The crisis of community is trying to heal itself

Connecting dots on the Teals, the Matildas, and Taylor Swift

The question that one asks oneself is whether they’re so alienated from their own inner lives that their lives are living them.

—David Milich

A good way to zap most of the joy from all the en-joy-ment the Matildas have brought many of us over the past couple of weeks would be to try and extract some sort of political lesson from the moment, and, well, sorry, that’s what I’m about to do. Call it a disease or an affliction or some other failing on my part, but how can we not take a moment and produce at least one mid-size article on all this?

The truth is, the Matildas’ moment has been an incredible thing in that it not only challenged deeply baked-in patriarchal prejudices about how mainstream sport is meant to work, challenging not just the male-dominated sporting codes in all their boy-club certainties, but the prejudicial mindset of media executives who have been telling us all (themselves, mainly) for years that people don’t want to watch women play sport.

Whether the Matildas’ thing …