed and kissed her. Nor have I a clue what proportion of Brand’s partners were enthusiastic accomplices and what proportion were reluctant but too petrified to resist. We humans don’t think and feel linearly. And we don’t recall with coherence.

Ask someone to describe how they felt at a particular moment in their lives and they will reconstruct a version using their memory and imagination. That’s how we remember: creatively. So, when asked if we consciously and voluntarily sanctioned someone else’s behavior, we can sometimes be certain, but, at other times, not-so-certain. Social scientists have a term for it: Retrospective interpretation — and it is always selective.

None of this is intended to cast doubt on the testimonies of victims of sexual attacks, nor for that matter the accused, many of whom are, after all, innocent. But it stops us trying to domesticate what is, in many senses, a wild and untamable concept.

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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For many, she embodies a toxic environment that sexually commodifies and exploits women, but the fact remains that she has made it to the top in a male-dominated industry and, indeed, a male-dominated culture. She has been the subject of countless academic studies and jargon-packed analyses.

Why has this taboo-breaking provocateur, who enrages conservatives and radicals alike, occupied us for so long?

Succès de scandale

“Here’s what I’ve learned after four decades in music,” she has said. “If they call you shocking, scandalous, troublesome, problematic, provocative or dangerous, you’re onto something.” Exactly when this dawned on Madonna, I don’t know, but I’m guessing it was June 1986. That was when her track “Papa Don’t Preach” was released in the US and Europe and she realized she was onto something … but what?

”Papa don’t preach, I’m in trouble deep/Papa don’t preach, I’ve been losing sleep/But I made up my mind, I’m keeping my baby,” sang Madonna on a tune that many took to be an endorsement of teenage pregnancy and, as one critic put it, “a path to permanent poverty.” Groups opposed to abortion interpreted it as a positive, ”pro-life” song.”

It really didn’t matter what they thought: what mattered was that they differed, often violently, and were prepared to create a commotion. Meanwhile, all Madonna would say was: ”To me, it’s a celebration of life.” The controversy blazed on for several months, unwittingly promoting sales and pushing the single to the top of the charts in the UK, UK and several other countries. The album from which it was taken also became a best-seller. (The song was written by Madonna and Brian Elliott. View and listen here) 

Mainstream entertainers had studiously avoided discreditable behavior and the disgrace and notoriety—not to mention malicious gossip and all manner of aspersion—that came from shocking the public for decades. Madonna, on the other hand, seemed to take her cues from the Rolling Stones and the Sex Pistols, neither of whom suffered collateral damage from their mischief in the 1960s and 1970s, respectively. 

Madonna emerged without collateral damage, her reputation as social provocateur as well as chanteuse boosted. She appears to have learned a salutary lesson from the “Papa Don’t Preach” episode. Actions that cause general public anger or indignation are precious.

Traditionally, the entertainment industry avoided them. An accusation of sexual assault, although later cleared, annihilated the career of Hollywood star Roscoe Arbuckle all the same; he died penniless in 1933. Mindful of his fate, stars and the studios that employed them were careful to contain any suspicion of scandal. With the exception of Elizabeth Taylor who, in the 1960s, conducted her romance with Richard Burton in public almost theatrically, stars kept as tight a lid as they could on their private lives.

The lesson wasn’t lost on Madonna: do something that upsets, outrages and disgusts some people and gratifies others and they’ll talk about you. And the media will pay attention. It really doesn’t matter if they find you monstrous, just as long as you stay at the fore of their consciousness. Anywhere else and you stand a chance of being ignored and, worse still, forgotten. In show business, the kind of calamities that most people avoid are a valuable resource. Madonna discovered the meaning of succès de scandale and it seems to have hit her like a flash on the road to Damascus. This helps explain why she plunged headfirst into the kind of episodes that had ruined earlier artists.

Shameless

For succeeding decades Madonna seemed, whether by accident or, much more probably, design (and perhaps even fate), to be in a continual state of crisis, not to mention her inflammatory lyrics, demagogic videos, shameless films or risqué book called Sex. Once she found momentum, Madonna never slackened: every new provocation seemed to surpass the previous one.

And all this was happening in that liminal time before the smartphone or social media, but after people had acquired the appetite for salacious gossip and guiltless eavesdropping. Big Brother and other reality TV shows provided a peephole for the audience’s new fascination with the hitherto concealed practices of others.  I wonder what Madonna made of Paris Hilton’s 2003 sex tape, drolly titled 1 Night in Paris. Or Kim Kardashian’s analogous coup de théâtre. The stars of both videos were propelled to the stratosphere, yet neither boasted anything resembling talent, at least not talent in the accepted sense of the word. You could almost hear Madonna think: “Why didn’t I think of that?”

Madonna never quite matched this shamelessness, but remember: she played a colossal role in creating the kind of culture in which it might otherwise have been dismissed as a cheap, vulgar and incendiary stunt rather than a major talking point and, in turn, a launchpad for two epic careers. Sex scandals are now a familiar trope of popular culture, though MeToo issued notice that the consequences can be as destructive as well as productive.

Open access

Today, anyone who aspires to be anybody in the entertainment industry has to enter into a Faustian pact. Like the German necromancer, they’re required to surrender their soul in exchange for whatever they think the world has to offer them. Madonna’s soul wasn’t part of her deal: her privacy was. Even before her 1991 film In Bed With Madonna, she’d been unabashed about sharing intimate details. The movie just confirmed that she offered open access.

An inquisitive media and a probing audience soon got used to this and expected the same cooperation from other entertainers. Those who hesitated didn’t make it, and we know nothing about them. Less inhibited wannabe celebs made it onto one of the alphabetical celebrity lists.

There is little in today’s celebrity-fixated culture that Madonna hasn’t either initiated, essayed or trespassed on in some way. Before tabloids started taking a keen and prurient interest in celebrity couples, Madonna married Sean Penn. That was in August 1985, and, as if to provide the media with a foretaste of the performative aspects of coupledom that were to become familiar, she and Penn staged a Grand Guignol at an outdoor ceremony in Malibu. Paparazzi helicopters circled in search of a shot, while Penn fired a few shots of his own – his from a gun. The marriage imploded after two years.

Madonna endured the unwelcome attention of a stalker who threatened to cut her “ear-to-ear.” She puzzled audiences about her sexual preferences by orchestrating an onstage three-way French Kiss with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera in 2003. Her 2012 Super Bowl halftime appearance didn’t upstage Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” but she managed to upset many of the 114 million TV viewers when she thrust a “swivel-on-it” finger at the camera. She was 53 at the time: “Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale.” Comparisons with Cleopatra are not baseless: they both remained fascinatingly attractive, not so much for their beauty but for their unpredictability. 

Mother to the generations

The term “postfeminism” wasn’t invented for Madonna, but it could have been. Her spirit of independence is an entrepreneurial rather than recalcitrant or rebellious spirit. Among the resources she’s traded is her sexiness. Note: not sex, but sexiness—the quality of being sexually attractive or exciting.  Wearing outfits that could have been taken from the clothes rack of a porn studio, simulating sex acts during concerts and portraying a variety of coquettish roles over a theatrically chameleonic career have not won her fans among first-wave feminists.

But Madonna became a mother to the generations. Over the decades, Madonna has flouted gender protocol, but, according to some, in a way that secretes a sneaky reactionism. If there is a theme running through her career it’s that she can do as she pleases, even—or especially—if her behavior upsets other women. Hers is a highly individualized approach to getting whatever she wants without necessarily considering the interests of other women. That makes her either a steely-willed, ruthless maverick prepared to trample on others, regardless of their gender, or a playful sexbot. Of course, she doesn’t see it like this. “I am happy to do the trailblazing so that all the women behind me can have an easier time in the years to come,” she wrote in an Instagram post earlier this year.

“Shocking, scandalous, troublesome, problematic, provocative … dangerous.” Madonna has been all these things. She probably won’t be again. Who can say? Having changed culture in the 20th century, her influence endures. And, as she recognizes, she’s still onto something. 

[Routledge publishes Ellis Cashmore’s Celebrity Culture, 3rd Edition next month.]
[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Precious scandals

But we don’t need them anymore: we have social media. The likes of Twitter serve as tools for moral reasoning and help individuals navigate complex ethical issues and dilemmas in their personal and social lives. I can already hear you laughing at my pretense. But indulge me: so far this year, the British have been gifted two precious scandals that have exercised their imaginations, powers of discernment and, best of all, their ethical reasoning.

The first scandal featured a popular TV presenter who was found to have conducted a relationship with a younger male colleague. The presenter, Phillip Schofield, worked for ITV, the UK’s main commercial television network. He resigned after conceding that he had “lied” to his boss and his agent, as well as the media, about what he called an “unwise, but not illegal” affair.

With the ink barely dry on this scandal, the second also features a TV presenter. The case involves a dichotomy about which British society does not yet have a clear idea of where to draw the dividing line.

The Sun newspaper recently reported that an unnamed BBC presenter paid a teenager £35,000 (about $45,000) for sexually explicit photos over a three-year period. The young person was allegedly 17 years old when the payments started. According to reports, the mother of the teenager first complained to the national broadcaster in May 2023 and the BBC undertook to investigate the allegations.

Presumably frustrated at the lack of progress, the mother took the story to The Sun, which is the country’s best-selling newspaper. There followed a guessing game in which anyone on social media could hazard their own hypotheses on the identity and motivations of the presenter. Even the prospect of defaming BBC personnel didn’t deter tweeters. In efforts to ward off speculators, several of the BBC’s best-known presenters went onto social media themselves, explicitly to say they were not the culprit. This seemed a guileless maneuver and probably heightened suspicions on the Shakespearean principle, “Methinks the lady doth protest too much.”

Unlike the former scandal, this one may indeed contain illegal activities, though at the time of writing this has not been decided by a court. What is known is that, like the Schofield case, it has gripped the public and inclined the twitterati, in particular, to flex their moral muscles.

Questions, questions.

Think of some of the more immediate questions. Quite apart from the obvious, “Whodunit?”—at the time of publication, this seems to be an answered question—there are other enticing challenges, such as, “Does the teenager bear any responsibility?” After all, they agreed to take and send pictures of themselves naked in exchange for money. They then decided to spend the money, not on a three-year university education, but on crack cocaine. Were they mature enough to make a clear-headed, informed decision? The age of consent in the UK is 16, but this does not apply in this case. The Protection of Children Act, of 1978, specifies that it’s a crime to take, make, share and possess indecent images of people under 18 years old. So, the presenter could be facing 26 weeks in prison. Would justice be served?

Another question is: Should the BBC bear any responsibility for allowing the presenter to operate, however covertly? “I blame this BBC man for destroying my child’s life,” said the teenager’s mother. “Taking my child’s innocence and handing over the money for crack cocaine that could kill my child.” Where does the blame lie?

We exist in an environment in which malicious gossip, scandalous relationships and transgressions that bring dishonor, disgrace and infamy are parts of the daily menu of news. Our media, even the serious media, specialize in gossip, hearsay and miscellaneous tittle-tattle, mainly on celebrities. Since 2006 when Twitter launched, we have all had a more direct way of sharing our views. Although Twitter’s original idea was to allow people to send words that were as inconsequential as the chirruping of birds, it soon morphed into a gossip medium.

The temptations of Twitter

It’s probable no one anticipated how tempting Twitter would become. It’s not as if people were enticed into sharing confidential information. After all, Twitter didn’t coax or sweet-talk tweeters into disclosing anything they didn’t want to. But it offered a sort of purgatory device. I don’t mean it was a place of suffering or torment for those wishing to expiate their sins before going to heaven: just a way of venting your thoughts. In a kind of self-perpetuating manner, others responded with comparable candor and lack of inhibition to find the release was surprisingly purifying. That’s what’s going on at the moment: everyone is excitedly ridding themselves of their opinions and, in the process, passing judgment in what’s become an online moral universe.

All this could tempt us into believing that privacy, at least privacy in the traditional sense of the condition, has disappeared. Twitter is now part of the natural order of things. Instagram, Snapchat, WhatsApp and the most newcomer Threads have added impudence and brio, making sharing arguably the defining experience of our time. We share money, knowledge and hours upon hours of our time; it would be untenable to ask people not to share what used to pass as a private life. Is this a bad thing?

It seems only a few years ago that privacy shielded all manner of vile practices that are now in the common domain. Child abuse was hushed up. Domestic violence was kept secret as an internal family issue. Women were often persuaded they were partly responsible if they were raped. People with developmental disorders, such as Asperger syndrome, seldom revealed and less still discussed their experiences. And well-known TV personalities were allowed to get away with vile abuses of privilege and status, in the secure knowledge that they were sheltered by a code of silence. These once-private matters have been turned into social affairs.

Much as it might disgust people to accept that so much thought and time have been spent on matters that could be handled in a hushed-up way without damaging reputations or harming the credibility of national institutions, celebrity culture has brought with it a refreshing encroachment: the public has trespassed on the private.

[Ellis Cashmore is the author of Kardashian Kulture]

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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What makes me so sure? Well, name one disaster that hasn’t been transformed into popular entertainment. The films are typically respectful, often thoughtful, and as deferential as possible to relatives. That doesn’t detract from the fact that they are made to entertain rather than educate us, inform us or change our attitudes. Unpalatable as it is to accept, we find real-life catastrophe enjoyable.

Welcome to the Curiosity Economy

Turnaround times are getting faster

The Titan vessel went missing in a remote area of the North Atlantic on Sunday with four days’ supply of oxygen for its crew of five. The intention was to descend to the wreck of the iconic British passenger liner Titanic, the largest ship in the world at the time it was built and supposedly “unsinkable.” That ship struck an iceberg on its maiden voyage in April 1912 and sank to the bottom, ending 1,490 lives. The Titan voyagers, gawkers themselves, were supposed to inspect the hulk of the sunken ship. The fact that there is even a market for this kind of venture suggests how fascinated we are by cataclysms.

The Titanic tragedy became the subject of many motion pictures, James Cameron’s Oscar-winning 1997 blockbuster being the best known. Talking pictures were not around at the time of the real tragedy, and it wouldn’t be until 1953 when 20th Century Fox put out Jean Negulesco’s Titanic that viewers packed cinemas to be permitted to peer guiltlessly at a tragedy that remains one of our favorites to this day. Forty-one years was considered a suitably long period, and there was no agonizing over the timing. After all, the intervening period had witnessed two world wars, both of which had been dramatized in various ways by the early 1950s and continue to occupy filmmakers and audiences (of course).

Bombshell: The Life and Death of Anna Nicole Smith

Nowadays, the period of respect has been compressed. The Chernobyl explosion of 1986 was made into a horror film called Chernobyl Diaries in 2012, though the more recognizable HBO series Chernobyl did not reach television screens until 2019, 33 years after the nuclear meltdown. Even that seems an excessively long time by today’s standards. More typical is Patriots Day, a 2016 film structured around the Boston Marathon bombings of 2013 that claimed three lives. Or Deepwater, a 2016 film based on the 2010 human and environmental disaster in which eleven people died.

We are all OceanGate

Does this suggest that we, as an audience, are becoming less respectful and sensitive? Or perhaps we are more genuinely interested in gaining a nuanced, empathic, comprehensive and more deeply insightful perspective than we are able to get through news outlets? Certainly, audiences are ready almost instantly. Maybe if talkies were around in the early twentieth century, cinemagoers would have jumped at the opportunity to witness the Titanic tragedy, albeit as paying onlookers. I doubt it, though. I think the historical context would have prohibited this.

I wasn’t around at the time, but my knowledge of the culture of the period tells me there would have been resistance. The intervening global conflicts changed audience sensibilities: by 1953, the public was inured to bloodshed and colossal loss of life. They’d watched newsreels, probably through parted fingers, and assimilated the prolonged trauma of persistent deaths, week after horrible week. Viewing a work of art based on a tragedy may once have been vulgar, uncivil and lacking in compassion. Not after the Second World War. Scars faded much more quickly.

The Death of One Man Is a Tragedy

Today, they seem to take no time at all to fade. No sooner do we learn of a disaster through our newspapers than a movie debuts. The attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, seemed to be such an extraordinarily enormous tragedy, with such far-reaching consequences, that filmmakers would have trodden gently. Not so: multiple dramatizations lept forth, including director Paul Greengrass’s recreation in real time, collating what was known of its flight path, communications with air traffic control, phone conversation of passengers and interviews with the families of the flight crew and passengers. United 93 was released within five years, in 2006.

I doubt that we will have to wait five years to see an artistic impression of what went on inside the Titan. It is grim trying to imagine it, but scriptwriters, directors and actors will do exactly that. Maybe they’re already doing so. As I write, reports of the grotesque misadventure of the Titan are filtering through and it seems unthinkable that any human would contemplate exploiting the tragic events, even for art’s sake. But they will. And it will not be long before you, reader, are watching the film.

[Anton Schauble edited this piece.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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“Undeniably, yes,” its defenders would answer, gesturing to the way in which the sport unifies people of diverse backgrounds and with totally different characteristics. They might also note how football has brought prosperity to areas of the world that might otherwise remain deprived. And brought not just entertainment but an unusual type of gratification to populations that lack other forms of reward. I made this point recently on BBC Radio4’s Moral Maze (you can listen here).

Football has other virtues: it encourages camaraderie, teamwork and mutual respect. In recent decades, the sport has encouraged and promoted the participation of groups that have traditionally been marginalized or excluded from mainstream sports and, indeed, society. As well as women, football integrates disabled people and, unlike many other sports, has no restrictions on transgender players.

The Magic and the Dangers of Football

The anguish of being a football fan is this: everything else in life is unexciting and sublunary by comparison. Football fans are used to this. Going to a game means to be transported beyond the range of normal experience and, for two or more hours, feeling exalted and newly alive. Other sports offer similarly thrilling sensations but without the added exhilaration, the fieriness or the occasional delirium. Paradoxically, many of the features of football’s unique formula are unwelcome outside the stadium and, often, inside too. Football’s is an edgy, hostile environment, where fury, antagonism and belligerence are natural elements: they combine agreeably but dangerously. We wouldn’t want them all of the time. Life would be too treacherous. For a couple of hours, though, danger is fine.

Street Grit and Messi Magic Lead Argentina to Glory

The passion football fans feel is unparalleled. A heavyweight title fight, the Super Bowl, an Olympic track final, and a few other sports events provoke an intense arousal among fans, but football’s pleasures are unique. That’s because of its history. Football was never supposed to be a sport: its origins lie in annual struggles between pre-industrial English villages or neighborhoods. The skirmishes were arranged confrontations involving physical conflict, weapons and injuries. Over time, rough-hewn rules gave the battles order, and eventually they were refined into football. There were a great many variants, but, by the end of the nineteenth century, just two remained: association football and rugby (which itself was divided into two codes).

The distinction between players and spectators didn’t exist in more primitive forms of what became association football and, even after the formation of the Football Association in 1863, observers were probably invested, as we’d say today. In their heads, the club they were rooting for was their club: owners were merely custodians. As the sport spread to continental Europe and Central and South America, the proprietorial sensibility spread, as did the feverish atmosphere. And ugliness too.

The violence associated with football was an outgrowth of the attachment fans felt for their clubs. Fighting was simply part of the continuum of normal behavior. It disappeared briefly and understandably after the Second World War, but recrudesced in the 1970s. While there are still violent undercurrents at football games anywhere in the world, they remain that—below the surface. The reason for this is the gentrification of the sport that started in the early 1990s. Before then, few games were televised live, players’ earnings were relatively modest and fans were raucous. Then, TV networks created subscription channels and clubs became content providers rather than bastions of local pride and gateways to community tradition.

Football appeared to become a different creature. Fans’ inclinations changed, though without being sanitized. Racism is one of the sobering reminders that, for all its modernizations, football’s regressive features will not die easily. Their persistent presence continues to haunt the game and issues reminders that traditions, even the lamentable ones, are like clumsy thieves— they leave fingerprints.

Why Football Has a Racism Problem and How to Solve It

Codes of Silence

Football is not alone in harboring sex offenders, though the number of horrifying cases of child abuse in recent years invites speculation on how long this kind of exploitation has been going on and whether the sport has employed a code of silence. It is not alone in this respect and many other sports, including gymnastics, swimming, athletics, basketball, and hockey, have been embarrassed by their failures to protect children and adolescents.

