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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/aug/07/between-the-world-cup-and-barbie-were-finally-having-an-honest-discussion-about-girlhood>
"The tears came the night the Australians beat Canada in the Women’s World Cup.
It wasn’t at the beginning of the match, with anxiety, when the Matildas
marched out to play knowing the match was do-or-die for their World Cup hopes,
star skipper Sam Kerr on the bench and not quite – not yet – recovered from
injury. It wasn’t with relief at the nine-minute mark, when Australia’s Hayley
Raso scored that first, dam-busting goal. It wasn’t even at the end of the game
when the whistle blew. Australia’s thundering 4-0 triumph over the Olympic
champs obliged sportswriters worldwide to acknowledge Australia didn’t merely
beat the Canadians; Australia destroyed them.
I wasn’t even crying about the game. What had me reaching for tissues was a
brief cutaway shot of the crowd, broadcast at some point between Raso’s first
beautiful goal and her second beautiful goal. The camera had found the faces of
some Australian girls – maybe 11 years old – in the stands. They were decked in
Australia’s green-and-gold colours, cheeks and foreheads smeared with matching
paint. They were exuberant with fandom, they were excited at being on camera,
and they were cheering – roaring – climbing over one another in their plastic
seats, exhilarated by the women’s game … and unafraid of what it meant to show
it.
The scene provoked in me a feeling writer John Koenig dubbed “anemoia” in his
Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows: “Nostalgia for a time or place that one has
never known.” To see the wild, thrilled faces of those girls was to remember
the euphorias of my own girlhood that, sadly, never got to include howling
through a game of top-flight international professional women’s football. I
longed to yoke their present to my past.
Between this World Cup and the Barbie movie, western culture is beginning a
tentative, honest discussion about the reality of girlhood. As western women –
in groups, in pink – revisit their experiences of a shared cultural object
common to very diverse childhoods, what the movie is helping us all to remember
is the intensity of feeling, of connection and of play that exists in girlhood
… with the realisation that our culture’s long-term habit has been to erase our
exuberance from public view, replacing us with lifeless bourgeois cliches about
what we should resemble rather than who we really are."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
