Procrastination

The only conceivable purpose of this post is to distract me from more pressing matters - an overdue essay - glaring accusingly at me, yet refusing to self-complete. Frustrating, you might say.

I've been writing it for over a week now. And still, I'm yet to devise a coherent structure. Sometimes the sheer guilt induces me to write a paragraph or maybe two. (Three is pushing it now). So progress is slow. So slow.

And this is hardly helping. According to some reports, it may even be actively disincentivising the onward march of the keystrokes. That, if you believe in willpower.

Booting gender myths into touch

In response:

You may be mistaking correlation for causation in your reading of the statistics. The fact that men express a higher interest with sport is more likely to be the result of socialisation rather than an inherent interest in sporting activities.

It is easy to see how this arises. Gender stereotyping happens even before children are born. Baby boys are handed squishy footballs and told that manly men take an interest in football, while their sisters are handed dolls and told that sport is a manly activity. So the first explanation for the statistics may simply be that they are conditioned away from sport from a young age.

But even if conditioning does not change women's internal attitudes towards sport, social pressure may shape the one they are willing to voice in public. As in, when the interviewer asks whether they like football, they feel obliged to give the womanly answer since that is what is expected from them.

So yeah, the whole 'interest' thing is a bit spurious, particularly since the study was probably conducted in a biased way by men to trying to prove a point.

(Charlotte is probably also right about the unrepresentative nature of the data sample, by the by.)

Women? Play football? You must be joking.

Below is a (fairly self-explanatory) transcript of what my friend wrote:

Dear Mischa,

You invited me to provide you with some evidence to prove the theory that men are more interested in sport than women (a point which few reasonable people would disagree with). Consider the following:

39% of the UK’s men say that they take an interest in the Premier League, as opposed to 13% of the nation’s women (pg. 36/7 of the Ofcom report).

http://ec.europa.eu/competition/antitrust/cases/dec_docs/38173/38173_104_7.pdf

Furthermore if we consider the stated levels of interest in sport, we find a strong positive correlation between the strength of interest and the proportion of men. Even if we amalgamate the ‘passionate’ and ‘strong’ sections, we still find that, taking an average, 84.5% of these fans are men (more than 5 times the number of women) (pg. 41). In addition, men form 78% of the Premier League’s fans (pg. 43).

Moving on to cricket, and broadening the notion of ‘interest’, let us consider the following report from Cricket Australia (bear in mind that Australia has a good record of gender equality in sport and a number of its female teams are successful):

89.55% of cricket players nationwide are male. On the basis of Cricket Australia’s mission statement, ‘to give all young people a ‘fair go’ regardless of their gender’ (pg. 80) it would be inaccurate and unscientific to assert that the relative paucity of women and girls in cricket is due to a lack of opportunities.

http://www.hreoc.gov.au/racial_discrimination/whats_the_score/pdf/cricket.pdf

The same story emerges when you look at rugby. It’s understandable that participation among women is low (5% in Australian rugby league) given the physical nature of the game, but in terms of fans, it transpired in a New Zealand study that 73% of rugby union’s crowd capacity were male (pg. 5). http://marketing-bulletin.massey.ac.nz/V15/MB_V15_A3_Garland.pdf

I could continue but my enthusiasm to continue proving a self-evident point is waning. I hope the veracity of my research satisfies you as to the truth of the matter.

Yours in cordial friendship,

Schmates

Memory lane

Zagreb was a mistake. I mean, who would choose to spend time there? But what followed was unforgettable.

It happened that last summer we had a day to kill in Zagreb. Originally, the plan was that we would have flown back a day earlier, wherein Zagreb's only function was as our airport. As ever, I'd got the details wrong - on the morning of our flight, we checked the details, only to discover that our plane left the next day. Hardly the end of the world, you might say. Zagreb is a capital city. All capitals breed culture and politics.

You'd be wrong. Zagreb is the European Sahara, a cultural desert, void of anything remotely worthwhile. But we had to do something with ourselves. So we slouched into town, hoping that something might turn up. After a few hours in which we drifted into a state of perpetual under-whelmedness, we decided to visit the main museum. After all, museums are the cathedrals of modernity, apparently.

We arrived, only to be swamped by clusters of canapé. The temptation was too much. So we gorged, notwithstanding the men in dark suits trawling the perimeter, watchfully gazing upon the guests. At some point, someone grew wise to our free-riding, and we were booted out. As it later turned out, we had attended the presidential function, for which the elaborate canapé (by this point, firmly embedded in my stomach) were the first course.

Bizarrely, we found ourselves jettisoned into another clump of people, hovering outside, and staring intently at someone. There were also cameras. And more suited men. Trying to find out more, we jumped up, looked around, pulled some faces and left.

Later that day and back at the hostel, we were watching the news. And there we were, guffawing on live TV, shocked that we had appeared on camera. Turned out that the press release was a fairly important one, too, jointly given by the prime minister and president of Croatia on the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

From this I have learnt that if you are going to gate-crash presidential banquets and butt into live broadcasts featuring the two most important people in a country, it is worth looking dignified rather than bewildered and bedraggled. But you've got to start somewhere, I suppose.

The enclosed link is the video footage of what I have just described (http://dnevnik.hr/vijesti/hrvatska/ako-je-bilo-onih-koji-su-uzimali-novac-za-to-moraju-odgovarati.html)

A taste of their own medicine

I'm jittery at the best of times. But at 2am, returning from Kilburn station, with an indiscrete figure hanging in the background, I was downright paranoid. Man up, you might say. Stop hallucinating. Cut the melodrama.

And that is precisely what I attempted to do. Diligently, I deployed anti-stalk (not, by the way, a form of discrimination against the main stem of a herbaceous plant): I crossed the road, he did likewise. I crossed back, so did he. Game on, because by this point we'd reached my patch.

Approaching my block, I decided to walk the long way around. 25 meters behind was our 'friend'. Then I thought of a plan: as soon as I was out of eyesight (i.e. had rounded the corner of the block), I sprinted at a lung-bursting pace around the rest of the block, passing my house on the way. And by the time he had rounded the corner (the same one that I had just passed) I was behind him, breathing loudly, shuffling my footsteps.

This, apparently, was too much for our 'friend'. After a few furtive glances over his shoulder, he ran away. The moral of the story: it is possible to out-stalk a stalker. (Assuming, of course, that is what he was.)