Another code of silence is thought to suppress gay male players, who typically wait until their competitive careers are over before declaring their sexual inclinations. In so doing, they perpetuate the myth that football culture is homophobic and intolerant of LGBTQ+ concerns. The women’s game is exactly the opposite. Indeed, women’s football has developed into a standard-bearer for gay rights. Reality differs from myth: 95% of fans are decidedly not homophobic and most would prefer gay male players to come out. My own research in 2010 and 2020 confirms fans reject the popular characterization of football culture but suspect there are obstacles. They conjecture coaches, managers, agents, and football club owners prohibit gay players from being honest. Their reasons for doing so remain opaque, but probably derive from concerns (however unfounded) about the market viability of openly gay male players.

It could be argued that a different sort of code of silence operates in the administrative offices of football too. Certainly, the staggering amount of corruption revealed in recent years indicates that many senior officers of FIFA, the sports’ governing organization, were loyal to an oath of omertà for decades, aware of countless bribes and kickbacks but unwilling to blow the whistle. As the sport commercialized, the rights to host and broadcast major tournaments became valuable and were pursued with the kind of zeal associated with the most tenacious players. But while players’ fouls were visible to all, administrators’ dishonesty was barely perceptible, at least to those who were not involved.

A sprawling investigation dating from 2015 and still ongoing resulted in scores of convictions, imprisonments and resignations. The awkward question of whether the corporatization of football had brought with it dishonesty was answered. It was like lifting a rock to discover the insect life beneath it. The creepy-crawlies were football’s officials and politicians. And just think: players who were prone to fouling were often called “dirty.”

I’m not naïve enough to think other sports are any different: All major sports respond to the clink of coin. This is why the most benevolent paymasters have been able to draw not only football, but golf, Formula 1, boxing and other major sports to the Gulf States. Many complain that football is selling its soul to billionaire sheikhs, but that presumes there was ever a soul to sell: Association football has been a professional sport since 1885 (baseball in the US was already professional by then), so the sport has always been more about lucre than love (the word “amateur” is from the Latin “amator”, meaning “lover”).

Like practically everything else that brings pleasure, including gambling, junk food, social media and TV-binging, football secretes harm. When reminded of this, everyone looks away. At least fans do. For them, football is like nothing else on earth: the joys it brings overpower everything. To others, it’s one of many pointless distractions that take people’s minds off of the things that really affect their material lives. And for still others, it is a once-great sport, now made presentable and incorporated into the entertainment industry.

They’re all right. If football had been a uniformly good force, it wouldn’t have had its thumping impact on cultural history. It’s the doubtfulness that keeps people ruminating. While people are thinking, talking and philosophizing, the sport stays at the fore. The instant they stop, football becomes just another sport.

[Ellis Cashmore is co-editor of Studying Football.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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“This organization is an organization that clearly wants to fight against racism, as it already has done.” Javier Tebas was referring to La Liga Nacional de Fútbol Profesional, Spanish football’s governing organization, of which he is president. His declaration was a response to the Brazilian player Vinícius Júnior’s stunning claim, “Racism is normal in La Liga.”

It was a predictable statement after a public dispute between Tebas and Vinicius: The player’s assertion that the Spanish league “belongs to the racists” was met with “La Liga has worked and will continue to work against this behavior of xenophobia and racist comments in stadiums.” Vinícius later called on sponsors and broadcasters to put pressure on the league to make changes. The results of this remain to be seen.

Spain is not completely alone in the 30 or so European football playing countries that lie east of Poland. Italy’s Ultras have rightwing and nationalist leanings and Inter Milan’s black Belgian player Romelu Lukaku was targeted by racist abuse in Turin recently. But racism has largely disappeared from western football. At least, from football crowds. In England, Tottenham’s South Korean forward Son Heung-min was the subject of a racist online video. The sources of online content are notoriously difficult to trace and it’s doubtful that the originators of this or other hateful messages circulated online are sports fans: More likely malevolent geeks who want to bring sports into disrepute.

History of Football Racism

The persistence of racism in association in football is one of the most perplexing anachronisms in sports, or any other sphere of society for that matter. Like the game itself, the practice of abusing black players has its origins in England. In the late 1970s, the appearance of dozens of black players enraged many white fans who reacted by hurling bananas, grunting like apes, and screaming epithets. The players were the children of Caribbean migrants who had settled in the UK in the aftermath of the second world war (often known as the “Windrush generation,” after the name of the first vessel to have arrived in England from Jamaica in 1948).

It was unexpected: at various intervals in history, black players had appeared in English football without incident, and the Afro-Brazilian player Pelé was acknowledged as the best in the world. But, coaxed by far right political movements, many fans were reminded that football was created by white men, watched by white men and run by white men. Blacks were uninvited guests. I recall talking to Cyrille Regis (1958-2018), who played for West Bromwich Albion and other clubs in the period. He told me how he learned to “absorb,” as he put it, the near-continuous abuse and somehow used it to motivate him.

Vile as it was, the racism was intelligible: White fans resented the intrusion of people they considered interlopers in a sport they and their forebears built and owned. Or at least felt they owned. There were underlying conditions too: Unemployment was prodigiously high in Britain in the late 1970s and early 1980s. In 1981, a barely believable 31% of employable under-18-year-olds were out-of-work. Far right groups blamed ethnic minorities, of whom Caribbeans and their descendants were about half (total number in UK population about 500,000, or less than 1%).

Theories of Racism

Theories of racism differ, but most are predicated on competition for scarce resources, including jobs, accommodation, healthcare and education. There is nothing inevitable, less still natural about racist antagonism, and rivalries over resources are arbitrarily created from convenient markers. Migrant status, visible appearance, language, cuisine, and patterns of worship serve as metaphorical signs of enemies. What appears to be conflict emanating from spurious “racial” differences has more prosaic origins.

Racism, in common with other cultural practices, is volatile: It’s like fire — a blast of wind and it spreads uncontrollably and unpredictably. That’s what happened after football fans around the world discovered English fans’ extraordinary way of barracking players. Once started, fires take on a life of their own. Racism died down in most parts of Europe by the late 1980s: The emergence of so many illustrious black players in the sport’s top leagues silenced abusive fans in most of western Europe, though not in the east.

Football in places like Ukraine, Poland and Russia today is, in terms of cultural diversity, about where Britain was in the mid-1980s. Unlike Britain and other western European nations, which have endured the tortures of the damned trying to extirpate or even just manage racism, eastern European countries regard racist abuse just like other forms of football taunting based on physical appearance. They don’t seem to grasp the severity of their abuse. Or, if they do, their governments don’t.

I won’t labor the history of racism in football. Suffice it to say that somehow it has survived in a world where black lives matter and multiculturalism has been elevated to sacrosanctity. Survived, that is, in certain forms. As I argued earlier, the form popular in most European countries is via social media and this means sports fans are not necessarily involved. The shouting has gone. Suppressed perhaps, but, as long as racism isn’t expressed in behavior (verbal and nonverbal), its effects are manageable. We’ll have to accept that Eastern Europeans will take longer to catch up. But that still leaves us with Spain. Why is it such an outlier?

Almost 20 years ago, Spain’s national team manager Luis Aragonés described Thierry Henry, a French player, as “negro de mierda [black shit].” The manager was widely condemned, but the fact that a person of such seniority felt comfortable casting such a foul slur made football wonder if the Spanish were out-of-step with the rest of Western Europe. The recent misadventure suggests they still are. Perhaps Spain, with its various regional cultures and languages, including Catalan, Basque, Galician, and Valencian, has assimilated or at least learned to live with strains and enmities related to identity and regional autonomy, particularly in Catalonia and the Basque Country. One of the effects may be to have desensitized the Spanish to the pain occasioned by divisive language.

Sledgehammer-To-Crack-A-Nut

So, what should be done? We can’t get into people’s heads and change their thoughts. But we can prevent them from talking and acting in a way that gives open expression to those thoughts. And, when they do, we should punish. The USA’s National Basketball Association (NBA) opted for the sledgehammer-to-crack-a-nut strategy when, in 2018, it hit Los Angeles Clippers’ owner Don Sterling with a $2.5m fine and an order to sell the club. Sterling had acknowledged during an interview with NBA investigators that he had made disparaging remarks about black people. The governing organization’s response appeared to be disproportionately punitive, but have you heard of any racism in basketball lately? (I’m not being naïve: it still manifests every so often: Kyrie Irving recently said crowds treat black players “like they’re in a human zoo.”)

Football has to make clubs culpable for their fans’ behavior. It already does this to an extent: Closing stadiums or parts of stadiums for periods and fining clubs indicates that governing organizations are prepared to lay blame at the door of clubs. Yet the penalties are hardly on par with the NBA sanction. Expulsion from a major European competition, double-digit points deductions and multiple transfer window freezes might ram home the message. These kind of chastisements would quickly translate into a cogent message for fans: Do it again and you’ll get more of the same! We would never hear another peep. And, if some errant sheep in the flock mouthed a racist remark, fellow members of the crowd would soon muzzle them.

This is suppression rather than resolution. It’s a reasonable ambition, not an unattainable or fanciful hope. I’ve learned over the years that thought control doesn’t work: Behavior control is altogether more practicable. It’s the paradox of football that the globally inclusive game is riven with a bigotry that should have been stillborn or, at least, died in the 1980s. In many parts of the world it has, but its persistence, especially in Spain, is a particular embarrassment. It’s a wonder football’s corporate sponsors like Coca-Cola, adidas, Toyota and Qatar Airways haven’t grown uncomfortable with the residual presence of racism and pressured governing organizations to crush it. Television networks too might have flexed their muscles and urged stiffer penalties for offending clubs — though, of course, they wouldn’t want to lose marquee clubs, or ratings would fall.

Racism will be crushed for sure. It remains a question of time: Football will, at some point, realize that the sledgehammer is a crude, heavy, powerful instrument designed to break rocks. Some nuts are tougher than others: For example, macadamia nuts have an extremely hard shell that requires significant force or specialized tools to crack open. A sledgehammer has more than enough force to crack that. The time for education and persuasion is over: football must now start hammering.

[Ellis Cashmore is co-editor of Studying Football]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Earlier this year, France’s professional football organization called for all players from its top leagues to wear shirts with rainbow-colored numbers to express support for The International Day Against Homophobia, Transphobia, and Biphobia. Five players refused and chose not to play rather than show solidarity with the inclusivity signaled by the special day.

Personal Beliefs

A year ago, the Paris St-Germain football player Idrissa Gueye declined to play in a match rather than wear a rainbow symbol in support of LGBTQ+ rights. The then club manager Mauricio Pochettino said only that Gueye missed the game for “personal reasons.” Gueye was born and raised in Senegal, where about 97% of the population are Muslim and homosexuality is illegal and punishable by prison sentences of up to five years. It is also illegal in Qatar, the home of Paris St-Germain’s owners. Last year’s men’s World Cup was staged there, of course.

Among the players who declined to participate this year was Zakaria Aboukhlal, who plays for Toulouse and was born in Morocco, another Muslim country, where blasphemy against Islam is a punishable offense and same sex relationships are legally prohibited. “Respect is a value that I hold in great esteem,” Aboukhlal wrote on Twitter, explaining his refusal to participate in the day of celebration. “It extends to others, but it also encompasses respect for my own personal beliefs. Hence, I don’t believe I am the most suitable person to participate in this campaign.”

It seemed a measured response and contrives an answer to a question that has so far not been asked: Is inclusivity inclusive? It sounds like a pun or some other form of wordplay, but it conveys an uncertainty about one of today’s most momentous cultural trends: Does inclusivity undermine the very groups it seeks to embrace?

Civic Unity vs. Individual Liberty

Every right minded person agrees inclusivity is desirable: We can never right history’s wrongs, but we can at least equalize conditions in a way that ensures no repetition. This policy aims to provide equal access to opportunities and resources for groups that have historically been oppressed. By promoting understanding, challenging stereotypes and encouraging empathy, it’s possible to create spaces where diverse populations can come together, engage in respectful dialogue and live and work together.

The trouble is: certain groups that have been subordinated sometimes oppose the policy of inclusivity. Muslims are one such group. They have no particular interest in contributing toward building a society in which LGBTQ+ groups are accepted, integrated, respected and treated as equals. Understandably so: The Qur’an stipulates that homosexuality is sinful.

Muslims have faced discrimination, sometimes known as Islamophobia, and continue to do so. They assert their right to believe homosexuality is a sin. Religious freedom is as much a human right as anything we can conceive. So, how do we respect both Islam and groups it deems sinners and so unworthy of respect? Squaring this circle requires us to distinguish between cultural inclusivity and individual rights.

The philosopher John Rawls (1921-2002) considered what conditions need to be satisfied in order to achieve what he considered a just society.  Balancing social good against the protection of individual rights and liberties was the key. It seems rational to preserve basic liberties, such as freedom of speech and assembly, as well as ensuring equality of opportunities. No rational person would willingly sacrifice these in pursuit of something as indeterminate as the social good, but Rawls entertained the possibility of civic unity amid a diversity of worldviews. He argued that curbing the liberties of an intolerant group that intended to harm the liberties of others may be justified. But what if the intolerant and potentially harmful group is one that’s been denied equal treatment? And what if the group’s apparent intolerance is based on a religious mandate. In other words, the group’s unwillingness to accept views, beliefs and behavior that differ from its own derives from its commitment to a faith. One answer to the question came via a case in England in 2010.

A Christian owner of a bed-and-breakfast in England refused a double room to a gay male couple. The owner insisted that it was against her religious convictions to let two men share a bed. A court concluded she unlawfully discriminated against the couple. Her appeal was supported by the Christian Institute, a national charity that defends the civil liberties of Christians. She lost her appeal. The word inclusivity was not in the popular vocabulary at the time, but the import of the court’s decision was clear: Her religious beliefs, no matter how fervently held, provided no justification for her action, which breached Britain’s equality law and was therefore harmful, in the sense it had an adverse effect on particular groups. The verdict portended the arrival of inclusivity, prioritizing the social good over religious beliefs.

The Mailed Fist

Inclusivity describes the endgame fought for over the decades by those who oppose racism, sexism, homophobia and many other forms of bigotry that have blighted society. But it’s an ideal: Desirable and perfect but unlikely to become a reality. The cracks appeared in the late 1970s when Louis Farrakhan took over the leadership of the Nation of Islam, a predominantly African American organization advocating black economic independence and separatism. Farrakhan denied allegations of antisemitism, sexism and homophobia but used the phrase “Satanic Jews,” prompting the uncomfortable recognition that belonging to a group that had been disparaged historically did not prevent someone reiterating the disparagement of others.

Similarly, women who railed for decades against sexism, or to use a more current term, misogyny have, in recent years, been accused of bigotry when they’ve opposed the induction of transgender women into institutions traditionally reserved for biological females. It’s hardly surprising many women have responded angrily to the appearance of transgender females in sports competitions, prisons, shelters and bathrooms designated for women. But the logic of inclusivity is irresistible. Women’s groups will flail, but inclusivity bears the feelings and ideas of our times and, when necessary, reveals a mailed fist inside its velvet glove.

For example, in England, some football crowds voiced their disapproval of the Premier League’s introduction of taking the knee before games. The gesture was to signal the sport’s alignment with Black Lives Matter and demonstrate football’s fight against racism. Thus it was consistent with the inclusivity project.  When fans remonstrated, they were instantly denounced as racists. In fact, much of the resistance to the gesture was based on the manner in which a symbolic display had replaced a genuine fight against racism. In other words, it seemed worse-than-futile. But honest criticism of a ritual that advertised football’s embrace of inclusivity was condemned. Personal beliefs were crushed, along with alternative perspectives and criticism that would have been considered valid in previous decades.

Coercive?

Inclusivity distinguishes the early twenty-first century from previous epochs. It is an unquestioned, incontestable and unassailably virtuous ideal. It is also a juggernaut of secular culture that will overwhelm everything. It aims to provide acceptance and equality by persuasion and, if need be, by force. And this is why the recent disagreement in French football is worth scrutinizing. Dismaying as it sounds, this case suggests that a policy designed to protect and enhance the experiences of previously marginalized communities will surely engender clashes with individuals who solicit respect for their beliefs, especially when those beliefs are based on religious scriptures. Ten or fifteen years ago, their solicitation would have been heard and considered. Now, it’s likely to be ignored. Religious beliefs and rights will be subordinated.

I’ve spent much of my professional life researching, writing about and opposing racism, sexism and other bigotries, so I instinctively approve of inclusivity. I also subscribe to cultural relativism, meaning that I don’t believe in absolutes: knowledge, truth and morality exist in relation to society, culture and historical contexts. “Live and let live” is my favored proverb: tolerate the beliefs and behavior of others in order that they’ll tolerate yours. Inclusivity chimes with that. But only if it’s discretionary and refrains from compulsion. European football’s instruction rather than suggestion to its players seems coercive, controlling, even tyrannical. A display of solidarity is just window dressing if some of the participants are performing under duress. It may be a way of promoting one of the great policies of our age, but it’s also misleading.

A different way of pursuing inclusivity is to recognize that cultural differences are not always reconcilable. We just have to tolerate them and prevent them from promoting harm to others. Tolerate is an old-fashioned verb but one worth reimagining: Allowing, accepting or even just enduring with forbearance beliefs and practices we don’t like seems a mature approach. Persuasion often works, but, when it doesn’t, coercion is no alternative: it’s more like a tacit admission of defeat.

[Ellis Cashmore’s latest book is The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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A Herculean Dilemma

Thomas Bach is, I believe, a virtuous man, but he’s learning that it doesn’t pay to be too pious when running an international sport. As President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) he faces a Herculean dilemma. He recently entertained the possibility that, in spite of widespread bans on Russian and Belarusian athletes across the spectrum of sports, he may allow competitors from those countries to appear at next year’s Olympics, in Paris. Even airing the prospect has forced him into a tight spot: “We [IOC] have been accused by the Russian side of being agents of the US, and we have been accused by the Ukrainian side of being promoters of war,” he despairs.

Like any right minded head of a global sporting organization, Bach is prioritizing the interests of sport over geopolitics—though he must be painfully aware that the two are inseparable. He should, in my opinion, be praised for designating human athletes as of paramount importance and creating the conditions under which over 400 highly trained, motivated and committed individuals are given the chance to compete. (At the Covid-delayed Tokyo 2020 Olympics, the Belarusian team was 96-strong. 335 Russian athletes were obliged to compete under the rubric “Russia Olympic Committee” due to doping violations.) Chances are he will leave no stone unturned in his effort to incorporate Russian and Belarussian in the games, under a neutral flag or no flag at all. .

But Ukraine is understandably angry at Bach’s softening position on Russian and Belarusian athletes and threatens to boycott the Paris Olympics, complicating Bach’s situation and raising doubts about the impartiality of the IOC and its ability to make a decision that will satisfy all parties. Countries that align or support Ukraine will feel the pressure to express their solidarity. The USA and Canada would be—perhaps already have been—encouraged to join a boycott. Several, if not all, western European nations would feature, as well Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia and the Czech Republic. In addition to NATO countries, both Australia and New Zealand have condemned Russia and provided humanitarian aid to Ukraine. There are 206 National Olympic Committees affiliated with the IOC and it’s conceivable that an Olympic boycott could include over 30 nations. Individual athletes may be free to compete as neutrals (i.e. not representative of their countries).

Quite apart from the removal of some of the most powerful nations in sport, the IOC would almost certainly face the wrath of broadcasters, several of which will refuse to screen the tournament if their home nation is not involved. The most important of these is NBCUniversal, which in 2014, acquired the exclusive broadcast rights to the Olympic Games from 2022 through 2032 for a total cost of $7.75 billion. This agreement includes the broadcast rights to next year’s games, as well as the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

Sports Boycotts in History

Sports boycotts are not uncommon. Over 60 countries, including the USA, China and the then West Germany  refused to participate in the 1980 summer Olympics in Moscow in protest at the Soviet Union’s incursions in Afghanistan. The boycott didn’t lead to an immediate withdrawal of Soviet troops from Afghanistan, though its proponents argued that it heightened international attention and put pressure on the Soviet government. In retaliation, the Soviet Union led a boycott of the next Olympics, held in Los Angeles. Cuba, North Korea and East Germany (as it was) joined the Soviets, though only 13 nations in total abstained. The retaliatory boycott served to present the USA with a showcase for its athletic talent and American competitors dominated the tournament.

The boycott of South Africa during apartheid, beginning in the 1960s, is usually offered as an example of how politically effective boycotts can be. The argument is that the boycott helped to isolate South Africa and increase international pressure on the apartheid government to end discriminatory policies. The boycotts are widely credited with playing a significant role in bringing about the end of apartheid in the early 1990s. It’s an appealing justification,  but there is no evidence that the boycott had any tangible effect: Its impact was largely symbolic. (The South Africa boycott was not maintained by all. For example, New Zealand’s rugby team continued to play South Africa, as did the Australian cricket team. Several other countries, including England, Ireland and Italy, sent teams to South Africa.)

