Girls will be girls, not goalies!

Soccer/football: “Goal is not a goal”. It is a symbolic vagina!

Ball-games are more or less reserved for men & boys & tomboys

(some will be lesbians).

In a recent statement David Beckham has said he is sure that his sons

will get their sister »to join in boy stuff«, making her a goalie, adding,

however, that he is sure »she will still be girly«. 

With all due respect to David Beckham, his soccer prowess and his family,

especially is baby daughter Harper Seven, his statement needs a comment,

a psychoanalytic one at that. As early as 1926, Freud's disciple, psychoanalyst

Helene Deutsch hinted that a goal is a symbolic substitute for the vagina.

This idea has been vaguely referred to by a number of psychoanalysts.

However, it is in my book »Sport through Psychoanalysis« (Vodeb 2001)

that I bring a detailed psychoanalytic interpretation of sport, pointing out that

»a goal is not (really) a goal«. The goal is a symbol of the female genitals and

scoring a goal really stands for coitus or penetration, which makes soccer

a typical male performance sport.

It is self-understood that Beckham does not have the psychoanalytic

competences to have an adequate understanding of unconscious processes,

the phenomenon of castration or the Oedipus complex, or to be familiar

with the concept of penis envy, which has (literally) given rise to the

introduction of female phallic sports such as soccer. Personally and

as a theoretical psychoanalyst, I can easily dismiss the idea that his

daughter is to become a tomboy playing soccer. On the contrary,

she will be influenced by the classic female (bodily) ideal to be beautiful,

to be a looker just like her mum. She will be happy to let her brothers

and boy-friends be engaged in symbolic soccer »sex«.

It is only natural for David and Victoria to hope for a girly-girl-stuff

career for their darling daughter.

The thing is that because of penis envy many girls take up phallic sports,

such as soccer, only to have (and suffer) sexual identity disorders when

they grow up. Lesbian sex can be a result of a girl’s involvement in a top

phallic sport.

From a psychoanalytic view, inherently female sports involve display

of bodily beauty, such as dance, pole dancing, or striptease,

which is but a natural counterbalance to bodybuilding, the show

of(f) male physiques.

Roman Vodeb, double M. A., is a Slovenian theoretical psychoanalyst and an independent scholar. He has published five books in which he applies psychoanalysis to sport, ideology of sport and gender. He writes for Slovene media, providing psychoanalytic interpretation of current social events and issues dealing with gender issues, politics, sport, culture and art.