As we mark International Women’s Day 2024 on Friday, I’d like to take this opportunity to let the genie out of the bottle, address the elephant in the room and slay the sacred cow. I don’t follow, or play, any kind of sport, but it’s hard to avoid when sport in all its forms frequently dominates front-page news. Sport in Australia (and many other nations) is akin to religion.

Thanks to a certain high-profile female sporting team (I won’t mention names here because I have no wish to contribute to the hegemony of sport), many fans were recently drawn to the different, more inclusive, safe, friendly, community of women’s sport. Oh, how lovely. Even this sport-sceptic was temporarily seduced by all those warm, feminine, fuzzies.

Even a sport sceptic like the author, Ingrid Banwell, had to waltz with the Matildas and Sam Kerr.Credit: AP

Yet nothing quite says gender equality like a female sports star behaving like a male sports star, and falling sensationally, and publicly, from grace.

In addition to those grand stadium events that attract fans and dollars, players behaving badly draw eyeballs to screens. Cheating, sexual harassment, or in the case of this week’s headline involving a certain (bankable) female sports star’s alleged abuse of a British police officer, these scandals are opiates to news junkies.

Regardless of gender, competitive sport fosters traditionally male behaviour: combativeness, aggression, a desire to crush the opposition and win. And participation in sport is another example of the current system rewarding women who aspire to be more like men.

In 1945, George Orwell wrote that serious sport was “war minus the shooting”. And in Oliver Stone’s recent interview with this masthead’s Peter Fitzsimons, he mentioned how “football most embodies warfare – you win or you lose”.

Years ago, when I lived in New Zealand – another sport-is-religion country – I met a woman who had formed a support group for the wives, mistresses and lovers of sport-mad men. This was a while ago, when women still pampered men on their days off from their hard and stressful man-jobs, and one of the mandates of this group involved serving cold toast and flat beer to the males of the household glued to televised sport. The support group’s acronym, WAR (Women Against Rugby), also sported a splendid logo depicting a large-bodied, small-headed, drooling, grinning man holding a ball. A spare finger also probed a nostril. The message of this logo was clear: sport – in this case rugby – brings out the brutes within.

Which leads to the question: does sport productively channel aggression or encourage aggression? Countless studies challenge both sides of these assertions. Yet the more I read about sports stars (including women) behaving badly, the more I hear about increasing domestic violence assaults during major sporting events, the more I’m inclined to believe the latter.