Workable Solution?

Bach can gauge the pushback to the admittance of Russians and Belarusians from the reaction to the recent decision of the International Fencing Federation (FIE) to allow fencers from Russia and Belarus to return to international competitions. Over 300 fencers, including 9 medalists from the last Olympics in Tokyo, signed an open letter published Tuesday insisting that the FIE and the IOC should not allow Russian and Belarusian fencers to compete while the Ukraine conflict persists. Olga Kharlan, the Ukrainian Olympic gold medalist, was especially forceful: “I want to perform at the Olympics. But as a citizen of Ukraine, I can’t even imagine how to stand next to representatives of the Russian Federation.”

Wimbledon will also be of interest. The tournament has reversed its ban on Russian and Belarusian athletes, who may now compete as neutrals in the tennis tournament. The WTA and ATP organizations, which run the women’s and men’s professional tours and which calculates the rankings to determine qualification for the Olympics, described the Wimbledon decision as “a workable solution which protects the fairness of the game.”

The position of Russia in football is unclear: It retains its membership of UEFA, the European governing organization, despite being banned from playing. There is talk that Russia could relinquish its membership and join the Asian Football Confederation. This may encourage UEFA to review its position. Russian football brings with it lucrative broadcasting contracts.

Bach’s Crapshoot

But the Olympics is like no other sports event and Bach will need to gamble. The easy choice is to maintain the status quo though this will jar with Bach’s ideals. My guess is that Bach will opt for the crapshoot and welcome Russians and Belarusians back, but with the kind of provisos he has recently outlined (see below). Then what? Ukraine will bail out for sure. It will also urge the other  30 countries that are members of NATO to follow suit. Poland, a member of NATO since 1999 and strong supporter of Ukraine’s independence and territorial integrity, will be first to follow, then other NATO members will be wringing their hands. 206 countries sent teams to the Tokyo Olympics, so losing the 31 NATO countries would be damaging but perhaps not terminally.

What about France? A founder member of NATO, along with the USA, Canada and 9 other nations in 1949, France withdrew from NATO’s military command structure and pursued an independent defense policy in 1966. The 2024 Olympics are scheduled to take place in Paris from July 26 to August 11. The Paralympic Games will follow from August 28 to September 8, also in Paris. Unthinkable as it is, a NATO boycott would lead France into the impossible and unprecedented position of boycotting its own Olympics.

Such a perverse prospect will not be in Bach’s calculations at the moment, but it will loom larger as we approach next July. Bach has made it signally clear that, while he doesn’t favor the expulsion of Russia and Belarus, he will accept the decisions of the IOC’s member sports on whether or not to allow competitors from these countries. Ultimately though the IOC has the final say on whether a qualifying athlete can enter the Olympics and that means Bach will have to wrestle with his conscience. My guess is that he will allow Russians and Belarussians but respect bans if individual sports, like track and field, insist on exclusion (there is no chance World Athletics will allow Russians or Belarusians, as Lord Coe recently made clear).

If my suspicion is right, we will witness the most controversial preamble to an Olympics in history—and I am not neglecting those politically-charged tournaments I mentioned earlier. Boycotts have a self-perpetuating quality, each withdrawal adding pressure on others to pull out.  NATO countries who have supported Ukraine will be taxed with making one of two equally unpopular decisions: ignore Ukraine’s requests or join a boycott that will be deeply unpopular among their own populations.

The recommendations issued by the IOC Executive Board are:

1. Athletes with a Russian or a Belarusian passport must compete only as individual neutral athletes.
2. Teams of athletes with a Russian or Belarusian passport cannot be considered.
3. Athletes who actively support the war cannot compete. Support personnel who actively support the war cannot be entered.
4. Athletes contracted to the Russian or Belarusian military or national security agencies cannot compete. Support personnel contracted to the Russian or Belarusian military or national security agencies cannot be entered.
5. Any such individual neutral athlete, like all the other participating athletes, must meet all anti-doping requirements applicable to them and particularly those set out in the anti-doping rules of the international federations.
6. The sanctions against those responsible for the war, the Russian and Belarusian states and governments, must remain in place, meaning no international sports events organized or supported by an international federation or national Olympic committee in Russia or Belarus. No flag, anthem, colors or any other identifications whatsoever of these countries displayed at any sports event or meeting, including the entire venue.

[Ellis Cashmore’s latest book is The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Are We Now Heading for Another Olympic Boycott? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Sex is Not Natural

Most readers will probably react to my suggestion in the same way as a friend of mine. “Sex is natural,” my friend argued. “Men are instinctively drawn to women and vice versa. One result of this is procreation. This is why we’ve succeeded as a species for about 300,000 years,” they contended.

Evolutionist that I am, I tend to assume that, like other living phenomena, humans and their biological ancestors adapted to survive and proliferate, and discovered sex was a reliable mechanism for reproducing. It made sense to assign different roles to different types of people in order to pair them and regulate procreation. From this perspective, monogamy owed more to evolutionary adaptation than conjugal fidelity.

“But we don’t learn sexual attraction,” my friend objected. “Can you remember learning to speak?” I replied. No. None of us can remember acquiring language. We have naturally-endowed physical and cognitive equipment that permits us to speak and perhaps what Noam Chomsky called deep structures that govern how we produce and use language. But we don’t remember learning to talk. And maybe sexual attraction is similar. We have deep propensities, but learn to develop the manner in which we experience and express them. Heterosexuality is not pre-mapped in our minds, even if it feels like it is.

We humans are capable of countless passions, tendencies and dispositions but have been encouraged to establish our sexual identities in a way that conforms with an arrangement composed of two parts. That means we are being encouraged to think about and assemble our sexual identities in a way that conforms with this.

“Encouraged? We don’t need encouraging,” my friend objected. “Men are men and women are different … it’s obvious.” To which I pointed out that even the physical differences we now regard as plain to see are our own creations. For most of human history, we saw similarities, the female body being just a gradation of one basic male type. “Medical theory taught that there was but one sex,” wrote Jeffrey Weeks in his 2003 book Sexuality, “with the female body simply an inverted version of the male.” Historically, a woman’s clitoris was thought to be an underdeveloped version of the equivalent structure in men—the penis.

Liquefied Sex

If this strikes you as counterintuitive, consider Thomas Laqueur’s studies, which indicate that the apportionment of the world into men and women based on sex—what we now call the binary—is a relatively recent convention that emerged just over 300 years ago. That’s when a clear division between males and females was recognized. Even then, no one knew for sure what made men and women fundamentally different. Hormones were not discovered until the 1920s and 1930s.

Weeks is among several scholars taking their cue from Michel Foucault’s precept “sexuality is the name given to a historical construct,” the idea being that sexuality is experience and is reconstructed continuously as humans move through their life cycle and through changing cultural contexts. We think of ourselves and others in terms of sexual types because social arrangements make it easier to navigate through life as, for example, a cisgender heterosexual male rather than a protean sexual being with a wide range of sexual tastes. But sexuality itself is a capacity for sexual feelings and experiences and, as such, is continually shaped and reshaped, depending on circumstances, surroundings, frames of reference and contextual relationships.

Gen Z’s Fluid Space

So, why should all this lead to a decrease in the number of people attracted solely to people on the other side of the binary? First, some statistics. After increases in 2020 and 2021, American adults’ identification as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or something other than heterosexual held steady in 2022 at 7.2%— double the figure of 2012—when measured by Gallup. That was higher compared to 3.1% of the UK population in 2021, according to the national census. This figure was an increase from 2.7% in 2019 and almost double the percentage from 2014, which was 1.6%.

Worldwide, a 2021 Ipsos study of 19,000 people in 27 countries suggested people born after 1997, i.e. Generation Z, were nearly 4 times as likely as those over 40 to identify as transgender, nonbinary,  or, in some way, gender-nonconforming. they were also the age group most likely to identify as something other than heterosexual. 9% of the total identified as LGBTQ+. But for those reaching adulthood in the second decade of this century, the figure doubled to 18%.

The results reflected those of a 2021 study conducted by the Williams Institute at the UCLA school of law: 15.9% of Gen Z adults in the United States identified as bisexual, compared to just 1.8% of Baby Boomers (b. 1946-64). This complemented a 2020 survey by Ipsos that found that only 51% of Gen Z respondents in the UK identified as exclusively heterosexual, compared to 72% of baby boomers.

The figures have only limited value (unless one accepts everyone is honest when volunteering information on their sexuality and that the human population is divisible into distinct categories). I repeat the stats here only to highlight what appears to be an underlying trend: more and more people declare themselves to be LGBTQ, nonbinary or something other than heterosexual. This drift will, I venture, reach an inflection point after which there will be a sharp upswing in the number of people who do not identify as heterosexual.

The censorious attitudes characteristic of much of the 20th century have gone and the first two decades of the 21st have been ones of inclusivity and release. Gay people no longer need to conceal, nor even declare their preferences or have them disclosed by anyone else. Any remnants of stigma have faded. In fact, ambiguity of sexuality arouses respect, even admiration. Los Angeles Times’ Jessica Gelt provides an example: “[Harry] Styles’ ability to exist comfortably, and extremely publicly, in a fluid space along the gender spectrum is particularly resonant.” Gelt believes Styles is a touchtone of contemporary culture and uses the term “gender nonconformity” to capture the mood he personifies.

Countervailing Forces

There are, of course, countervailing forces. While Uganda is the only African country where it is illegal even to identify as gay, several others, including Kenya and Nigeria, have rolled back progress on LGBTQ+ issues. There is also fierce resistance in several Middle Eastern states, where Islam informs all aspects of culture and law. Islam invokes scriptures and the credo of centuries to affirm a canonical truth:  homosexuality is a sin.

Roman Catholicism has a similar credo, though Pope Francis has criticized laws that criminalize homosexuality as “unjust,” and supports efforts to welcome LGBTQ+ people into the church. There are 1.8 billion Muslims and 1.36 billion Roman Catholics in the world, so I am not underestimating the religious resistance to the cultural change I predict. Yet some Muslims are liberalizing and many believe there are various ways of interpreting the Quran. There are also discernible signs of change in the Catholic church. Despite this, many will expect the resistance to continue. I believe expectations exist to be defied.

Unstoppable Gender Fluidity

In the twentieth century, sex referred to biological difference and gender was the response of society to that difference. Today such bygone distinctions seem glib and simplistic. The term gender fluidity captures the absence of stability, either in how we are assigned at birth or how society responds to sexuality — both have been liquefied. And the implication of gender fluidity is that sexual orientation and inclination is ever-changing. Let me return to the linguistic analogy: We learn one or maybe two languages without realizing it, then acquire others, perhaps changing dialects and accents as we mature and move from home to mix with others.

Today’s world is populated by sexually diverse people, many spurning the binary and insisting on a pronoun that reflects how they feel about themselves, regardless of how they were assigned at birth. Gender neutral toilets are everywhere. entertainers proclaim their queerness or, in the cases of Cara Delevingne and Demi Lovato, pansexuality — which means not limited by anything (pan means all-inclusive).

Practically every drama on film or tv has nonconforming characters. Each contributes toward a normalization of gender fluidity, bringing what were once regarded as deviations from heteronormativity to a condition of normalcy. Heteronormativity describes a worldview that endorses heterosexuality as the normal sexual orientation. It will be dismembered over the next two decades.

The decline of heterosexuality does not mean the end of procreation or human survival Marriage will survive but, with the acceptance of same-sex marriage over the past decade, there is likely to be further expansions of the concept of marriage to include polyamorous relationships.

Perhaps I am too sanguine. But I am trying to divine a future, not appraise the present. Gender fluidity is an unstoppable movement. No amount of vestigial prejudice can impede it: It is a question of how — and how fast — the era will take shape. The expansion of choice and multiplication of options is consistent with the diversification we are witnessing in other areas of culture. The days of straight cisgender individuals (and I am one) are not numbered yet, but, in 20 years, their statistical dominance will have gone, replaced by a different type of sexual landscape in which the binary will be only of historical interest.

[Ellis Cashmore’s latest book is The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Bryson was convicted of raping two women, one in 2016, the other in 2019. At the time of the offenses, he was male, his sex assigned at birth, and known as Adam Graham. In 2020, court papers reflected Graham’s wish to transition from natal male to female, and their name was changed to Isla Bryson. During the trial, the court heard of Bryson’s troubled background, including a brief marriage to a woman. Bryson told the court how they had felt a sense of dysphoria since the age of 4, and eventually decided to transition to female at the age of 29. Now 31, she was found guilty and initially remanded to a segregated wing of a women’s jail in Stirling, central Scotland, to await sentencing.

 While it is part of the United Kingdom, Scotland has its own parliament and this has power to make laws on issues that affect Scotland, for example on education, health, transport and some aspects of the criminal justice system—in much the same way that US states are able to legislate. The UK Parliament controls defense and foreign affairs. Scotland’s Gender Recognition Act, of 2004, determined the process by which transgender people can legally change their gender. Recently, the Scottish Government proposed contentious changes to the law that would reduce the waiting period for adults to change their legal gender from two years to three months and, crucially, withdraw the need for a medical diagnosis of gender dysphoria. In other words, gender would become a matter of self-identification—whatever a person declared themselves to be, male, female, or neither.

The Last Days of Nicola Sturgeon

A central proponent of this change, known as the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, was Nicola Sturgeon, who was the first woman to hold the position of Scotland’s First Minister when she was elected unopposed in 2014. Sturgeon, for most of her term of office, was enormously popular: a sterling advocate of Scottish independence, a redoubtable supporter of the European Union and a conscientious and belligerent defender of her own beliefs. She was politically dominant in Scotland and had few, if any, peers. But her support of transgender rights insinuated her into a debate that consumed her. She recently resigned, at 52, her political career prematurely ended by an issue that is sure to doom many more politicians and other kinds of leaders in the years ahead.

Without realizing it, Sturgeon staked her political life on the transgender reforms. She pushed through the changes. Trans people in the UK generally have the same kind of legal protections against discrimination as other protected groups under the 2010 Equality Act and the Scottish reforms were, for some, not necessary. Reem Alsalem, the United Nations special rapporteur on violence against women and girls, warned Sturgeon that the reform would be open to abuse by male sex offenders, thus endangering women. Feminist campaigners argued similarly that male sex offenders would attempt to use transgender recognition to gain access to female spaces. Evidence submitted to the UK Houses of Parliament in 2021 provided British Ministry of Justice statistics that showed sex offenders accounted for 59% of trans inmates, compared with 17% of male inmates and just over 3% of female inmates. The Equality and Human Rights Commission also expressed concerns.

But Sturgeon was adamant and the reaction was virulent. Harry Potter’s creator, the novelist J. K. Rowling, a resident of Scotland, was seen in a tee-shirt bearing the phrase, “Sturgeon … destroyer of women’s rights.” Sturgeon is a self-professed feminist and Rowling’s protest was damning.

Threat to Women

Meanwhile, concerns grew about Bryson’s presence in a women’s facility. Bryson, remember, was convicted of rape, the most invidious male crime against a woman’s body autonomy. It seemed perverse that a rapist was in a female prison. In a rare intervention, Sturgeon overturned the situation, defending her decision in a somewhat oblique manner: Isla Bryson “regards herself as a woman,” Sturgeon said, but “I regard the individual as a rapist.” She emphasized it was important not to suggest “even inadvertently” that trans women posed an inherent threat to women.

There is no unanimity, nor even close to a consensus on how to deal with single-sex spaces such as prisons, nor indeed most of the other questions posed by trans people. How, for example, is society meant to respond to children who experience gender ambivalence or just do not comply with binary expectations? But Sturgeon, during the passage of the Gender Recognition Reform Bill, was in no mood to tolerate alternatives to her vision. She decried those who disagreed with that vision as “deeply misogynist, often homophobic, possibly some of them racist as well.” Opponents of transgender rights are more usually described as transphobic.

In January 2023, Bryson was moved to a male prison in Edinburgh. A month later, she was sentenced to 8 years imprisonment with 3 years of supervision after release. The court heard that Bryson was taking hormones and seeking gender reassignment. At the time of sentencing, it seemed as if she would be taken to a male prison, presumably in a Vulnerable Prisoners’ Unit (VPU), where she would be segregated from other prisoners. These kinds of units do not always afford protection: for example, Richard Huckle, a sex offender, was found dead in his cell in a Yorkshire prison’s VPU in 2019. One wonders whether Bryson will survive her full sentence. The Scottish Prison Service maintains that it determines where transgender prisoners serve their sentences “on an individualized basis, informed by a multi-disciplinary assessment of both risk and need.”

Inclusivity and Fairness

How is this case a parody, an exaggerated imitation of wider society? If we stand back, it’s possible to imagine how Bryson, or rather an imagined Bryson, is how many people perceive transgender people: sly, deceptive, inauthentic and possibly dangerous. That may be a subjective and wildly inaccurate representation, but it is a persuasive misconception and one that affects much of the transgender debate. Anxiety over the case expresses a more general apprehension that women are often abused, attacked and sometimes killed by physically imposing men, as Bryson once was.

Do people really see all trans people with a sense of trepidation? Yes and no. A great deal of the opposition to the extension of transgender rights is fueled by a fear that every gain made by transgender people means a loss to natal women (those assigned female at birth). But not everyone accepts that there is a zero-sum game in play and many believe that a mature 21st culture should be capable of encircling and supporting all manner of groups that have been traditionally excluded, marginalized or, in some way, Othered.

Scotland now has to wrestle with the ideological questions that have already challenged some other countries and will surely demand responses from many more in the coming years: How can the law affirm and enforce transgender rights while upholding the entitlements, protections and privacy of natal women? There are two fundamental but potentially incompatible principles at stake. The first is inclusivity — the policy of providing equal access, opportunities and resources to people who have been historically regarded as peripheral. This has become almost totemic of modern culture and its effects are visible in the arts, entertainment, industry, politics and in practically every public sphere. Inclusivity has become one of those sacrosanct postulates like the right to work or fundamental human entitlements. Its moral value is so obvious, it needs no justification. The trouble is: it sometimes leads to unfairness.

The principle of fairness is older and involves the provision of impartial and just treatment without either discrimination or favoritism. It remains a distinctive feature of society and, while in practice it is often compromised, the essential value of fairness, particularly in democratic societies, is beyond dispute. Or at least it has been. Now, the concept of fairness may need adjustment.

Unwinnable?

People born after, say, 1950, will have grown, advanced and learned to live in a world that was, at once, liberated, yet still bound by tradition. They would have been inured to critiques of patriarchy and the persistent pressures for equal pay and conditions of service for women. They would have lived through times when Women’s Liberation, as it was called in the 1960s and 1970s, broke barriers, and when the Pill combined with the legalization of abortion, gave women previously unheard of control over their own bodies.  A parallel fight for release and self-assertion was fought by gay activists, principally Stonewall and the Gay Liberation Front. The removal of sodomy laws in the US and the 1967 Sexual Offences Act in Britain wiped away legal restrictions, but not the stigma attached to homosexuality. That started to disappear after celebrities like George Michael and k.d.lang either came out or were outed in the late 20th century.

Today, it would be unthinkable to suggest there could be a fair society without strenuous efforts to amalgamate the best interests of the widest possible range of groups. Extra efforts to accommodate once marginalized groups are regarded as perfectly compatible with fairness. Yet, satisfying the claims, wishes and perhaps demands of the transgender lobby, for many, leads inevitably to unfairness — as the ramifications of the Bryson case suggest.

So, how do we square a circle in which the interest of one such group conflicts with those of another? Many women see this as easy: transgender women are exactly that: not women, but “transgender women.” Women have, at various times, been denied the right to vote, own property, keep their own income, be educated, serve in the military or in politics, or participate in countless other pursuits that men have overseen. Women haven’t been gifted their current rights — they’ve fought for them and, as far as they are concerned, paid their dues. It must be galling (and I write as a straight cisgender man) for many to discover that some people born men –and who have enjoyed the privileges that this status confers–  have now chosen to live as women and are demanding rights of their own.

My guess is that inclusivity has become a cultural value of such unquestioned paramountcy, it will supplant other considerations. The women’s rights lobby fought, fought hard and emerged victorious on many fronts. It may now be engaged in an unwinnable fight, caught in a culture war that is sure to dominate social and political discourses in the years ahead. [Ellis Cashmore’s latest book is “The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson.”]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Fans were even more enraged in 2005 when the American Glazer family bought the club. Some even started a rival club and transferred their support. They’ve never been satisfied the Glazers are suitable custodians of a club fans believe is rightfully theirs. Now, they’re concerned the Glazers will sup with the devil and sell to the emir of Qatar, Sheikh Tamim bin Hamad al-Thani, who already owns the club Paris Saint-Germain via a company called Qatar Sports Investments.

