Beach volleyball? You’re better off gawping at Madame Lagarde
IAM IN a very overcast and drizzly Monaco this weekend. (Please don’t burgle me having read this. But if you do burgle me, please don’t let Mini Puppy out into the garden.) I’m here to watch the Grand Prix, and if you would like to be transported to a world where capitalism and tax avoidance have succeeded and feminism has failed, then please, take my sweaty paw.
This is how the world would look were men to triumph in their several-thousand-yearslong mission to oppress us. It would not resemble Kabul, with women shuffling around in burkas and men with beards buying oranges; it would be far more like the playground in which I find myself today.
It’s one where men inhabit leathery skins the same colour as the hulls of their yachts, drive around in deep-throated Ferraris, and where women wear Julien Macdonald cobweb dresses over thongs and stagger around on vertiginous heels, pillow lips permanently ajar.
Sport, any sport, apart from three-day eventing, is boring and pointless, while sport of every discipline remains the ultimate sexist arena.
And although I enjoy equestrianism, that most certainly does not include horse-racing.
Race jockeys are nasty little men for hire who barely know the names of their mounts, whereas the event rider needs a special relationship with the horse to succeed.
It’s a relationship many men struggle to create, so intent are they on dominating any being with a pulse. I don’t know one man who ever watches a woman compete or, for that matter, has ever read a novel by a female writer, except under duress.
Athletes are being dangled in front of young people’s computer-addled eyes as the ultimate role models but my feeling is that they are not, and cannot possibly be, well-rounded human beings. If you practise the same thing over and over again from the age of five, of course you will become good at it! Sport is not an art form, like ballet, whose practitioners are surely the ultimate athletes, and badly-paid ones to boot (unlike Manchester City player Yaya Toure on hundreds of thousands of pounds a week).
Sport, far more than the oftberated (mainly, it has to be said, by me) fashion industry, is the ultimate body fascism, the ultimate triumph of brawn over brain, of youth over wisdom.
Did you see the photographs of the women’s beach volleyball team last week, playing a game on the lawn in the shadow of Big Ben? The waistband on their teeny shorts was lower than even Alexander McQueen ever dared place it. The windows on the Palace of Westminster started to mist.
Last week, a senior official at UK Athletics allegedly called Jessica Ennis, the 26-year-old poster girl of the 2012 Games, ‘fat’, adding: ‘She’s got too much weight.’ The heptathlete’s coach, Toni Minichiello, countered: ‘I’ve never had any issue with her weight or shape. There are times I’ve wished she was taller, but that’s it.’
Would you want your daughter to be subjected to that? I once spent some time with the marathon runner Paula Radcliffe, proof if ever you needed it that too much exercise is bad for you. The free radicals from over-exertion had prematurely aged her skin so badly she resembled Gillian McKeith. (McKeith is also here trackside in Monaco, for some strange reason, along with my all-time idol, actor Michael Fassbender, who redressed the chauvinism of Hollywood rather by appearing naked and objectified and perfect in Shame.)
Radcliffe lacked any discernible body fat when we met, making her doubt that she could ever conceive naturally. She pulled up her tracksuit trouser leg to show me her calves, riddled with puncture wounds from the spikes on the shoes of other runners, as though she were a self-harmer, which in a way she was.
AFAR better idea this summer, rather than exposing your female child to yet another set of abs, would be to sit her down in front of YouTube clips of Christine Lagarde, the immaculate Chanel-clad head of the IMF, who yesterday uttered the only real dollop of sense so far about the European financial crisis.
Not her advice that we in the UK should cut VAT, which is also sensible, and would certainly help keep down my NetA-Porter bill. But she was brave enough to say the unsayable: that she has far more sympathy for children starving in Africa than she has for those suffering austerity measures in Athens.
Just look at where sport has got the Greeks! They’d have done better being Geeks! I rest my Louis Vuitton case.