soccer and sex

the following is the commentary from "MoveAnyMountain" in response to the short article in the link. this is exactly why i love soccer and sex so much.


Eagleton writes: .... that "for the most part football these days is the opium of the people, not to speak of their crack cocaine". And finally he hammers home: "Nobody serious about political change can shirk the fact that the game has to be abolished."

Of course Eagleton is partly speaking ironically with his tongue so far in his cheek it almost made it to Greenland. But in so far as he is serious - and serious about mocking a certain left wing attitude - I think the explanation is simpler:

Unlike Winston, she had grasped the inner meaning of the Party's sexual puritanism. It was not merely that the sex instinct created a world of its own which was outside the Party's control and which therefore had to be destroyed if possible. What was more important was that sexual privation induced hysteria, which was desirable because it could be transformed into war-fever and leader-worship. The way she put it was:

'When you make love you're using up energy; and afterwards you feel happy and don't give a damn for anything. They can't bear you to feel like that. They want you to be bursting with energy all the time. All this marching up and down and cheering and waving flags is simply sex gone sour. If you're happy inside yourself, why should you get excited about Big Brother and the Three-Year Plans and the Two Minutes Hate and all the rest of their bloody rot?'

That was very true, he thought. There was a direct intimate connexion between chastity and political orthodoxy. For how could the fear, the hatred, and the lunatic credulity which the Party needed in its members be kept at the right pitch, except by bottling down some powerful instinct and using it as a driving force? The sex impulse was dangerous to the Party, and the Party had turned it to account.

Lenin gave up listening to the music he loved because it took him away from the Revolution and made him think kind thoughts about other human beings. There is no real need to look far for an explanation of why the Left, when being ironical or not, doesn't like football.