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Mighty Presence

The objections are now familiar to anyone vaguely familiar with sports. Gulf States, enriched by their reserves of oil and gas, have, over the past decade established a Middle Eastern control over many sports. The sovereign wealth fund of Saudi Arabia underwrites the LIV golf tour. Bahrain hosts a Formula1 grand prix. The International Cricket Council has moved its headquarters to Dubai, the most populous city in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). And, as if anyone hadn’t noticed, Qatar has recently staged football’s most prestigious event, the FIFA World Cup—and done so successfully. Saudi Arabia will host football’s Club World Cup later this year.

In England’s Premier League, both of Manchester United’s local rivals—Manchester City and Newcastle United—have been bought. The former is owned by City Football Group whose majority shares are owned by Mansour bin Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the deputy prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and a member of the ruling family of Abu Dhabi.  Newcastle United was recently purchased by the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia. The Newcastle buy-out was challenged by many fans, though the opposition appears to have softened now that the club’s on-field fortunes are improving.

The objection to the encroachment of Middle East interests on sports that have traditionally been dominated by the West is not based on xenophobia. Well, not totally. Territories in that part of the world are not so vigilant in observing what many other parts of the world regard as fundamental human rights, particularly when it comes to LGBTQ+ groups. Homosexuality is outlawed and, in some parts, an imprisonable offense. There are places where it is punishable by death. Women’s status differs from country-to-country, but nowhere is there equality of access or opportunity comparable with the West’s.

Sports Fans Say Qatar Has Now Politicized the World Cup

Where’s The Harm?  

Now, a cynic might ask: since when did football fans become so self-righteous? Or did they always secretly harbor a strong sense of right-and-wrong, and were just not enraged enough to express their sense of morality? Until those Gulf States, with their “medieval” cultures started muscling in on that pure, unsullied and wholesome pursuit once the preserve of English gentlemen and, more recently, the proud property of the masses. Sports is too virtuous, too honorable, too undefiled by the sins of the world to be corrupted by those primitive Arab states where being able to quote the Quran counts as enlightenment.

But wait: let me offer a counterweight. Think about the meaning of sports: a pernicious biosphere where human effort is squandered in the futile pursuit of artificial objectives that have no benefit, material or otherwise, in the real world. Sports competitions are as trivial as they are purposeless. Sports’ only point is to satisfy individuals’ self-serving desire to surpass others. The more successful sportsmen and sportswomen are egotistical plutocrats whose money derives from the financial reserves of media behemoths. OK, sports events might once have been innocent tests of physical proficiency in a number of set challenges, but now they have morphed into an industry analogous to, if not contiguous with, showbusiness.

Fine, you might reply: So, where’s the harm? Again, I have an answer. Obviously, the physical injuries are commonplace and an expected byproduct of intense training and competition. And the long-term damage to the health of athletes and fans alike is an unfortunate, if inevitable, consequence of rivalries that might once have been friendly but are now warlike. Concussion and other forms of brain injury, sometimes permanent, are now seen as collateral damage in many sports. 

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Activities that were designed to test the limits of human capability have become the means by which to extend those limits. Cyclists, swimmers, and track and field athletes habitually ingest substances in their efforts to enhance their competitive performance and break boundaries. Athletes from practically every other known sport, to some degree, use licit or illicit pharmaceuticals in their efforts to maximize their physical potential.  Sport’s injunction to give one’s best appears quaint and unworldly: win-at-any-costs is more congruent with today’s ethos.

Hypocrisy

Sport’s harmful effects extend beyond the physical: at a cultural level, its fierce and destructive onslaught on traditional citadels has been unsparing. Here the less visible, yet arguably more profound consequences of sport have turned every one of us into sports fans of some hue. Racism surfaced in sports in the late 1970s and, while it has diminished in the West, it flourishes in the sports of countries like Hungary, Ukraine and other Eastern European democracies. Women have been pushed out of sports for most of its history and have only in recent years managed to compete in most major sports.

Unbelievable as it sounds, child abuse is an ungovernable wrongdoing in a variety of sports. Making the practice more pernicious is the fact that perpetrators are always the people charged with the responsibility for the welfare of young athletes.

What of the beautiful game itself? For decades, mired in corruption, bribery and miscellaneous other forms of venality, the world’s governing organization FIFA has operated like a private feudal fiefdom dispensing preferential treatment to anyone with sufficient funds and insufficient scruples to grease the right palms.

Qatar Will Change the World Cup Forever

And remind yourself: this is the same sport, indeed the same institution, that voices objections on grounds of morality whenever Middle Eastern interest in a club or a tournament surfaces. There’s a word that describes the practice of upholding high moral standards but having standards of one’s own that fall some way below: hypocrisy. It is endemic in western sports.

Sports were once thought to serve as a source of moral inspiration and maybe they were. But only a fool would ignore the deeply malevolent effects of their presence today. Over the next week or so, we’ll witness dutiful devotees of football protesting the growing influence of the Gulf States in their sport. They will almost certainly be genuine in their disapproval. But even a moment’s self-reflection will remind them that the sport they hold in such reverence is not only futile, arbitrary and wasteful, but a vile, unprincipled, rapacious, fraudulent and hopelessly corrupted environment in which decency is in short supply. How can Middle-Eastern owners possibly make it worse? Ellis Cashmore’s latest book is “The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Reverberating questions

The term institutional racism is, as a matter of course, invoked to explain the persistent pattern of behavior. No amount of hand-wringing, policy directives or even new presidents seems to make much difference. But the killing of Tyre Nichols will make a difference. It is a killing that will leave a searching and complicated legacy — and I mean legacy, not just influence, because it will shape the way we make sense of institutional racism and perhaps wonder if this is a meaningful explanation after all.

The five officers involved in the beating — Tadarrius Bean, Demetrius Haley, Emmitt Martin III, Desmond Mills Jr. and Justin Smith — were indicted on various criminal charges, including second-degree murder. They are all African Americans. How can this be institutional racism, or any other kind of racism? The reverberating questions have no ready answers.

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Some might insist liberal hypocrisies have disguised subterranean racism for decades and whites remain in charge of everything, including the way we all think. A form of co-optation, appointing and promoting blacks to positions of relative privilege, has served to distract everyone from who rules. Cerelyn Davis, a black woman, is the chief of police in Memphis, Tennessee, where the killing took place.

Undernourished Aspirations

Little in this world is as potent a consensus: Everyone agrees that institutional racism is a force in today’s society. So, what exactly is it? The term itself was introduced in 1967 by black activists Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton in Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America. Racism is “pervasive” and “permeates society on both the individual and institutional level, covertly and overtly,” they wrote.                 

Later writers, like Douglas G. Glasgow, sought to restrict the use of the concept to express the fact that, in the 1960s and 1970s, “The ‘for colored’ and ‘whites only’ signs of the thirties and forties had been removed, but the institutions of the country [United States] were more completely saturated with covert expressions of racism than ever” (in The Black Underclass). Glasgow wrote further: “Institutional racism (which involves ghetto residents, inner-city educational institutions, police arrests, limited success models, undernourished aspirations, and limited opportunity) does not only produce lowered investment and increased self-protective maneuvers, it destroys motivation and, in fact, produces occupationally obsolete young men ready for underclass encapsulation.”

 On these accounts, institutional racism is camouflaged to the point where its specific causes are virtually undetectable, but its effects are evident in the procedures of industries, political parties, schools and police forces. Defining it as inclusively as this made institutional racism a resonant term and one which has gained currency of late. But its generic status invites criticism about its lack of specificity and its limits as an explanation of such a wide range of social processes.

A Collective Failure

In the UK in 1999, a well-intentioned report into the murder of black London teenager Stephen Lawrence used the concept as a kind of secret weapon. “A collective failure of an organization to provide an appropriate and professional service to people because of their color, culture, or ethnic origin. It [institutional racism] can be seen or detected in processes, attitudes, and behavior which amount to discrimination through unwitting prejudice, ignorance, thoughtlessness and racist stereotyping which disadvantage minority ethnic people.”

The Macpherson report, as it was known, concluded that London’s Metropolitan Police was guilty of carelessness though not deliberate (“unwitting”) racism. “It persists because of the failure of the organization openly and adequately to recognise and address its existence and causes by policy, example and leadership.”

Countless British organizations put their hands up and acknowledged they propagated institutional racism. After all, if it was unintentional, or inadvertent, no individual or single department was to blame and everyone went scot-free. Even “enlightened” organizations, such as religious and educational institutions could own up to racism with relative impunity. This, it could be argued, was the fatal flaw: Every time, someone claimed institutional racism, it was nobody’s fault. Or, if individuals were to be blamed, it’s because they behaved consensually in a way that doesn’t upset the “system.” 

By capturing the manner in which whole societies, or sections of society, were and still are affected by racism, or perhaps racist legacies, long after racist individuals have disappeared, we approach racism’s emergent property — it comes into being through the interactions of people and stays long after those people have disappeared. The racism that remains may be mostly unrecognized and unintentional, but, if never disclosed, it continues uninterrupted.

Imperishable?

Critics insist that institutions are, when all is said and done, the product of conscious human endeavors and, no matter how deeply entrenched, it’s an error to suppose that institutional racism is a cause of behavior. Humans, not institutions, attack other humans.

This makes the Nichols case especially troubling: If we acknowledge the formidable, persistent power of racism to affect practically every feature of modern western society, then we’re forced to reckon with our apparent helplessness to subvert it: Every effort over the past 60 years since civil rights appears to have crumbled.

On the other hand, if we remind ourselves that humans ultimately wield the batons, what do we make of blacks mercilessly assaulting other blacks? Are we still going to call it racism? Because, if we are, it changes the word’s meaning and somehow diminishes its impact. Whites no longer have sole culpability and maybe they never did. In fact, an acknowledgement of the presence of institutional racism does no harm and may even burnish self-righteous liberal credibility.

Conceptual criticism apart, institutional racism has demonstrated a practical value in highlighting the need for continuous, relentless action in expunging racist discrimination rather than assuming it will just fade away. Its mention in the same discourse as the Nichols death should also unsettle us because it reminds us of the almost imperishable capacity of racism to distort modern life in ways we never imagined.[Ellis Cashmore’s latest book is The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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Why are so many convinced the character of the World Cup and, by implication, the Olympics has changed, and why do so many believe this is bad? Basically, fans balance the benefits and intrinsic rewards offered by global tournaments against the hijacking of such events for partisan purposes. At Qatar, the host’s abundant human rights issues and its questionable labor practices were roundly criticized. There were clichéd complaints of “sportswashing,” though, as one fan concluded: “Sportswashing is not really possible anymore. Attempts to pull the wool are cut off immediately by the billions of people on social media.”

Galvanizing Effect

Nowhere in the world is likely to be morally flawless in the mind of sports fans. They see sport as bringing climate change, human rights, bigotry and practically any other of the world’s bedeviling social problems into focus. Sports is, as one participant put it, “fair game,” meaning, if there is a problem that needs fixing, the methods are of secondary importance: only the result matters and sports is becoming an effective instrument. Nearly 73% are convinced sport in the 21st century is politically weaponized and will be an effective force in changing society. Sports have a “galvanizing effect,” according to one fan: “Movements for change can use the associated momentum to kick off beneficial activity.”

Qatar Will Change the World Cup Forever

Qatar has “lit a fire” under sport. “Any future host nations will come under more scrutiny,” suggested a fan, making a point shared by most. And another: “It is a myth that sports and politics are not intertwined. Sport can create positive change in society, and an open stance should be encouraged to drive this change.”  

“Athletes like all of us have a right to free speech,” declared one fan, confirming that the role of the World Cup, like it or not, will be to spotlight inequities, injustices and discrimination.

Politics and the World Cup in Future — What fans think

88.6% Think World Cups and Olympics of the future will be controversial political events

72.3% Think sport has the potential to produce social and political change

73.4% Think political World Cups are a negative development

62.1% Don’t think athletes should get involved in nonsporting affairs, like wearing emblems or       making gestures

51.8% Don’t think being involved in political activism is detrimental to competitive performance

34.1 %  Think future World Cups should follow Qatar’s example and ban alcohol.

Sample: 1,200. Conducted: Dec. 19, 2022-Jan 19 2023. Teesside University, UK                                                                                                               

Who Is In Charge of the Message?

But, while there is near-consensus on the moral destiny of the World Cup — and, according to most fans, the Olympics too — there is division over the desirability of sports becoming political in character. Nearly 74% don’t feel that politicization shouldn’t be encouraged. It is, they say, not sports’ responsibility to be a catalyst of change. Why then do so many think the politicization of sport is an unfavorable prospect?

The answers for this are not straightforward. Some fans believe the remonstrations witnessed over Qatar will soon be forgotten and will have achieved nothing. Sports only appear to be effective, but in the longer term are simply not. Some fans reflected on how sport was often lauded in the fight against apartheid in South Africa. There was a widespread boycott and SA was alienated from world sport for much of the 1970s and 1980s.Yet there is little evidence that the boycott actually served more than a symbolic role.

“Who is in charge of the message?” asked one fan, raising another objection. Is it legitimate for one culture to criticize another because its customs and practices differ? One of the present authors has argued that much of the attack on Qatar bordered on Islamophobia and several participants in the research were concerned that moral absolutism (the belief in absolute principles in ethical, political or theological matters) could prevail. As most fans recognize, there are few places in the world that are perfect enough to avoid some sort of reproval. (The next World Cup is to be held in Canada, USA and Mexico, which would seem to offer plenty of raw material for political protest.)

Football Is Ready for Openly Gay Players

One participant extended this argument: “People like to pass judgment on other cultures without acknowledging the problems in their own country.” He continued: “Don’t forget homosexuality was illegal in the country that hosted the World Cup last time England won it.” It’s a slyly intelligent response: Britain’s Sexual Offences Act, which decriminalized private consensual homosexual acts between men aged over 21 was not passed until 1967, a year after England’s only World Cup win. There was no gay liberation movement; this started in 1969. While Betty Frieden’s The Feminine Mystique had been published in 1963, women’s liberation didn’t pick up momentum till the late 1960s/early 1970s. There was no protest in 1966.

Sports Should Be Pure

Host nations have, in the past, largely escaped the kind of audit that would expose unwholesome legislation, customs and cultural practices. Football’s World Cup has, over the decades, been held in countries mired in conflict, where dubious pursuits and, often abhorrent operations have been practiced. The 1934 tournament was played in Italy, then under the leadership of Benito Mussolini, the founder of the Italian fascist party, who annexed Abyssinia (now Ethiopia) in the same year and, in 1940, entered World War II on the same side as Germany. “Il Duce,” as he was known, used the World Cup to promote fascism.

In June 1978, General Jorge Rafael Videla, the military dictator of Argentina, presided over the World Cup opening ceremony, and presented the trophy after the final. Three years earlier, he had explained his philosophy of government: “As many people as necessary must die in Argentina so that the country will again be secure.” About 30,000 political opponents of the Videla junta “disappeared,” many feared killed, burned and their remains scattered on some of the pitches used during the tournament. The World Cup itself was a huge success, the Argentinian national team prevailing — though only after suspicions of match fixing. It’s sometimes been speculated that Argentina’s invasion of the Falklands in 1982 was in large part an attempt to regenerate the feelings of nationalism and solidarity sparked off by the World Cup.

“Politics don’t belong in sports,” proclaimed one fan bluntly. The point is shared by nearly three-quarters of fans: They have largely accepted the prescription of Avery Brundage, who was president of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) from 1952-72: He strongly condemned political interference in sport, which, he maintained, should be “pure.” Only in recent years have sports fans departed from this and taken notice of athletes like Colin Kaepernick and Naomi Osaka, who explicitly used their sports as political platforms.

Social Media’s Exposé

Sports fans have politicized over the past few years. Global movements, in particular Black Lives Matter and MeToo have demonstrated the electrifying power of social media in solidifying opinion and motivating people into action. Even if the majority don’t encourage the politicization of sport, they have become perhaps unwitting participants in the process. Back in 2002, when Qatar was awarded the hosting rights by Fifa, football’s world governing organization, fans were not concerned with the territory’s culture and politics, nor its moral desirability as a site for one of the world’s two most prestigious global tournaments.

By the time of the Qatar tournament last December, everyone was familiar with the customs and practices of the Sheikdom in the Persian Gulf. Some fans attribute this to a growing awareness, in itself hastened by changes in communications: “Social Media allows [a nation’s suitability as host] to be challenged far more than it ever was and exposes stories that the public would previously be unaware of,” said one fan, underscoring the role of online exchanges. Another participant agreed: “Forthcoming events will be exposed in the same way.”

Tangential to the main inquiry, but an indicator of fans’ expectations of World Cups was the alcohol ban: Qatar, a Muslim territory of course, implemented a ban on the sale of alcohol in stadiums. This appeared to be an unpopular decision that fans would resent and oppose. In the event, they didn’t. Over a third (34%) of fans would now support a similar ban at future World Cup tournaments. A minority, but a significant minority nonetheless.

If their visions are to be accepted, future international sports tournaments will take on a very different and much more political complexion that we’re used to and, while most fans regret this development, the vast majority are expecting the kind of turbulence of the Qatar World Cup to be repeated time and again. As one fan summed up: “We live in a time where politics and sport are inextricably linked.”

[Cashmore, Cleland and Dixon are the authors of Screen Society]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Sports Fans Say Qatar Has Now Politicized the World Cup appeared first on Fair Observer.

This was published on May 12, 1981. Neil Amdur, writing for The New York Times, reminded readers, “Homosexuality is the most sensitive issue in the sports marketplace, more delicate than drugs, more controversial than violence.” Amdur’s story was headlined “Homosexuality Sets Off Tremors” and drew on the advice of Bruce Ogilvie (1920–2003), a professor emeritus of psychology at San Jose State University: “He advocated anonymity for homosexual athletes,” wrote Amdur.

Nobody’s Business?

Around the same time, Navratilova’s purported housemate Rita Mae Brown was described by The Washington Post’s Stephanie Mansfield as a “dark-eyed beauty, feisty feminist, lesbian activist.” Mansfield wrote of her relationship with Navratilova: “Their private love affair suddenly became public property in the afterglow of notoriety prompted by Billie Jean King’s candid statements on her own love affair.” She quoted Navratilova: “My personal life is nobody’s business.” How wrong she was.

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For over four decades, Navratilova’s personal life has been everybody’s business — and she doesn’t appear to have minded. In the early 1980s, Navratilova was unequivocal about her sexuality,  though, as her statement suggests, had no understanding of how she would become an unapologetic, often combative, living symbol of gay rights in sport. She may not have wished for the symbolic role, but she matured into it, so that, by the time she retired in 1994, she was much, much more than an athlete — a great athlete, I should emphasize —  she was an avant-courier, a figure who runs ahead of all others.

Popular With Sports Writers If Not Fans

A few days ago, Navratilova announced that she has been diagnosed with breast and throat cancer. Mercifully, both cancers have been detected in their early stages and the prognosis is favorable. “This double whammy is serious but still fixable, and I’m hoping for a favorable outcome,” Navratilova  said. “It’s going to stink for a while but I will fight with all I have got.” The statement typifies her approach to every difficult, unpleasant or challenging situation she has faced. And I’m not referring to just tennis or health scares.

In 1981, Mansfield described Navratilova as “a popular athlete with the sports writers if not the fans,” her implication being that her relationship with Rita Mae Brown had alienated her from crowds. Czech-born Navratilova defected to the USA in 1975. By 1981, she was one of the leading female players in the world and, at 24, poised to dominate her era as comprehensively as Roger Federer and Serena Williams were to in later eras. She’d never made a secret of her relationship with Brown, whom she met in 1979, though it was her friend and fellow tennis champion Billie Jean King’s scandal that precipitated interest in her personal affairs.

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When King’s former hairdresser and secretary Marilyn Barnett took legal action against her to ascertain property rights, King initially denied that she had an intimate relationship with Barnett. Later she acknowledged it, becoming the first female sports star to declare her homosexuality, though grudgingly. The case was thrown out after the judge heard that Barnett had threatened to publish letters that King had written to her. Reflecting on her conflict-strewn career, King observed: “My sexuality has been my most difficult struggle.” Despite this and the fact that King was married to a man (she divorced in 1987), King’s sexual proclivities had become a matter of public record and several of her sponsors dissociated themselves from her.

