Here’s why I absolutely love Vera Pauw: she is everything that woke women rhapsodise in the abstract but despise in the flesh. She is to women’s sport what JK Rowling is to literature — too good at her job to be ignored but too ornery to be celebrated. She’s a victim of sexual abuse but not the right sort of victim, and it’s great to be a tough, take-no-prisoners dame so long as the prisoners you don’t take are pale, stale, white men.
When you have sinned against the dogma of body positivity, however, when you have dared to suggest that a female professional athlete could do with losing a few pounds, as alleged against Pauw, then the magnitude of your transgression outweighs the merit of your grievance.
Pauw had the courage to speak out about having been raped as a young player and later sexually assaulted on two occasions by prominent men in Dutch football. For 35 years, she said, she kept her secret from family and teammates “and, I can now accept, from myself”. She said she had “allowed the memory of it to control my life, to fill me with daily pain and anguish”.
Addressing the image she presented in her sport she added: “To many I am seen as a brash and loud football coach and manager, a tough woman who has risen to the top in a man’s world. Nothing could be further from the truth.”
By all accounts she is brash, loud and tough but she plainly implies that this persona is a carapace she has developed so she can survive and prosper in a world in which she suffered such gendered violation and discrimination.
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Being a victim of rape and sexual abuse does not, of course, entitle anyone to themselves be abusive or cruel. But it might help explain Pauw’s style of interpersonal engagement, which is essentially defensive. If it’s true that three men found they could rape or assault her and get away with it, then it clearly wasn’t always the case that you don’t mess with Pauw.
The article in The Athletic magazine, which reported accusations of her “body shaming” female players during her time as coach of Houston Dash, appeared a year after Pauw’s revelations of her rape. But this time the gendered discrimination that she suffered in her sport was coming from women.
The most serious allegation was that one player developed an eating disorder as a result. Pauw, however, countered that this woman’s teammates knew that her “disordered eating” had been going on for months but had said nothing to the coach or medical staff.
She said of the criticism: “If I would have been a male it wouldn’t have happened at all.” She cited Pep Guardiola’s public statement that his Manchester City player Kalvin Phillips was “overweight” and “unfit”, and that Phillips had admitted he’d been told to stay off the chocolate cake. Never “even in my dreams” would she have made such a comment, Pauw said.
Yet The Athletic article was the beginning of the end of Pauw’s tenure as manager of Ireland. It was published just before Ireland’s first female World Cup campaign began and soured relations in the ranks. Last week Pauw claimed that Jonathan Hill, the FAI chief executive, undermined her authority by having “safeguarding meetings” with the players on foot of The Athletic piece, implicitly giving it credence.
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She spoke about the emotional toll of those accusations in what was a fevered atmosphere: “I didn’t know how to live anymore. I thought I can do two things: I can go and find help, or I kill myself. I was not ready to kill myself, so I found help.” The response of some of her players was support or understanding but also anger that she engaged with the accusations at all. Once again, was Pauw expected to respond to an attack by putting up and shutting up?
The doctrine of body positivity against which she allegedly sinned is a variable dogma. You can celebrate your body when it is fat and woe betide anyone who dares suggest you change a thing. That though is not the case when it is “wrong”. If your perfectly healthy body is “wrong” then you must be encouraged to amend it with drugs and extreme surgery. Woe betide anyone who urges you to be happy in your own skin — even if you are a child.
JK Rowling was a single mother who left an abusive marriage while writing the first Harry Potter book, famously working in a café with her baby in a buggy because she couldn’t afford to heat her flat. She has probably done more for childhood literacy than any author in history — Enid Blyton didn’t have to compete with smartphones and social media.
And yet she is a hate figure to many women because she blasphemed against transgenderism. She took the controversial view that being a woman is more than a feeling in a man’s head or wearing a skirt, and opposed the transitioning of children.
She was largely vindicated last week when the Cass review of transgender services in the UK, which are also accessed by Irish children, found that troubled youngsters were prescribed puberty blockers in a regime driven more by ideology than science. Not that it will matter to Rowling’s female critics.
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Like the Jewish women raped and brutalised on October 7, who have since discovered the striking lack of international feminist solidarity, a woman can never be a victim if she’s a villain.
Not another referendum please
Are you up for another referendum? Can you face two more months of carefully moderated and timed debates on radio and television, explanatory leaflets cluttering up your recycling bin, and prolonged speculation over Sinn Fein’s position before they decide which way to jump? It looks like you might not have to.
We were due to have a referendum on June 7 next, the same day as the local and European elections, on the question of Ireland joining the Unified Patents Court. If passed, it will make life easier for inventors or designers as they’ll only need one patent rather than 27 for any products they sell in the EU. It sounds highly unlikely to generate the same level of passionate debate as the “family” and “care” referendums, but it’s been reported that new enterprise minister Peter Burke is to bring a memo to cabinet next week proposing a postponement after the government’s walloping in the two polls last month.
A proposal with such obvious benefits for innovators, content creators and businesses should be a relatively easy sell. The reported reluctance to put another question to the public suggests that the government still doesn’t understand what happened last time. Last week a senior government source said: “It’s fair to say that the referendum in June is gone. It’s about learning from the last one and giving time for debate.”
So they’re still labouring under the illusion that the family and care referendums weren’t sufficiently debated or understood. Well, here’s a memo to cabinet — just because people didn’t vote the way you wanted doesn’t mean they’re stupid, vindictive or ignorant. It’s just possible that the electorate listened to all the arguments and exercised their own judgment on the merits of the different proposals. They can actually be trusted to do the same again.