Interest quickly moved from King to her friend Navratilova who, as the above-quoted story of The New York Times story indicates, volunteered information on her sexuality without inhibition, though on the innocent assumption it wouldn’t expose her to public scrutiny.  So, Navratilova’s decision prompted many questions, the main one being “What now?” The answer was that she became the butt of weak jokes, lost out on some advertising contracts, failed to follow the likes of Anna Kournikova to celebritydom, but reigned imperiously over women’s tennis.

Coming Out: Then and Now

In the 1970s and 1980s, Navratilova won 59 Grand Slam titles: 18 singles, 31 women’s doubles and 10 mixed doubles. King retired from tennis in 1985, leaving Navratilova by far the most prominent openly gay person, certainly in sport and probably beyond.  Remember, this was a time when Freddie Mercury declined to speak openly on his sexuality (and didn’t do so until days before his death in 1991).

In 1984, at the height of the AIDS pandemic, Elton John married Renate Blauel, a woman. They divorced in 1988. In 1992, k.d. lang’s “Constant Craving” was released. The same year, Whitney Houston married Bobbie Brown —  a liaison that served to overshadow Houston’s friendship with Robyn Crawford. The arrest of George Michael for engaging in a “lewd act” in a Beverly Hills restroom in 1998, was a global game changer in too many respects to list here. The mutually reinforcing panic and homophobia incubated during the AIDS pandemic was curtailed by the discovery in 1996 of antiretroviral therapy. Being an out gay athlete then was a completely different experience to how it is now.

Navratilova  aligned herself with LGBTQ+ causes and became an effective and often provocative advocate for gay rights at a time when this was not the acceptable, morally justifiable, and even voguish undertaking it is in these times of gender fluidity. Her very presence among sports’ elite made her a powerful advocate for all women’s rights. 

Again, a reminder is needed: women had been hampered in sport by a myth of frailty for the early part of the twentieth century. They weren’t even permitted to compete in an Olympic marathon until 1985. Association football, or soccer, is the most popular sport for women in the world, but the first FIFA World Cup for women took place as recently as 1991. Women’s boxing wasn’t allowed in most parts of the world until the 1980s and even then it took a major court case in 1993 to allow female boxing to develop. It was accepted as an Olympic sport in 2012. 

Transgender Athletes

Unlike many LGBTQI+ activists who supported transgender athletes and defended their right to compete in events that best-suited their present gender, as opposed to the gender they were assigned at birth, Navratilova opposed this. Many feminists agreed with Navratilova when she maintained that to allow transgender women athletes to compete with cisgender women “is surely unfair on women who have to compete against people who, biologically, are still men.” The stance earned her the sobriquet “transphobe” and it was in this context that I met her for a BBC documentary.

I’ve written for Fair Observer on the vexed issue of transgender athletes and my position remains: I believe some form of integration must be found. Navratilova believes this will disadvantage athletes whose natal sex is female. It’s a perfectly plausible argument, one I understand, though one with which I don’t concur. Navratilova’s position on transgender athletes has driven a wedge between her and several LGBTQI+ groups, particularly those that lobby for inclusion. In 2019, she was removed as an ambassador by Athlete Ally.

This isn’t likely to diminish her stature nor her place in history — not just sports history. There have been several out gay female athletes in tennis and other sports since she rose to distinction in the 1980s. There have also been some male athletes. None of them can escape the influence of Navratilova and, in the 21st century, who would want to? Hers may be the most significant influence of any athlete and it will endure over the generations.

[Ellis Cashmore’s latest book is The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Martina Navratilova: A Personal Life That Became Public Property appeared first on Fair Observer.

I was reminded of this by the last installment of “Harry & Meghan” (H&M). Netflix’s six-part documentary on the eponymous pair. The celebrity couple are not characters in a narrative, nor component parts of a wider narrative: they actually are the narrative.

Perpetual Motion

The thing about narratives is: they advance. Celebrities have to be in perpetual motion, especially in the modern era, when traditional expertise in singing, acting or modeling is no longer necessary. Many of the people audiences follow, often worshipfully, don’t claim to possess any particular skills germane to the mainstream entertainment industry. They just exist. And their existence excites audiences.

Harry and Meghan are such creatures. This is probably unfair because Meghan, when plain “Meghan Markle,” displayed her acting chops and could boast she was known as a screen actor before she met the late Princess Diana’s youngest son. Harry could also react to this, reminding us of his royal credentials: he is, after all, the son of the King of England and, as such, is always likely to attract interest.

At the moment, there is no end in sight. Netflix is thought to have paid the gilded pair about $100 million for the documentary, meaning Harry and Meghan are earning too much money to change what appears to be an emerging formula: talk in a manner that hints at confidentiality, about one subject — Harry & Meghan (the ampersand serves to remind us that this is a product rather than two individual humans). The public appetite for inconsequential intel from the Palace seems ravenous and, where there is hungriness, the pair will serve up more nourishing scraps.

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A World of Their Own Design

Harry and Meghan are a pair of voluptuaries cocooned in a world of their own design: They’ve chosen to decamp to Southern California and co-exist with the media, creating a reality in which they appear on screens and are paid handsomely for their presence. They talk pleonastically about themselves and their travails with the British royal family. Disclosures about microaggressions at the Palace catch the headlines. But they appear to feel no obligations to corroborate or offer even inference in support of the claims.

Accusations of racism in the media are always liable to stir interest. So, when Meghan complains about being described as “exotic,” we can understand how the stereotype implicit in the adjective might have upset someone so delicate. But is it likely to cause trauma? Possibly. Though not in the way the victim of a racist attack who needs hospital attention is traumatized. Meghan’s complaint tends to trivialize the effect of racism. An alternative response would be to congratulate Meghan for helping stimulate an international discussion of racist harassment and misconduct at Buckingham Palace.

Since December 2016, when Meghan was photographed in Toronto wearing a gold necklace featuring the letters “M” and “H,” Harry and Meghan have dominated the media and thrilled audiences. Six years is a long time in celebrity culture. Typically celebrities without obvious proficiencies in traditional entertainment maintain prominence by keeping their narrative moving. Kim Kardashian and her relatives are virtuosos: Whether being held up at gunpoint, wearing Marilyn Monroe’s clothes, or going through a divorce, Kim has been adept at surprising her audience. In this way, she’s kept her narrative in motion, changing direction in unexpected ways, so fans have no time to tire.

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Plot Twist?

Unless Meghan has a “Gone Girl”-like twist in preparation, the people who are fascinated by her and her husband’s divulgences will become jaded and the Netflix fees will be a thing of the past. A divorce would work. But it’s difficult to predict what else will convince audiences that they are a couple worth watching. Think of the great narratives of recent years. Johnny Depp and Amber Heard kept people rapt with a long court saga of Homeric proportions. Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez aka Bennifer were the power couple of the early 2000s, and nearly two decades later after splitting up, they got engaged again after rekindling their romance in 2021. The narrative proved compelling because no one ever thought it had actually stopped, even in 2004 when they announced they were parting. Everyone somehow knew they’d get back together.

Arguably, the most fascinating celebrity narrative this century is Britney Spears: A best-selling singer in her teens, Spears is now 41 and has rarely been out of the news in more than three decades. Only Kardashian, who came to the public’s attention in 2007 courtesy of a sex tape, challenges traditional entertainers in terms of longevity.

One-dimensional

Keen readers will know where I’m headed: Harry & Meghan is nearing its terminus. The same audiences who have been gratified by the Palace tittle tattle and tales of the internecine spats will now expect something different. Neither Harry nor Meghan shows much potential to deliver anything apart from more-of-the-same. Harry, in particular, appears a likable but one-dimensional character who has an inexhaustible appetite for talking about himself, but nothing else.

Meghan, in fairness, stokes interest with her legal cases and her troubled family background; but there surely can’t be much more mileage in that. Her preparedness to share heartbreaking experiences, as she did in the The New York Times, will chime with many. “Losing a child means carrying an almost unbearable grief, experienced by many but talked about by few,” she wrote in 2020. (Harry later blamed The Daily Mail for his wife’s miscarriage.)

Meghan could try to morph into a lifestyle guru, like Martha Stewart, perhaps lending her imprimatur to a range of upscale products. Or tread a similar path to her friend Oprah Winfrey and host her own talk show. Harry might add value as a co-host. Another baby is too predictable.

Less fortuitous events are often newsworthy. A near-death experience did the trick for Elizabeth Taylor in 1961. A dreadful accident in 1984 pushed Michael Jackson to the fore of public attention. Paris Hilton’s imprisonment in 2007 created enormous interest. No one wishes comparable experiences on H&M, but, realistically, they would keep the narrative running.

They could become the celebrity equivalent of the Harry Potter books: Readers never tire of reading these over and over. Or the 1997 movie “Titanic,” which fans watch multiple times. I doubt it. There’s no final chapter in this or any other celebrity narrative: they often disappear into obscurity with several issues unresolved and plot strands left straggling. Harry & Meghan are already close.

People who love them admire their attack on the royal family and the historical elitism it embodies. What others find hard-to-bear is the inflated sense of their own importance, their eagerness to discern unworthy motives, the parasitic existence they’ve created for themselves and their seeming disdain for decent people who lack the wealth and glamor they’ve been gifted.[Ellis Cashmore’s latest book is The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Harry & Megan: It’ll Never Last appeared first on Fair Observer.

Whisked Away By The Zeitgeist

The fascination with Swift is probably unparalleled: worldwide and seemingly inexhaustible. Fifteen years ago, she was a sweet, skillful and promising country singer. Today, she is the seventh wonder of the world. Last November, tickets for her forthcoming Era tour were released to “verified” fans: the demand was so unprecedented that the Ticketmaster site crashed under the weight of “extraordinarily high demands” and “insufficient” tickets. About 2.4 million fans applied. Within days, it was reported that prices for single Era tour tickets were listed on resale sites as high as $17,860 — a price beyond all but affluent adults (passionately devoted affluent adults too) or child stars.

The tour — which starts March 17 —  is intended to support Swift’s tenth album Midnights. Even at a time when physical sales of recordings are a relic of the previous century, Swift’s album sold 1.5 million units in its first week of release in October, 2022 — the first time a musician had sold over a million in an opening week since Swift herself did so with Reputation in 2017. Streaming of Midnights exceeded a billion in days. In 2022, Forbes estimated her personal wealth to be $570m.

Some artists are just meant to be: Elvis and the others mentioned earlier were pop gods in waiting: so close to the zeitgeist they were, like Dorothy and Toto, bound to be whisked away and carried to greatness, their music, demeanor, look, antics perfectly in harmony with the times. Others are harder to figure out: Swift is one of them. It’s easy to mistake her music for good rather than brilliant. She looks interesting, but not in the same flamboyant way as, say, Rihanna or Lady Gaga. There have been no outrageous stunts or splashy displays of wealth that typically guarantee the kind of coverage Kim Kardashian and her siblings have exploited so expertly. Swift has either steered or been swept clear of caricatured performances.

Her only moment that came close to explosive was at the 2009 MTV Video Awards ceremony when the artist formerly known as Kanye West interrupted her acceptance speech and sparked a long feud. West aka Ye later claimed he was motivated by god to make his intervention. If so, god might legitimately be considered to have delivered Swift to her eminence. Because the years-long dispute with Ye probably boosted her reputation. 

Yet, she is unmistakably great — and I use the word as an attribution rather than a property: if enough people acknowledge her greatness, she actually is great. So, why is she considered so illustriously above the average?

Authenticity by Kismet or Design?

The greatest entertainers are those who understand how much of themselves to reveal to audiences. For most of the twentieth century, a little went a long way and performers allowed only glimpses of what used to pass as private lives. All that changed with the onset of celebrity culture and, today, anyone with ambitions in the entertainment industry is obliged to sign a Mephistophelean contract: success is conditional on the surrender of private lives. Swift was only fifteen when she signed for Big Machine, a Nashville label, in 2005. For the next 10 years, she was a meticulous chronicler of her own developing status: her records were mostly autobiographical reflections on “my-life-as-a-popstar.”

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Media studies scholar Maryn Wilkinson thinks this “authenticity” was crucial to Swift’s early success and it made her relationship with fans almost intimate. Los Angeles Times’ Mikael Wood reckons the intimacy “wasn’t a product of kismet but of design” but her music was so shimmering that “eventually you stop caring what’s drawn directly from Swift’s real life and what’s not.”

It’s worth pondering this point because the sense of intimacy Swift created endured. No artist has used social media more artfully than Swift. The Guardian writer Alim Kheraj calls her “a ringmaster of fan service,” the reference to the ringmaster suggesting how she conducts and directs her fans. And remember, her fan base spans the age spectrum, so her ability to coordinate is quite a feat.

Were Swift’s progress uneventful, her personal history might not have captivated her fans. But it was anything but: she had a major fall-out with Big Machine’s owner Scott Borchetta when in 2019 he sold the label to Ithaca Holdings, owned by Scooter Braun, whom Swift disliked. While Swift had negotiated a deal with Borchetta that allowed her to own the masters of later albums, the ownership — and thus ability to earn from — her first six albums transferred to Braun. This meant that he could earn money from the use of Swift’s early music in, for example, advertising, tv programs, films and so on. She would have no control over where and how her music would be used. Characteristically, Swift made her annoyance well known on Instagram, Tumblr and other social media.

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An acrimonious and serpentine dispute ensued and fans were offered ringside seats as both Swift and Braun vented on social media. Feuds like this are reliable ways of galvanizing interest. Swift resolved to re-record her early music, announcing this on social media, of course. She did exactly that and, with typical ringmaster’s flair, urged her fans to buy the new recordings, even if they already owned the originals. Sales suggested they were mostly compliant.

What Next?

This wasn’t the only splenetic dispute that kept Swift occupied. The earlier-mentioned incident with Ye in 2009 started a squabble that dragged on for several years. Celebrity feuds are usually popular with audiences and serve to keep the disputants in the news. Ye was presumably aware of this when he rapped, “I made that bitch famous” on his 2016 track “Famous.” The altercation broadened when Ye’s then wife Kim Kardashian got involved. Her involvement at any level guaranteed a global audience, not just of observers, either: the heated exchanges were conducted largely on social media, allowing interested fans to feel they were participating.

The disputes lend a nimbus of complexity to Swift: she may bewitch fans with her music, but she makes a no-holds-barred enemy if you cross her. Her fights are spectator sports but ones in which her fans are allowed to brawl too. And not just on social media: they buy her albums, if only to ensure she wins the day. When someone, especially a god-fearing American, wields the kind of influence over human life, thought and action Swift evidently does, the imagination starts to wander and the mind starts to wonder: What might she do next?

 She could break Spotify’s single-day streaming numbers again. Or sell-out a record number of concerts at record high ticket prices. And she could carry on winning every conceivable music award. Or she could try something new.

Unsurpassed Influence

In 2018, Swift celebrated her win at the American Music Awards by urging her followers to vote in the midterm elections. For years, her blue eyes and blonde hair endeared her to the US’s alt-right, the rightwing movement that rejects mainstream politics and uses online sources to disseminate its supremacist ideology. But her injunction put paid to the alt-right rumors and appeared to align her with the Democrats, a party for which she could become valuable. Influence comes in many shapes and forms. When a popstar, then not even 30, tells voters to exercise their right, it might not make much difference. There again, maybe it will.

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In September 2021, in Fair Observer, I asked the question: Is Oprah the Most Influential Person Ever? I thought she was. Now, I think Swift surpasses her. Think of her demographic: not just teenagers or starry-eyed twentysomethings, but heads of family, perhaps even grandparents. I repeat the figure 44 percent of all Americans. I doubt if any pop singer in history ever had such wide and deep appeal. Within that dense fan base is a dutiful alliance committed to maintaining her dominion. Swift’s onetime adversary Ye plans to run for president in 2024 and, while Swift herself has given no indication that she has no comparable ambitions, there’s a temptation to ponder what theoretically she could achieve in 2028. She will be 39, four years younger than John F. Kennedy was when he was inaugurated as President.  

[Ellis Cashmore’s latest book is The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Is There Really Anything Taylor Swift Can’t Do? appeared first on Fair Observer.

For over 90 years, the World Cup has rivaled the summer Olympics for scope, grandeur and athletic excellence. It still does. But, from this point, it will also be an occasion for gathering forces of dissent. Many will despair at the wrangling that’s changed the character of the 2022 tournament in Qatar, while others will be excited by the way sport can force into world focus problems, affairs or just situations that might otherwise be ignored or dismissed as unworthy of international attention.

Cultural Changes

Twelve years ago, when football’s world governing organization FIFA agreed to let the sheikhdom on the coast of the Persian Gulf with a tiny population of 2,200,000 to host the tournament, the problems posed seemed logistical: weather, accommodation, timing and so on. No one could have known what was coming. The Harvey Weinstein case came to the fore in 2017, and led to the subsequent surge of the MeToo movement. The comparably potent cultural movement of Black Lives Matter that grew after the killing of George Floyd by a police officer in 2020. Gender fluidity and the challenge to the traditional sexual binary. Transgender politics, not only in sport but in every area of society. These were among the cultural shifts that changed … well, practically everything in society, including perceptions and expectations of sport.

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The days when sports governors tried strenuously to prevent political or social issues fouling the onetime pursuit of amateur gentlemen are now gone. Sport is now fully weaponized and the majority of its fans not only accept but insist that it should be used as an instrument for exposing injustices and promoting causes (I have soon-to-be-published research that provides evidence of the rise of politicized fans).

Sports has a mixed record in promoting social change. While it’s hailed as partly responsible for bringing down South African apartheid, there is no persuasive evidence that boycotting South African sport was effective in any more than a symbolic way. The memorable black power salutes at the Mexico Olympics of 1968 are now iconic reminders of the fight against racism in the USA, though many neglect how athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos, who gestured with their gloved fists, were actually punished and demonized at the time rather than vaunted. Muhammad Ali is often regarded as champion of civil rights as much as a boxer, though, in 1964, when he dropped his name Cassius Clay and converted to the Nation of Islam he was attacked for his separatist philosophy.

Criticism of Qatar or Islam?

Some believe revealing Qatar’s exploitative treatment of migrant workers and its admonition of homosexuality will hasten a change in both. In the first instance, this is possible. In the second, unimaginable. Islam decrees that homosexuality is sinful. No Islamic country on earth, nor any Muslim, whether in the middle east, Britain, USA or anywhere else will demur. Qatar is among at least eleven other countries that consider homosexuality a capital offense, which may be punishable by death.

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At this point, I should perhaps declare an interest: I am a white, cisgender heterosexual male, born in the UK, part-educated in Canada, having lived in Asia and the USA. In common with other sociologists, I understand the deep cultural significance of religion, but believe in the primacy of humanity, making me atheist. I am also reflexive, meaning that I don’t accept there is a neutral position from which to assess cultures: the very fact of my existence implicates me in culture and precludes objective analysis. I remain aware that I am steeped in the culture of my upbringing and mature development. So, while I’ve supported gay rights and opposed racism for my adult life and argue against others who do not, I try to resist privileging my own culture over all others. I include this detail because my interpretation of much of the recent condemnation of Qatar is that it is a disguised attack on Islam.

Close to a quarter of the world’s human population are Muslims. I find the Islamic code on homosexuality repugnant. I also acknowledge that its source is in faith and no amount of argument will change this. So, when Qatar is described by western journalists as “medieval,” it discloses a sneering, ignorant disrespect. And, when I hear western Europeans, who are not Muslims, describing their commitment to “cultural inclusiveness” or “inclusivity,” I suspect they mean excluding any party that disagrees with popular western principles, standards and values.

Intolerance is an old-fashioned word so maybe neo-intolerance is how we should describe the new form of western cultural pompousness. The affectedly — and usually self-congratulatory — manner with which west European liberals make pronouncements on practically anything that deviates from their own rules of thought and conduct is sure to be challenged. Possibly by the time of the next World Cup.

Politics and the 2026 World Cup

The 2026 World Cup will be shared by three hosts all from the same land mass and all predominantly Christian: Canada, USA and Mexico. Not all countries are equally worthy of opprobrium, of course. The USA will bear the heaviest burden, with laws on the possession of firearms framed in the nineteenth century (far from medieval) and laws on abortion that were reformed in 1973, but which may by the time of the World Cup, be retroceded to the 1820s. Mexico decriminalized abortion only last year. As for Canada, that perennially inoffensive territory in the north, consider: last year, Pope Francis publicly apologized for the 150,000 indigenous children who were separated from their families and taken to residential Catholic schools where they were beaten, starved and sexually abused, between 1881-1996. This will be one of a number of concerns regarding indigenous people that will surface when the World Cup arrives. 

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Once more, there will be sanctimonious critics offering their insight, resonance and misplaced sense of superiority. There will also be earnest interrogation that will lead to useful and possibly productive developments. Qatar is not going to abandon Islam, but its citizens live on planet earth, eat, work, catch buses and do many of the same things as the rest of the world. That includes examining their lives from time to time — as we all do. They have been made forcibly and, I am guessing, uncomfortably aware of what many others regard as their shortcomings and may choose to revise them accordingly in future. 

What is football for?

Football is ridiculous, isn’t it? Eleven grown men kicking a ball in one direction while another eleven grown men try to stop them and move the ball the other way. Can you think of anything more trivial and purposeless? The attention granted the World Cup might lead a friendly alien to assume the tournament takes us closer to world peace, or finding a cure for cancer, or maybe saving the planet from self-destruction. It does none of these things. But this sporting wasteland may yet produce some good: if, as I expect, World Cups from this point become cultural tinderboxes, then they might cease to be trivial and conjure larger, more meaningful campaigns that will bring genuine benefits.

Those who wish football and other sports to ablute themselves of politics will rue the day FIFA awarded the 2022 World Cup to what was once a British protectorate where they speak Arabic and which got rich through its oil. But the sustained fury the decision has engendered may yet be the greatest blessing, not to football, but to the world.

Ellis Cashmore’s latest book is “The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson.”

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Qatar Will Change the World Cup Forever appeared first on Fair Observer.

Lopez was sitting with her beau of the time, Ben Affleck, a white Californian built like a light-heavyweight boxer (she may be back with him now). You’ll understand shortly why I’m being specific about their particulars.

You Can Take the Man Out of the Ghetto…

Watching the past weekend’s Oscars altercation, I immediately wondered: What if Chris Rock, an African American comedian, had cracked a gag at the expense of JLo and not Jada Pinkett Smith? After Martin’s joke, Lopez grinned politely, while Affleck, seated next to her, was clearly unimpressed but forced a transparently false smile.

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But what if he had taken offense, like Will Smith, a black actor with a similar build to Affleck, did? If Affleck marched onto the stage and smacked Rock across the face, the situation would have taken on a completely different dynamic. The headlines would have read: White Actor Strikes Diminutive Black Host. Rock is 5 foot 7 inches and, in boxing terms, looks about a featherweight.

The media would have reacted differently, though how differently we’ll never know. One thing is for sure: The episode would have taken on a racial character.

Even as it was, Smith’s assault on Rock is loaded with racial implications, the most obvious one being that he supplied white racists with sustenance. There is an adage that “You can take the man out of the ghetto but you can’t take the ghetto out of the man.” Racists subscribe to this and often cite the examples of O.J. Simpson and Mike Tyson, both African Americans who became conspicuously successful and had more money than they could count. Both, in their different ways, imploded.

Smith hasn’t committed an offense comparable with rape or any other kind of violent crime. And the LAPD has declared it will not seek prosecution. So, Smith’s contretemps is likely to remain that: an embarrassment rather than a crime.

But let’s face it: Had it occurred in a different context, the likelihood is that the perpetrator of the offense would be arrested and charged. There would be no trouble finding witnesses, either. Smith behaved like a perfect racial stereotype: hot-tempered, bull-headed, thuggish and, most importantly, incapable of controlling his emotions even in an environment where decorum prevailed. Even after Smith returned to his seat, he screamed obscenities at Rock, who lacked the wit to turn the episode into something worthy of laughter. His was an unedifying exhibition of uncontrolled aggression.

Surprisingly, Smith was not ejected and, indeed, later picked up an award for best actor.

Animating Masculinity

But pandering to stock racist types was not Smith’s only offense. His action was borderline misogynistic, perhaps even enhancing the racial stereotype he’d brought to life. Consider if it was a case of Will being taken over by his emotion, seeing the look on his wife’s face, probably under family stress with her condition and snapping. Or a black man animating an anachronistic form of masculinity, historically associated, though not exclusively, with black men. After all, the amusing line was aimed at his wife, Jada Pinkett Smith, who has alopecia, a condition that manifests in the partial or complete absence of hair from areas of the body where it normally grows; baldness, in other words.

Couldn’t she have responded to the insult herself? She may have felt a more dignified silence was the best policy. But she might also have answered back with an equally acerbic remark. Or, if she had been moved to act, Pinkett Smith could have administered the slap in the face herself. She’s about the same size as Rock, so it wouldn’t have been the mismatch that actually did take place. Since when do women need their husbands, partners or male friends to take care of their business? Jada looked slightly disgusted by Rock’s remark, but, so far, her views on her husband’s violent behavior aren’t known. Had she objected to it, we would have surely found out by now.

Since #MeToo gained momentum in the aftermath of the Harvey Weinstein case, the flagrant manipulation and abuse of women by men — especially powerful ones — has become visible through the testimonies of countless women. We probably suspected for years that men get away with mistreating women in more ways than one. But #MeToo has effectively put the brake on this egregious historical practice.

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What about men’s abuse of other men? I know readers will think I am stretching this too far, but surely men have the right not to be coerced, harassed or intimidated too. Rock was only doing his job — the tradition at Oscar ceremonies is to “roast,” as Americans call it. That is, to subject guests to good-natured criticism. For many, he may have overstepped the mark by making fun of what is, after all, a medical condition. But the informal rules about what constitutes good or bad taste change year by year. Rock is at least entitled to expect the people he insults will be familiar enough with the custom that they take the ridicule in the spirit he intends.

Victims of Domestic Abuse

The LAPD’s intention not to pursue the case raises a final issue. Should it be necessary for a complainant to press charges when an obvious assault has been committed? Rock is clearly embarrassed by the affair, and his failure to file a complaint presumably reflects his desire to have the incident quickly forgotten. Countless women and men, who have been victims of domestic abuse, do not press charges. But their motivations are usually very, very different. Often, they are pressured by their abuser or threatened with more violence should they pursue charges.

The LAPD’s approach to this seems head-in-the-sand. It will probably have no consequences for Chris Rock and leave no damage, professionally or physically (at least he didn’t seem too badly hurt). But victims of domestic abuse are never so fortunate: their circumstances dictate that they often imperil their own safety by giving evidence. The LAPD’s decision will not inspire them.

*[Ellis Cashmore is the author of “Kardashian Kulture.”]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Will Smith’s Gift to Racists — and Misogynists appeared first on Fair Observer.

What England’s Premier League Did for Football

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I thought of this shortly after Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea Football Club in 2003 and launched the most extravagant spending splurge in the history of sport. In his first year in charge, his total spending in the player transfer market equated to 40% of the entire Premier League’s expenditure on players. Was this man trying to prove he could buy anything he wanted?

The club was easy: Already deeply in debt (£60 million — around $79 million), Abramovich just paid off the creditors and took control of Chelsea. Then he assembled the strongest playing squad available. The cost of the transfer fees plus salaries far outweighed the club’s income, and in his first five years, Chelsea posted losses of £447 million — a sum that sounds less fantastic today than it did in the 2000s.

Money, Money, Money

Chelsea, at the time of Abramovich’s arrival, was a club of comparable size to, say, West Bromwich Albion. The clubs had similar histories of achievements, comparable fan bases and stadiums. Chelsea was not included in the original elite when plans for the Premier League were formulated in the early 1990s. Abramovich commissioned the transfer of players such as Didier Drogba (in 2004), Andriy Shevchenko and Michael Ballack (both in 2006), signaling that no player was too big — or too expensive — for Chelsea.  

The rewards were abundant. Chelsea won the Premier League in the 2004-05 season, losing only one game under the management of Jose Mourinho, and this was but one of a total of 21 trophies, including five Premier League titles, two UEFA Champions League triumphs and a FIFA Club World Cup championship. Chelsea became one of the most garlanded clubs in the history of the Premier League and could lay a legitimate claim to being the best team in the world for long periods in recent history.

If Abramovich’s project was something like that of Magic Christian’s protagonist, it worked like a charm. Actually, Abramovich didn’t need Prospero-like charms — all he needed was money. He spent lavishly and luxuriated in the rewards. But the costs were prodigious. Last year, for example, Chelsea lost £145.6 million. Abramovich made good on the money, as he has done since he took over, by making deposits in the holding company Fordstam Limited, which technically owns Chelsea FC, and which Abramovich owns outright.

Abramovich never explained his profligacy. He didn’t give interviews and seemed to prefer anonymity. I was once asked to divine Abramovich’s motivation and answered by comparing his ownership of Chelsea with his love of art. He has a formidable collection that includes Bacon’s Tryptych, for which he paid $86.3 million. “He has the means to possess things he loves,” I said. “He might have bought Chelsea as a trophy at the outset, but he seems to have formed a loving attachment.”

Even if he did start with a testable hypothesis, the club became more a passion than a project.  He ran Chelsea Football Club not as a business in the conventional sense, but more like a charitable foundation or an endowed college with only one benefactor.

Prised From His Grasp

And now it is over: Abramovich has had the club he created prised from his grasp. He won’t appear at Stamford Bridge again and will probably never again set foot on English soil. The British government, as we know, has invoked powers to freeze his assets (of which Chelsea FC is one; the Bacon may be another), forced him to put the club on the market and denied him access to the proceeds of the sale. He has set the asking price of £3 billion, presumably reflecting the money he has sunk into the club over his tenure, but he won’t see a penny of it. (The pertinent legislation is the Economic Crime Bill, which was rushed through Parliament in early March.)

We shouldn’t underestimate how much pain he must be feeling as he reads about the bids for his club. Negotiations are being handled by US merchant bank Raine. Abramovich himself is not allowed any input. As an aside, Abramovich has not committed a criminal offense and is guilty only of having “links” (whatever they may be) with Russian President Vladimir Putin or his regime. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, “There can be no safe havens for those who have supported Putin’s vicious assault on Ukraine.” Abramovich has consistently denied historical associations with Putin and has done so for at least 11 years.

As I write, a shortlist of bidders for the club is being considered by Raine. Eventually, the preferred bidder will be selected and — extraordinarily — will then be screened by the government. Paradoxically, the only bidder that would be likely to continue Abramovich’s munificence was a group from Saudi Arabia, which has withdrawn, presumably sensing tenders from that part of the Middle East would not be received favorably at the moment. The others are consortia — associations of several companies.

Whoever buys Chelsea will not need due diligence to realize they will have to hemorrhage money, at least for the immediate future. The club has been promising to break even since at least 2009, when then-chief executive Peter Kenyon promised the club would be “self-sustaining” by 2010. It hasn’t come close. Will new owners persist with the lose-money-to-win-trophies approach?

Football’s Land of Milk and Honey

It’s not inconceivable that a consortium could introduce dramatic downsizing over the next three or so years, allow existing contracts to expire, trade prudently in the transfer market and perhaps model itself on Liverpool, a football club owned since 2010 by Fenway Sports Group Holdings, which also owns the Boston Red Sox of Major League Baseball.

If so, transfers on the scale of the £97.5-million Romelu Lukaku deal in 2021 are likely to be a thing of the past for Chelsea. There may also be some surprise departures to lighten the wage load.

Lionel Messi’s move from Barcelona to Paris St Germain came as a bolt out of the blue last year; at least, till the full extent of Barcelona’s debt came to light. The club owed about €1 billion ($1.1 billion) and Messi’s salary was reputed to be over €50 million. (The ill-fated European Super League was not motivated by greed, as was widely reported, but by the will to survive. Most of the clubs in the original project are ravaged by debt and presumably thought the league offered a route to liquidity.)

The next owners of Chelsea FC will not bring the inexhaustible supply of money Abramovich did. They will be legally bound to honor existing agreements, so players like Lukaku, who earns £16.5 million per year, and N’Golo Kante, who gets £15 million, will be paid for the remainder of their contracts. But the club is unlikely to offer salaries of this size in future.

More likely, the new owners will introduce some kind of internal salary cap. Arsenal has long operated with a wage structure. Other clubs without benefactors typically try to keep a lid on their salaries. Manchester City is owned largely by the Abu Dhabi United Group and spends with the kind of improvidence associated with Abramovich. Whether Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund will turn Newcastle United into another Chelsea remains to be seen. But Chelsea’s new owners will almost certainly take a more businesslike approach.

UEFA, football’s governing organization in Europe, may complicate life for Chelsea’s new owners if it restricts clubs’ spending to 70% of their income. Back-of-an-envelope calculations suggest Chelsea has typically spent more than the whole of its yearly income on transfers and salaries. Even if it expects income of, say, £400 million, the club will have to exercise self-restraint unheard of during the Abramovich era. Presently, wages alone are thought to be £336 million.

The Chelsea case presents an insight into English football’s rise over the past 30 years. In 1985, England’s clubs were banned from European competition for five years (six for Liverpool) due to violence amongst supporters. Since their return, they have grown to dominance. This is due in no small part to Abramovich. After his takeover, international entrepreneurs enthusiastically bought into Premier League clubs and introduced the kind of money that brings bargaining power in the transfer market. Today, owners include investors from the United States, the UAE, China, Thailand, Egypt and Iran.

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England has become football’s land of milk and honey. Love him or loathe him, Roman Abramovich is sport’s latter-day Abraham. He has instigated a revolution. At a time in history when sport’s integration into the entertainment industry was almost complete, Abramovich took Chelsea from a respectable but ordinary English football club to one of the world’s foremost names in sport and a brand thrumming with elan and glamor.

A rapacious capitalist to some, a tyrant’s accomplice to others and a moral nightmare to a few more, Abramovich remains, without doubt, the most influential presence in football over the past 20 years. People may not approve of what he’s done, but the effects — good or bad — of his breathtaking foray into sport will be felt for decades to come.

*[Ellis Cashmore is co-editor of Studying Football.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post The End of the Extraordinary Abramovich Era appeared first on Fair Observer.

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I have no idea whether Russian President Vladimir Putin is familiar with Ferguson’s motivational strategies nor whether he has even heard of him (though I suspect he has). Yet they are improbable kindred spirits. Putin seems to share with Ferguson a defensive or paranoid attitude predicated on the conviction that they are surrounded by enemies. It’s possible to imagine Putin addressing his aides with the kind of blistering, expletive-fueled tirade that used to be known in football circles as the hairdryer treatment. 

Sweeping Russophobia 

The siege mentality that was integral to Ferguson’s success is easy for Putin: The rest of the world actually is against him and his subjects. I’ll exclude Belarus (and, for the time being, China), but pretty much everywhere else has decided that the seemingly obsessive Putin is leading his country maniacally toward self-destruction, probably taking a good portion of the rest of the world along for the ride.

Let me define Russophobia as a strong and irrational dislike of Russia and all things Russian, especially the political system of the former Soviet Union as well as its current leader. In Ukraine, ruling parties have pursued a nationalist Russophobic agenda at least since 2018. The sharp increase in worldwide Russophobia since the invasion — or liberation, depending on your perspective — of Ukraine is unprecedented, at least in my experience. 

The collective punishment of all Russians, whatever their status, affiliation or political outlook for what appears to be Putin’s war, is going to have effects, an unintended one being that it will probably encourage national solidarity in Russia. It’s unlikely to turn people against the man in the Kremlin and is much more likely to encourage the kind of paranoid mentality that would make Sir Alex envious.

Russian oligarchs, like Chelsea Football Club’s owner (for the time being) Roman Abramovich, will no doubt be angry, particularly at having to dispose of his £150 million London home. But they are not going to renounce Putin: A new home like the one Mikhail Khodorkovsky, Russia’s former oil tycoon, was given at the YaG-14/10 penal colony in Siberia for 10 years might await.

Consumer brands such as Apple, Nike and Ikea have pulled out of Russia, followed by PayPal, Visa and MasterCard. Sales of certain Russian vodkas outside Russia have stopped. The broadcaster RT has been removed from British, American and other platforms, presumably to protect guileless viewers becoming brainwashed by Putin’s propaganda.

Sports Boycott

The Russophobic blizzard has swept into sport too. Football’s governing organization FIFA has suspended Russia from international games, thus eliminating the country from the forthcoming World Cup (Russia is currently appealing this). The International Olympic Committee (IOC) has recommended to sports organizations that they deny the participation of Russian and Belarusian athletes, even as representatives of the Russian Olympic Team or any other spurious denomination. 

Formula 1 has terminated its contract with the Russian Grand Prix. The International Paralympic Committee has banned Russians from the Winter Olympics (again subject to appeal.) A full-scale sports boycott of Russia is in the air, probably affecting all athletes, even professional tennis players like Daniil Medvedev, who currently lives in Monaco. The question is, will the sports boycott and other prohibitions actually hasten a cease to the hostilities in Ukraine or will they instead have a paradoxical effect?

The only comparable precedent we have is in South Africa under apartheid. The IOC withdrew its invitation to South Africa to the 1964 Summer Olympics when the country’s interior minister Jan de Klerk insisted that the national team would not be integrated. It would, he said, reflect the segregation of South African society — in other words, the team would be white. Other sports followed the IOC’s example until, in 1977, the embargo was enshrined formally in the Gleneagles Agreement, which effectively turned South Africa into a sports outcast. 

Countries that kept their sporting links with South Africa were themselves ostracized, or blacklisted, as it was known. Individual athletes were forced to compete outside South Africa. Zola Budd and Sydney Maree were notable examples, Budd moving to the UK, Maree to the US. The boycott was eventually removed when apartheid fell in 1990, its total disappearance celebrated in the 1995 Rugby World Cup that which took place in South Africa and was won by an ethnically diverse home team.

We often look back and think the much-publicized sports boycott was a determining factor in ending apartheid, and it’s satisfying to imagine that the fusion of sport and politics produced a joyous and wonderful culmination. Certainly, the sports prohibition was an awareness-raiser and effectively signaled the rest of the world’s abhorrence of constitutional racism. 

But it dragged on over two decades and there is, inconveniently, no conclusive evidence that it had any impact on President F. W. de Klerk’s decision to lift the ban on the African National Congress and other black liberation parties, allowing freedom of the media and releasing political prisoners. Nelson Mandela was freed from prison after 27 years, on February 11, 1990. 

Money And Morals 

The sports boycott embarrassed South Africa as the current cold-shoulder will embarrass Russia. It may also have also have persuaded South Africans, in particular white South Africans, that their prolonged period of misfortune was the result of the antipathy of the outside world. That is probably what will happen in Russia. Citizens will be exasperated when their access to consumables is strangled and they can’t use credit cards to purchase whatever products are left. They’ll probably resent being restricted to Russians-only sport. 

But it won’t make a scrap of difference to the wider conflict and might in fact strengthen the resolve of the Russian people. This is not the narrative we are offered by the media, of course. 

The longer Russia is starved of international sport, the more credible the siege theory will become. In any case, the boycott will be fractured. Money often strains morals, especially in professional sports. For all the proscriptions and threats of blacklisting, South Africa was still able to offer enough filthy lucre to attract world-class cricketers, including Geoff Boycott, footballers such as Bobby Moore, boxers like Santos Laciar and other athletes. Even the African American promoter, Don King, a staunch critic of apartheid, had agreements with South African boxing, revealed by The New York Times in 1984. 

The same will happen in Russia. If it prevails in Ukraine, the probability is that there will be some form of state under the full or partial political control of Moscow, meaning no softening on the various debarments. The sports boycott will expand. This will leave major sports organizations with a new question: Do they recognize Ukraine as an independent sporting nation as it has been since 1991, or as a Russian colony, dependency or protectorate? Ukrainian athletes so far haven’t been excluded from international competitions. If they were, the cruelty would be redoubled. It would be a repugnant collision of injustices. 

Perhaps justice would be better served if the block on Russian sport were lifted. I know this sounds counterintuitive and might appear to reward, or at least accept, an aggressive act. But I take counsel from the adage that two wrongs don’t make a right. An action, no matter how heinous, is never a justification for wrongful behavior.

Many readers will not interpret a sports boycott as wrongful behavior, merely a reaction to provocation. Perhaps. But it would be foolish to hyperbolize the importance of sport; obviously it is not as serious as war, or a million other things. So, why hurt people who are not responsible for the original sin? Anyway, in a practical sense, it would serve to show that while the leadership in Moscow may indeed be execrated, the 144 million Russian people are not.

*[Ellis Cashmore is co-editor of Studying Football.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Should We Lift the Ban on Russian Sport? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Is the European Super League Such a Terrible Idea?

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Violence, racism, decaying stadiums, an indifferent population and two full-scale tragedies had contributed to football’s degeneration. In 1989, when yet another calamity visited the sport in the form of the Hillsborough disaster, football’s crisis deepened. The sport seemed in terminal decline. (Hillsborough was the name of the stadium in Sheffield where 94 football fans died — three more passed away later — after too many spectators were admitted.)

Revolution

Thirty years ago this week — February 20, 1992, to be precise — English football changed dramatically. When the clubs in the First Division announced they were leaving the Football League, they could have had no conception they were starting a revolution that would turn the debilitated game into the most popular, marketable, glamorous, culturally diverse and arguably most valuable sports competition the world has ever seen.

The inaugural season started on August 15, 1992, with 22 clubs making up the newly branded Premier League. The original plan was for ITV to screen the games of England’s leading clubs — Manchester United, Arsenal, Liverpool, Tottenham Hotspur and Everton (Manchester City and Chelsea were not among them) — but this was revised to a more equitable arrangement.

Earlier, in 1990, Greg Dyke, then a senior executive at London Weekend Television (an affiliate of the ITV network), pledged financial support for a breakaway from England’s Football League — this being an assembly of clubs split into four divisions — with revenue distributed among all member clubs.

The proposal was for a different structure in which the leading teams formed a self-contained alliance — independent of the Football League — and which would generate its own revenues, especially from the media, without any responsibility for sharing with the 87 clubs outside of the new entity. The Premier League was designed to operate under the auspices of the Football Association and would preserve the system in which the teams that finished the season at the bottom of the top tier would be relegated to the division below, while those at the top of the second tier would be promoted into the new league. But the key difference was that the elite would not share income with lesser clubs.

Sky’s Bid

ITV had presumably not expected a rival bid from Sky television, which, having launched its telecommunications satellite in 1989 and started transmission, had endured punishing losses.  So, when Rupert Murdoch’s TV station bid an unheard of £304 million ($407 million today) for the rights to screen the new competition, it seemed not so much audacious as suicidal. It sounds absurd now, but there was a suspicion that non-terrestrial television might have been a flash in the pan.

Murdoch’s calculation was simple: Football fans would pay a monthly subscription in exchange for live games. Back then, live games were a rarity. Football clubs were historically opposed to screening games live for fear that their attendances would slump. That didn’t happen. In fact, football became an exemplar for market-oriented sport: it fashioned a commodity, created a new demand for it and offered it for sale.

Sky’s fortunes turned. Subscriptions rose so sharply that it soon became the UK’s leading digital platform with revenues of over £1 billion. In 2018, it was acquired by the American company Comcast in a deal valued at £30 billion. At the time, Sky had 27 million subscribers.

Today, Sky no longer has exclusive rights to Premier League games. The European Union obliged it to share with other broadcasters. The present deal also includes BT Sport and Amazon Prime, expires in 2024-25 and is worth £5.1 billion. Retro-indexed to inflation, this would have been about £2.3 billion in 1992. The boards of directors of the clubs (they didn’t have outright owners) were probably astonished at Murdoch’s seemingly over-generous bid. None of them would have imagined how the value of English football would spiral upward as a result of Sky’s initiative.

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Buoyed by their new largess, the clubs refurbished their grounds (or stadiums, as most prefer to call them today), rendering them safe and family-friendly. To this end, the traditional standing areas, known as terraces, were removed and replaced with seats. Now, ironically, standing sections — or “safe standing sections,” as they are known — have been reintroduced.  

The lavish endowment also bankrolled the arrival of new players, often from overseas leagues that couldn’t match the salaries available in England. Eric Cantona was an early beneficiary, joining Manchester United in early 1992. Others included Tony Yeboah, Patrick Vieira and Ruud Gullit, black players who silenced any residual racist chants and comments leftover from the 1980s. In the mid-1990s, David Beckham personified the league moving seamlessly between sports and entertainment, acquiring a then-unique status as an all-purpose celebrity who could endorse practically any consumer product and guarantee increased sales.

Roman Abramovich

But the most influential figure in the Premier League was not a player, but a Russian oligarch, who, in 2003, decided he wanted to buy a football club in what was then emerging as the most fashionable sports competition in the world. Roman Abramovich bought Chelsea Football Club, then about £80 million in debt. He made good on the debt and, over the next 18 years, splurged £2 billion on transfers, that is, the amount paid to clubs to release players from contracts.

Following Abramovich’s example, moneyed business leaders from outside the UK began buying Premier League clubs, usually without any hope of breaking even. Despite the media and sponsorship income, clubs managed to hemorrhage money, mainly because of extravagant player salaries.

After the 2021 takeover of Newcastle United by Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund, there were 14 (of 20) top-flight clubs in overseas owners’ hands. Chelsea lost £145.6 million last year, Manchester City £125.1 million, mainly because both teams spent so much on transfers and paid high salaries; COVID-19 contributed, of course — the clubs lost income from spectators. Having benevolent owners means the clubs now operate less as businesses, more as foundations (like endowed colleges or charities).

Proponents of grassroots sports despair at the manner in which what was once a working-class game played by factory teams and supported by industrial workers has been hijacked by international plutocrats. Their intention has never been to cultivate local talent, but to attract the world’s most glittering names. Last year, Chelsea paid £97.5 million to Inter Milan for Romelu Lukaku. In 2016, Manchester United forked over £89 million for the services of Paul Pogba. Both players’ salaries are £12-15 million per year. Some argue this squeezes out aspiring young local players. Others suggest it inspires them.

Losers

What of the clubs that remained in the Football League, now rebranded as EFL? They were cast adrift and left to face the full brunt of market forces. Practically every club in the three divisions that make up the EFL struggles financially and many have declared themselves insolvent. There is little chance they can prosper outside the Premier League. Hence, their aim is to secure promotion. Ironically, these clubs might have benefited if the ill-fated European Super League, which attracted interest from several leading Premier League clubs, had taken off.

At the start of the 20^th century, money was, for many, a pestilence that would destroy the core value of fair play. Today, it could be argued that it was English football’s savior. Like every other professional sport — and all major sports are now professional — football has been embroiled in corruption, doping, violence and other activities that have despoiled sport’s central precept. All had their sources in money. Yet money is arguably the prime mover behind every single development in contemporary sport, and that is especially true in English football.

The Premier League is emblematic of recent developments in sports. It thrums with avarice, ruthlessness, triumphalism and an indifference to the collectivist principles that originally brought football into being.

*[Ellis Cashmore is co-editor of Studying Football.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post What England’s Premier League Did for Football appeared first on Fair Observer.

Jackson, by contrast, has, since his death, suffered reputational harm over child sexual abuse allegations, but not so irreparable that he — or, more accurately, his character — has been dragged down from the showbusiness pantheon.

What If Michael Jackson Had Lived?

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Earlier in February, a musical devoted to his life and work opened at the Neil Simon Theatre on Broadway. “It’s unfortunate he is not alive to witness the flawless production of MJ the Musical, a model biographical musical,” wrote Ayanna Prescod, of the New York Theatre Guide, who awarded the show the maximum five stars. The review was typical of others, which range from positive to rhapsodic.

Only one reviewer, Michael Appler of Variety, had the temerity to raise questions about Jackson’s sexual abuse allegations with cast members. He was shown the door. “The show’s backers were quick to shut down any mention of the scandal that still clouds the King of Pop’s life and legacy at the red-carpet premiere of the musical,” wrote Appler.

The Afterlife   

When Jackson died in 2009, there was an immediate upturn in the already formidable sales of his records and a period when some radio stations played nothing but his music, whether as a solo artist or as part of the Jackson 5. Even after death, he continued to mesmerize audiences. He was rarely out of the news and even appeared as a hologram in 2014.

But in 2019, “Leaving Neverland,” a 4-hour documentary focusing on two men, Wade Robson and James Safechuck, offered a startling account of Jackson, not as the world’s onetime most popular entertainer but as a sexual predator. The testimonies of the two men were delivered with such conviction that they were accepted by many as credible. There was no headlong rush from others claiming to be victims. Robson and Safechuck were known to be close to Jackson, and their claims were detailed enough to persuade many to reevaluate the singer and, by implication, his legacy.

For a while, it appeared that Jackson’s afterlife would end abruptly. Less than a year before, the arrest of Harvey Weinstein, a powerful Hollywood producer, had initiated a dramatic cultural mood shift. The #MeToo movement surged to prominence and, in the years since, every man or woman accused of untoward behavior, including verbal harassment, was castigated. Often, their contracts were revoked and their overall status downgraded — in other words, canceled.

Yet Jackson’s stature, though affected, has not suffered comparably. He was the highest-earning dead entertainer in the world for eight straight years, from 2013 through 2020, slipping to number three with $75 million made last year, according to Forbes. His music continues to sell. His estate has many other income streams, including Cirque du Soleil’s show, “Michael Jackson ONE,” a spectacular success in Las Vegas. Michael Jackson is still with us, shows no signs of going away and most decidedly has not been canceled. Why?

Don’t Speak Ill of the Dead

Obviously, many people just don’t believe Jackson’s accusers, and some assume they are fortune hunters. Jackson is unable to defend himself and thus any allegation is destined to remain only that — an allegation, a claim, an assertion or a contention. The supporting evidence, however direct and believable, derives from the remembrances of two men, both of whom were privy to Jackson’s life but whose statements can’t be refuted by the accused.

This is further complicated by the time lapse between his death and the revelations. Jackson had been subject to rumors and accusations, some of which had traction enough to land him in court. But he was cleared in 2005 and died an innocent man, legally speaking. Had he been alive at the time of the 2019 documentary, Jackson would almost certainly have denied all allegations and set a legal team on the case.

In view of the way he handled the media during his life, he would probably have appeared on television and in other media, issuing his own version of events. He would probably have pointed out that both men were treated kindly as friends and, for reasons best known to them, never uttered their complaints during his lifetime.

It sounds crass, but being dead does not guarantee innocence. British TV personality Jimmy Savile was enormously popular in his life and raised about £40 million with his charitable work. After he died in 2011, Pandora’s box was prised open: All manner of people advanced accusations of misconduct, including having sex with the corpses of dead patients at a hospital mortuary. The weight of testimony convinced all but Savile’s family and most devoted fans of his guilt. While he was well-liked, Savile was not in Jackson’s class. The King of Pop’s approval was global and worshipful. Correction: It is global and worshipful.

Don’t Trust the Media

Another factor in Jackson’s continued popularity is a lack of trust in the media. Research indicates that 56% of Americans agreed with the statement, “Journalists and reporters are purposely trying to mislead people by saying things they know are false or gross exaggerations.”

The rise of Donald Trump, the COVID-19 pandemic and the circulation of what many now call fake news have made people distrustful of mainstream media. Even if we leave aside the bizarre beliefs that Jackson is still alive — and probably sharing a home with Elvis, Marilyn Monroe and JFK — there are many who are likely to question practically everything they learn from the media about the star.

It’s no longer necessary to be a conspiracy theorist to be a cynic. Questioning newspapers and TV news is commonplace, so the fact that the seemingly incriminating documentary was shown on mainstream channels — Channel 4 in the UK, HBO in the US — no longer validates its authenticity.

Don’t Forget That He Was Black

Bill Cosby, a once-legendary black comedian, has been well and truly canceled. But Cosby was tried in court and, after initially being released after a jury failed to reach a decision, was later convicted, sentenced and spent over two years in prison before the conviction for sexual assault was overturned. He is finished as both an entertainer and the educator he seemed to aspire to be. He is now 84.

Whoopi Goldberg’s recent argument that the Holocaust wasn’t about race was baffling and surprising, coming as it did from an African American. An apology followed, along with a two-week suspension from the ABC show, “The View.” Cancelation looks likely. Her opinions are often provocative and often well-intended. But, in this instance, she simply sounded foolish and ignorant. It’s unlikely we’ll hear much from her in the future.

Jackson was also black. On occasion, he proudly announced himself to be so. But his ever-changing appearance persuaded some that he was blanching his skin and undergoing plastic surgery in an effort to disguise his blackness. Jackson himself would have objected to this. On more than one occasion, he pointed out that he suffered from vitiligo, a condition that affects skin pigmentation.

Jackson’s stalwart supporters would probably refer to the historical cases of Mike Tyson, O.J. Simpson and Clarence Thomas, all of whom were conspicuously successful black men whose careers or reputations were damaged after high-profile cases. Jackson, they could argue, is part of a tradition in which black men who rise to the top are brought back to earth, as if to remind white America of the self-destructive element in black males.

It would be naïve to assume Jackson’s blackness has not been a factor in deterring cancelation. In Cosby’s case, a court of law considered evidence of his wrongdoing. Goldberg’s contretemps was made in full view of millions. There is no definitive proof of Jackson’s alleged transgressions, so anyone or any organization that makes decisions on his culpability is forced to conjecture. Much as they may deny the conjectures are affected by Jackson’s blackness, who would believe it?

Awareness of the unequal treatment and abuse of women has been complemented by the recognition that black people have, over the decades, been suppressed and, on many occasions, brutalized. They’ve been unheard and underrepresented in many spheres of social activity, though not always in entertainment. The revival of the shibboleth of white privilege that was first aired in the 1980s served notice that castigation of blacks for deeds that might have gone unpunished if performed by whites has been commonplace.

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This doesn’t suggest Jackson has been granted a free pass. Heaven knows, he has plenty of vilifiers. Yet there is understandable caution. This prompts an awkward question: Are we less likely to condemn people of color for suspected or actual transgressions? And perhaps an even more awkward question: Does “we” usually mean “whites”? The legal precept of innocent until proved guilty has been reversed in recent years, allegation alone becoming potent enough to denounce celebrities and annul their careers.

Jackson has his detractors, for sure. Yet somehow his legacy actually grows in stature. Thirteen years after his death, he continues to fascinate just as he did in life. It seems impossible to harm or damage his — what shall I call it? — revenant. There is probably no other celebrity, living or dead, so insusceptible to cancelation.

*[Ellis Cashmore’s “The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson” will be published by Bloomsbury in May.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Why Hasn’t Michael Jackson Been Canceled? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The second was the legitimization of voyeurism. What was at one time regarded as an unwholesome and indecent fascination with other people’s affairs is now considered conventional. In fact, the more transgressive outlook is to be nonchalant.

MTV at 40: Did Video Kill the Radio Star?

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The new Disney+ mini series “Pam & Tommy” dramatizes an infamous leaked sex tape involving Pamela Anderson and her then-husband, Tommy Lee, who still plays drums for the band Mötley Crüe. Anderson was starring in Baywatch, a TV series that ran from 1989 until 2001. The show was about a team of lifeguards on a Los Angeles beach and became a showcase for Anderson, who featured in the series from 1992 to 1997 before moving into film.

Anderson married Lee in March 1995. It seemed a marriage made in heaven. Well, in Cancún, Mexico, to be exact. The newlyweds were sensibly undressed in beachwear, Lee’s splendidly inked torso in full view of the media. By the end of the year, Anderson announced she was pregnant. But heaven had an unwanted visitor.

Private Lives Made Public

There were rumors about a videotape of Anderson and Lee in sexual congress. That such a thing existed surprised no one. The couple seemed blissfully loved-up. But what surprised many was that people were discussing it as if it were a public event. It later became known that the videotape had been stolen from the couple’s California home while they were honeymooning and that the thief, a dissatisfied contractor who had done some work at their house, was seeking to release the tape in an instance of what we’d now call revenge porn.

This was the mid-1990s, remember. Today, he would have immediately uploaded the recording and gotten millions of views within minutes.

Anderson and Lee were, it seems, genuinely upset by the prospect of having their private lives turned inside out. Neither had anything to gain. Lee’s band had six successful albums, and Anderson was borderline iconic, her signature red swimsuit emblematic of the time. Had the tape gained a wider audience, NBC, the TV network, would probably have dropped her from the show amid protest from their advertisers and several indignant church organizations.

For comparison, in predigital 1988, Rob Lowe’s career temporarily cratered after the media got hold of a recording of the actor in a threesome with a woman who was later revealed to be 16 and another woman in her 20s. After a 10-year absence, Lowe made a Lazarus-like recovery when he got a part in “The West Wing,” a show that restored him. Of course, Lowe was a man.

Lowe’s recovery is one way of imagining how Anderson’s career might have gone had the tape been quickly and widely distributed. Another way is to remember Janet Jackson’s “wardrobe malfunction” of 2004. She had several contracts canceled after a tumult of complaints about her appearance in the halftime Super Bowl show in which she exposed her breast. Her partner in the stunt was Justin Timberlake, whose career suffered no comparably ill effects.

Also in 2004, a similar sex tape featuring Paris Hilton and her partner Rick Salomon had the opposite effect. It propelled Hilton to global notoriety and consequent stardom. Hilton was a woman, but, unlike Anderson or Jackson, she did not have a successful career in show business. Salomon was relatively unknown and, perhaps paradoxically, later married — and I am not making this up — Anderson (though only for a year).

A sex tape also functioned as a career propellant for Hilton’s one-time friend, Kim Kardashian. Again, unlike Anderson, but a lot like Hilton, Kardashian had no known acting or singing talents and belonged to what was then the emerging class of celebrities who were well-known for being followed avariciously by the media. Kardashian existed as an internet life force and a presence in a reality TV series. Halfway through the first decade of the century, this was sufficient to guarantee her a spot high on the A-list.

There were several differences between Anderson’s experience and those of Hilton and Kardashian. For a start, audiences already knew Anderson and realized she needed a sex tape circulating about as much as a funeral wreath. Hilton and Kardashian, on the other hand, were best known as socialites, people who dress well, inhabit fashionable environments and are fond of premieres. All three women acted as if they were affronted, outraged and embarrassed by the leaks, but only one of them sounded credible.

Has Porn Lost Its Appeal?

There was another big difference. When Anderson’s tape appeared, the internet was still in its infancy and without YouTube, which launched in 2005, there was no obvious conduit for publishing. Consent and exploitation may sound old-fashioned today, but, in the 1990s, they were still relevant. Even by the early 21st century, the lack of online regulation had not been realized as the major problem it later became.

Kardashian herself stress-tested the internet’s limits in 2016 when she posted naked selfies, her modesty protected only by censor bars. In the same year, OnlyFans launched an online platform specializing in what was then seen as risqué material. Its majority owner Leo Radvinsky’s background was in porn. It’s now one of the fastest-growing websites, according to Ofcom, second only to Pornhub for streaming this type of erotica.

Tumblr appeared to buck the trend when it banned adult content in late 2018. Its traffic dropped and it was sold a year later for a modest $3 million, having been valued at $1.1 billion in 2013.

What about us? Did we change too? Our capacity to respond, appreciate or be repelled by aesthetic influences is not fixed. Perhaps we were more likely to be offended or shocked when the Anderson tape became available, less so by the later exposures and hardly at all by OnlyFans’ output. Porn has largely lost some of its power to thrill or disgust. Our sensitivity to images of others having sex couldn’t have remained unchanged with so much of it readily available online, could it?

There hasn’t really been anything shocking since the original Kardashian transmission. Can you imagine if anyone tried it today? Audiences would hardly be able to contain their indifference. With the possible exception of Britain’s seemingly indestructible, multi-purpose Katie Price, surely no one would attempt it, for fear of being ridiculed.

Our fascination with what other people do in their not-yet-made-public moments is what drove reality TV to its preeminent position as the century’s most popular genre, and I think its form, style and subject matter justify calling it a genre. Maybe this prurient streak has always been in us, though I’m inclined to believe the captivation was animated and encouraged by TV’s ingenuity; by coaxing drama from documentary, TV cameras made privacy entertaining. Every one of us became eavesdroppers without any of the guilt typically associated with being a peeping tom. Maybe that’s why watching sex tapes, or their digital equivalents, isn’t so exciting anymore. Those pangs of conscience were probably part of the frisson.

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Like anything else that’s banned, the prohibition is part of porn’s appeal. The instant you make it legit, you reduce its attraction. While #MeToo and other movements that fight the objectification and degradation of women would find this irony hard to accept, there is logic in rinsing off porn’s dirt and making it a bit more respectable — and a bit less stimulating.

Anderson, now 54, would probably not accept any responsibility for the growth or sanitization of porn and almost certainly not want her legendary tape viewed again after nearly three decades. And if it were, it would register only historical interest rather than titillation. But in the 1990s, Anderson was riding the zeitgeist, however unwittingly and, perhaps, with help from her private misfortune, changing its direction.

*[Ellis Cashmore’s “The Destruction and Creation of Michael Jackson” will be published by Bloomsbury in May.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Did Digital Media Retire the Sex Tape? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Being caught in purgatory suggests the current crisis has the ability to cleanse or purify. The case of Azeem Rafiq has the potential to do exactly this.

What Is Behind Football’s Persistent Racism?

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Rafiq is the former professional cricketer who recently revealed that, during his employment at Yorkshire County Cricket Club, between 2008 and 2014 (he also played for the club in 2016 and 2018), he was habitually subjected to racial abuse, was obliged to listen to offensive language, including the epithet “paki,” and experienced “bullying.” His initial complaints of institutional racism were reviewed by the club which, in October 2020, confirmed that an inquiry was underway and instructed a legal team to investigate. The findings were anodyne and, while the club apologized to Rafiq, it cited “insufficient evidence” in relation to several claims.

Rafiq escalated the matter, making an additional legal claim against the club for “direct discrimination and harassment.” He had his testimony heard by an employment tribunal and, more recently, a government select committee. Key officials at the club were embarrassed into resigning, and sponsors, including Emerald Books, Yorkshire Tea and Nike, dissociated themselves, relieving the club of a valuable source of income.

Rise of the Political Athlete

Imagine if Rafiq had voiced his concerns two years ago. An individual athlete making largely uncorroborated but momentous claims, many contested by whites, from years before would have been unlikely to be taken seriously. He would have probably been dismissed as oversensitive, thin-skinned or even paranoid.

The default escape route of “banter” — that catch-all word habitually used to dismiss offense and harassment — would probably have been used to elude culpability or deny malice or aggression. A lack of hard, unequivocal evidence or confessions would not have helped his argument, and it’s unlikely most people would ever have heard of Azeem Rafiq today.

Black Lives Matter has changed all that. Since the movement, which has existed since 2013, turned its focus on the Floyd murder, the world has taken notice. Its effects in Britain have been truly transformative. Statues of historical figures associated with slavery have been pulled down, entertainers from film and television have been reprimanded, shunned or canceled for characterizations that have racist connotations, every program or film is now accurately representative of Britain’s culturally diverse population and practically every TV show has a disclaimer about language and scenes that may offend.

Britain already has equal opportunities legislation, but employers are probably scrutinizing how obediently they follow the letter of the law nowadays. It’s doubtful whether any other country has reacted as positively to Black Lives Matter as Britain. Rafiq’s case appears at a propitious time in history and now promises to batter whatever remnants of racism are left.

There is also providence in Rafiq’s position. At no time in history have athletes been taken so seriously. The old stereotype about dimwitted or politically ignorant jocks has been destroyed by a generation of spirited and culturally aware athletes, who are determined to use their sports as platforms. Five years ago, this would have been unthinkable. In 2016, NFL player Colin Kaepernick, then a quarterback with the San Francisco 49ers, decided to fashion his own protest against police violence against African Americans by dropping to his knee while others stood proudly before the American flag as the national anthem played.

It was a near-seditious act at the time that barred him from the field ever since. Now, sports teams all over the world spend a few moments kneeling to signify a commitment to the fight against racism.

Athletes like Rafiq are now taken seriously. Their views and proposals on such human rights matters as child poverty, migrant workers and the National Health Service are not only listened to but, as in the case of Manchester United player Marcus Rashford’s campaign for free school meals, acted upon. A blunt repudiation of Rafiq’s claims from ex-colleagues impresses no one. The so-called white privilege that afforded whites credibility when denying racist behavior is fast disappearing.

Revelations that Rafiq posted anti-Semitic messages on social media several years ago do not invalidate his present claims. No one seriously believes victims of bigotry — of whatever kind — are always innocents themselves. There is also no reason to think, as Marie van der Zyl, president of the Board of Deputies of British Jews suggests, that Rafiq’s apology was not “heartfelt” or “completely sincere.”

Day of Reckoning for Institutional Racism?

The weakness in Rafiq’s argument may turn on institutional racism, which is denied by Yorkshire Cricket, but which is, according to many, pervasive in many aspects of British society. The term came into popular use after the 1999 Macpherson Report on the killing of Stephen Lawrence, a black teenager from east London. The police service as a whole was affected, concluded the report.

Institutional racism is a property of an organization, such as a firm, an educational authority or a government department. It is notoriously hard to detect, hence why it usually goes unnoticed. Let’s say, for example, a government department awards lucrative contracts for the provision of services or commodities, such as personal protective equipment, to a number of firms, all of which are owned by whites. No company owned by ethnic minorities is awarded a contract, yet no one bothers to check, and the practice continues.

There may be no intention to discriminate, nor any individual may deliberately intend to disadvantage ethnic minorities. But the disparate impact is felt all the same. This is how institutional racism operates — surreptitiously.

There have been suggestions that Yorkshire County Cricket Club operates an analogous policy in hiring a disproportionately high number of white players. It is conceivable, though unlikely. While cricket is a popular recreational sport with British Asians, it offers a limited long-term career. The chances of securing a professional contract are negligible, anyway. So, while the glamour of a life in professional sport is attractive, maybe many young Asians are rational enough to make a cost-benefit calculation and arrive at the decision that their best interests will be served in accountancy, law, medicine or another profession. We at least need to consider this possibility before assuming the presence of racism.

Whether or not one agrees with the above, it is hard to miss the fact that there has been no comparable reckoning across the Atlantic. The nearest may be the case involving the Phoenix Suns owner, Robert Sarver, who allegedly used racist terms in a heated locker-room exchange. Interestingly, the incident has not been swept to prominence by Black Lives Matter. Britain, I venture, has embraced the movement more enthusiastically than the United States.

The root and branch introspections promised in the 1980s and in the 1990s yielded change for sure. But racism was never expunged and, every so often, research would remind us that African Caribbean children underachieve at school and are overrepresented in courts and prisons, and British Asians are subject to racial profiling by the police and often fall victim to hate crimes. The visibility of racism has diminished over the decades, and its consequences are undeniably less severe. Yet it remains. But for how much longer?

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The case of Azeem Rafiq is like one of those traffic signs that warns of something ahead, such as a hazard or a fork in the road. In this case, it is the day of reckoning, a time when past misdeeds are acknowledged and put right. The cricketer has already won his case, at least in a moral sense. Over the next several years, every individual, corporation and public institution will self-investigate to ensure they are faultless in their practices and that no semblance of racist behavior exists.

What of Yorkshire County Cricket Club? It will never be restored to its hallowed position in the sports pantheon and may yet become a symbol, albeit a reluctant one, of a Britain of the past, a vestige of a time when offenses could be caused without consequence, racial slurs communicated with impunity and complainants dismissed with a shrug. No longer.  

*[Ellis Cashmore is the author of “Kardashian Kulture.”]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Will the Azeem Rafiq Case Purge Britain of Racism? appeared first on Fair Observer.

The Relationship Between Football and Populism

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There’s not a country on earth where citizens will not know the name of at least three football teams, wear club regalia and watch, play and bet on football. Around 3.5 billion people viewed some part of the 2018 World Cup, with 1.12 billion watching at least one minute, according to FIFA, the sport’s global governing organization.

With over 3.5 billion fans, football’s faithful following is comparable to that of a major religion, like Christianity (2.38 billion) or Islam (1.9 billion). But, unlike religions, football, like other sports, isn’t expected to make pronouncements on torture, gay rights, labor exploitation, freedom of expression or any of the other moral issues of the day. The trouble is, it does.

Global Society of Inclusion

Football’s moral philosophy seems clear. FIFA expressed its two key directives in its policy document, “Making Football Truly Global: The Vision 2020-2023” as “Fight against Racism and all other forms of discrimination” and “Protect human rights.” To demonstrate its sincerity, in June 2020, England’s Premier League approved football players taking the knee before games to showcase a committed opposition to racism in the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd by police in the US.

Other major sports organizations, including the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the National Football League (NFL) in the US, steadfastly refused to allow the gesture, recognizing it would compromise the traditional stance on political and partisan actions. Football was one of the first to adopt a “commonsense approach” to the controversial ritual and remains an enthusiastic supporter despite objections, some from black players. Other sports have grudgingly accepted kneeling, largely as a result of pressure from players. The NFL finally changed its position last year and the IOC prior to the Tokyo Olympics.

Football continued without compunction. “We remain resolutely committed to our singular objective of eradicating racial prejudice wherever it exists, to bring about a global society of inclusion, respect and equal opportunities for all,” a statement affirmed in August. “The Premier League will continue to work with our clubs, players and football partners to bring about tangible change to remove inequality from our game.” Yet two recent developments suggest that practical considerations complicate principles.

Eighteen months ago, an attempted takeover of Newcastle United by a consortium collapsed after the Premier League decided that, had the deal been allowed to proceed, Saudi Arabia would have effectively become the club’s owner. The Gulf state would be subject to the league’s owners’ and directors’ test. Failure to pass the test means potential buyers can be stopped if they’ve committed an act in a foreign jurisdiction that would be considered a criminal offense in the UK — even if the act is not illegal in their home territory.

The original potential buyers pulled out, the popular assumption at the time being the killing of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018. It was widely reported that Saudi agents were responsible for the murder.

However, it appeared that the real stumbling block was Saudi Arabia’s apparent involvement in a television network that streamed Premier League games. Qatar-based broadcaster beIN Sports had spent billions to acquire territorial rights for the games, but Saudis “permanently cancelled” its license and suspended its channels in 2017. Reduced to basics, the deal stalled because of money. So, when the dispute between Qatar and Saudi was settled earlier this year, the deal was revived.

Sportswashing

The completed sale of Newcastle United Football Club to the Saudi Public Investment Fund, which lists as its chair Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who is widely thought responsible for ordering Khashoggi’s murder, has horrified and disgusted critics. Amnesty International has stated that Saudi authorities are “sportswashing their appalling human rights record with the glamour of top-flight football.” Sportswashing is an attempt by odious political regimes to clean up their international image by associating themselves with prestigious sporting events or competitions.

Amnesty claims that Saudi Arabia regularly violates human rights in various ways, including using torture as punishment, banning freedom of speech and expression, and subjugating women. The Saudi government denies claims of rights abuses and claims its apparent excesses are designed with national security in mind. Presumably, the Premier League — and perhaps football generally — accepts this.

Saudi Arabia’s Gulf neighbors, all of which have questionable human rights records, have already acquired top-tier football clubs: Qatar Sports Investments owns Paris Saint-Germain; Sheikh Mansour, an Abu Dhabi royal, owns Manchester City. Qatar is scheduled to host next year’s FIFA World Cup.

The timing of the takeover is hardly propitious. In Saudi Arabia, women have essentially the same legal status as children, having to rely on husbands or male relatives to make nearly all decisions in their lives. Much of the workspaces in the territory are gender-segregated. In 2019, Saudi was rated the fourth most dangerous place in the world for gay travelers by Forbes magazine, which reported that the country “implements the death penalty for consensual homosexuality under their interpretation of Sharia law.”

Football ostensibly lauds freedom, equality and open-mindedness while indulging insular regimes that encourage practices it officially denounces. In the 1970s, Commonwealth countries prohibited sporting contacts with South Africa, then operating a constitutional racial segregation policy known as apartheid. The Gleneagles Agreement, as it was called, effectively closed down South African sport. Non-Commonwealth nations showed solidarity by supporting the ban, which was relaxed only at the end of apartheid in 1990. No one has dared suggest a comparable ban on the Gulf states.

Freedom or Dereliction of Duty?

But this isn’t the only dilemma football has faced in recent weeks.

West Bromwich Albion player Callum Robinson is among an unknown but probably sizeable number of professional football players who are opting not to get vaccinated against COVID-19. Robinson is worthy of attention because he’s contracted COVID twice, survived (obviously) and presumably decided the dangers of the virus are less significant than the potential side effects of the vaccine.

He isn’t, as far as we know, a QAnon affiliate, doesn’t subscribe to any known conspiracy theory and has not aligned himself with anti-vaccination campaigners. He enjoys the support of some teammates and not others. He is 26 and is probably expecting to play competitively for another 10 years, maybe more, if he avoids injury. His decision has drawn the ire of Liverpool manager Jurgen Klopp, who says that footballers “are role models in society.” Currently, 16 to 29-year-olds are the most vaccine-hesitant demographic in the UK and elsewhere; Klopp is 54.

We can only use educated guesswork to divine the reasons so many professional athletes choose not to vaccinate. Their bodies are, in a sense, the tools of their trade and they have presumably made a cost-benefit calculation, recognizing that, given the brevity of the development and trialing of the vaccine compared to other pharmaceuticals, the medium-to-long-term side effects are unknown and, without the benefit of a time machine, unknowable at present.

In the US, the National Basketball Association (NBA), when confronted with a similarly reluctant percentage of players, compelled them to get vaccinated or face suspension without pay. The order worked: 95% of NBA players are now vaccinated. Football’s governing organizations have eschewed this approach. FIFA instead issued a statement saying that “We encourage Covid-19 vaccinations.”

Depending on your perspective, this is either an admirable defense of freedom of choice or dereliction of duty. Those who believe the latter are maddened by football’s indecision, if that’s what it is. They consider public health a priority over personal freedom.

If FIFA had blocked the Newcastle takeover, people would probably accuse football of favoritism, pointing to the Manchester and Paris ownerships. If it followed the NBA mandate, people would accuse it of restricting freedom of choice. But football’s own piety invites these criticisms. Other sports see no need to make their moral philosophy so public, at least not as ostentatiously or in such a self-congratulatory manner. Why does football?  

No sport has struggled so painfully and for so long with racism, nor has any sport witnessed spectator violence on a comparable scale or duration. Bribery and corruption were once commonplace in boxing, but a 2015 expose revealed football’s epic history of venality and led to the removal of FIFA president Joseph “Sepp” Blatter.

Child abuse was once thought to exist only in gymnastics, but a recent investigation found that it has been in football since at least the 1970s. Australia’s female players have recently complained of a” culture of sexual harassment.” 

No other sport in history has been as popular as football or, alas, manifested so many pernicious, multiform wrongdoings. Football constantly struggles to map its way out of a maze of malevolence. Its visible attempt to occupy the moral high ground is perhaps football’s attempt to place itself above suspicion, making its morality clear to everyone. It’s a bold move, but one with serious drawbacks. It puts football’s hypocrisy in plain sight.

[Ellis Cashmore is a co-editor of Studying Football.]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

The post Can Football Find a Way Out of a Moral Maze? appeared first on Fair Observer.

Harry and Meghan: In Pursuit of Wealth and Luxury

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The epoch-defining “The Oprah Winfrey Show” ran for 25 years, during which the host used her growing reputation not so much to change people’s lives but to instruct them to change their own lives. Like a preacher using a parable to illustrate a moral or spiritual lesson, Oprah drew on her own experiences and opened herself up to inspection, encouraging her followers to accept responsibility for themselves and to self-actualize — fulfill their own talent and potential.

It was a very different message to that preached by civil rights leaders earlier in the 20^th century. Oprah relied less on the solidarity and potency of collective effort, and more on individual determination and enterprise.

Philosophy of Individualism

Oprah’s philosophy of individualism chimed well with the changing times. Her show arrived at the start of the third decade after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which outlawed discrimination based on race, color, religion, sex, national origin, and the less portentous 1965 Voting Rights Act, which prohibited discrimination in voting. The first post-civil rights decade had been tumultuous, with riots in many major cities serving notice that the technical abolition of racism had done little to extirpate it from American society. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968 catalyzed further unrest.

Well into the 1970s, the dust seemed to settle, and conspicuously successful black figures emerged as if living evidence that it was possible to overcome what once seemed insurmountable obstacles. Bill Cosby featured in the country’s most popular sitcom, “The Cosby Show.” Eddie Murphy’s 1984 “Beverly Hills Cop” established him as one of the world’s most bankable film stars. Michael Jackson was arguably the leading entertainer in the world. Two months after Oprah’s show launched, Mike Tyson won boxing’s heavyweight world championship to become probably the most heralded athlete since Muhammad Ali. Michael Jordan was on his way toward his cultural apogee.

Black celebrities of the 1980s were perfect emblems of the Reagan era, a period associated with low taxes, laissez-faire markets, entrepreneurial initiative and individualism. Oprah and the other glittering African Americans were conspicuous reminders of the success of black Americans, who had persevered and refused to allow the country’s enduring racism to derail their destinies. Oprah was, as one writer sarcastically called her, “an Horatio Alger for our times,” referring to the 19^th-century novelist whose tales imparted the message that hard work can triumph over poverty.

This didn’t mean Oprah avoided the problem of racism. Within months of going national, Oprah ventured into dangerous territory by featuring residents of Forsyth County, Georgia. There had been no black residents in Forsyth since 1912, when three black men — all of whom were subsequently hanged — allegedly raped a white teenager, prompting whites to burn down black churches and schools. Oprah asked questions of white people who openly refused to welcome black people into the. “We have a right to have a white community,” said one woman. Unwaveringly, Oprah persisted with her questioning.

Mischief and Provocation

Oprah had few equals when it came to mischief and provocation. No social or personal issue was off-limits: as well as racism, she tackled homophobia, addiction, infidelity and child abuse — sometimes drawing on her own experience as a victim. It was a new type of show. She took aim at figures from entertainment, but from politics too and from big business. No one was spared.

Yet her partisanship never clashed with her fundamental idea that people should help themselves. If they grumbled and complained about the world, they would get nowhere. If they relied on others, they would end up where they started. In this sense, she aligned herself with the conservative writer Shelby Steele who believed that, by the end of the 1980s, racism in America was not so much a raging lion that needed to be slain but more an annoying bee that could be swatted.

It made sense to Steele — and perhaps Oprah — not to waste energy on the collective effort fighting a beast that had already been tamed. Instead, African Americans should focus on their own progress as individuals. For many, Oprah was and is a guru, her mantra being “Live Your Best Life.” Somehow, 35 years ago, she scented that this type of individualist ethos was filtering into the zeitgeist.

Oprah leveraged her influence to publish “O, The Oprah Magazine,” initiate a book club, play in film adaptations of Alice Walker’s “The Color Purple,” and Toni Morrison’s “Beloved” and not so much endorse Obama’s bid for the presidency as authenticate it. In fact, research indicated that 30% of voters in the 2008 election said they would be influenced by Winfrey, with half of those more likely to cast votes for the candidate she endorsed; Pew Research Center coined it as the “Oprah factor.”

In 2008, Oprah announced plans to launch an eponymous television channel, the Oprah Winfrey Network, or OWN. Twenty years ago, the first university course based on her was launched at the University of Illinois: “Oprah Winfrey, the Tycoon” was the first of several programs to use Oprah “as a prism to get at the intersection of race, class and gender in the post-civil rights era,” as one tutor put it.

No one ever queried her sincerity. When she conducted interviews, there was emotional immediacy, but with open and honest mischief. Many of her interviews disclosed hitherto unknown aspects of her subject’s character. The Tom Cruise interview in 2005 revealed the actor as a frenzied, perhaps hysterical figure. Michael Jackson in 1993 divulged experiences in his childhood that made audiences wonder how much effect they were having on his bizarre behavior later in life. More recently, in her interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Oprah, perhaps inadvertently, dragged into the light allegations of racism at the heart of the British monarchy.

Help Thyself

History will be kinder to Oprah than it has been to several other African Americans who were once admired but later reviled. The groundbreaking Bill Cosby was disgraced after sexual assault charges were brought against him (his conviction was overturned earlier this year.) Mike Tyson was imprisoned for rape in 1992 and served three of his 10-year sentence. Michael Jackson died in 1999 but was posthumously denounced after two men claimed to have been sexually abused by him as children. At 67, Oprah has taken criticism but emerged basically intact. She was even seriously discussed as a presidential candidate for a while after dropping hints in 2018 that she might run for office.

Oprah was once an entertainer. But she became a mogul, so her story is one of spectacular success. While she is emblematic, Oprah is hardly typical: Black women remain underrepresented in positions of power in both private and public sectors on either side of the Atlantic. While Oprah herself might explain this as the result of a lack of confidence, ambition, self-esteem and support from peers, others might identify experiences of discrimination, stereotyping and more structural factors, such as disparities in the education system and the job market that have persisted over the decades. Oprah’s approach tends to downplay the impact of institutional barriers.

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Oprah hasn’t tried to change society. She hasn’t even tried to change human beings. She’s tried and succeeded in making people change themselves. Her gift was and is that she is neither a firebrand nor a demagogue. There is nothing other-worldly about her. She just insinuates herself into people’s lives by speaking plainly and truthfully without bombast or sham virtuousness. It has enabled her to change countless lives in ways even she probably doesn’t realize.

It’s doubtful if there has been anyone quite like her, recognized the world over just by her first name. Her power is all-pervasive; its effects are felt everywhere. If you think I exaggerate, think of someone, good or bad — a politician, a religious leader, an entertainer — who has influenced so many people and whose sway will surely extend beyond her lifetime.

*[Ellis Cashmore is the author of “Kardashian Kulture: How Celebrities Changed Life in the 21st Century.”]

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy.

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