Peter Klevius obituary over the best ever: RIP, the worlds best football player, Lily Parr - and the next best, Pele.
Although both scored more than 1,000 goals, Lily Parr did so in headwind!
No
one can be more vulnerable for female sexual beauty (i.e. heterosexual
attraction - ask women who know him) than Peter Klevius - and no one
male can be more ignorant about sexual beauty when seeing a woman
playing football and on the arena becoming human instead of woman. Just
like the early Christian St. Perpetua who said before she faced death on
the gladiator arena 203 AD: 'And I was stripped (for death), and I
became a (hu)man*', i.e. no longer fettered by womanhood/femininity.
* A time when a man was considered the only fully human.
A sport of nature - or a fact of nature?
Social
convention based on a commonsense reaction to the ‘palpable menace of
sexual desire among all human beings, and, most especially, to the known
seductiveness of women’ (i.e. heterosexual attraction) was, at
Tertullian’s* time, i.e. the latter part of the Second Century, shared
by pagans and Christians alike. According to Tertullian, it was a fact
of nature that women were seductive, and Christian baptism did nothing
to change this fact (Brown 1988: 68, 81). However, we are not informed
why the fact that women are seductive, necessarily should imply
restrictions on her. We might guess that a number of Tertullians
transferred to a modern Western secular city might have diverged in a
similar pattern of opinion as would contemporary people. If women were
defined by marriage, by its sexual and procreative roles and by the
sex-based labor assigned to married women, then their refusal of
marriage might move them into a category that transcended womanhood.
Only in the arena of martyrdom can we view these transcendent women
unfiltered by the lenses of male observers (McNamara 1985:104).
Perpetua, a Roman matron, faced the lions in Carthage on March 7, 203.
She recorded her experience in prison which led her to a new vision in
which all her mortal persona was burned away. An unknown spectator'
possibly (most probably) Tertullian , rescued these documents and
appended an eyewitness account of her death, resulting in an authentic
female voice recording the emergence of her 'autonomous spiritual being
from the cocoon of her womanhood' (McNamara 1985:105). Perpetua
renounced everything that made her a Woman. She stripped away the
emotions and the constraints of the feminine role she had once fully
played. On the night before her execution, she dreamed that she had
entered into the arena to fight the beasts. There she was confronted by a
certain “ill-favored -Egyptian" who challenged her to fight with him.
Also, there came to me comely young men, my helpers and aiders. 'And I
was stripped, and I became a man' (McNamara 1985:105).
At the
foot of the ladder lay a dragon of enormous size, and it would attack
those who tried to climb up and try to terrify them from doing so.
* Tertullian has been called "the father of Latin Christianity" as well as "the founder of Western theology".
Not "women's football" but human's football - or just football*!
*
You don't say about a child that s/he plays "children's football", do
you. If it's a girl you say 'she plays football' and if it's a Finnish
girl you say 'hän pelaa jalkapalloa', where 'hän' is a sexless personal
pronoun (as in most other language families except IE and semitic) and
therefore not translatable to the indoeuropean sex segregated s/he. And
when divided by biological sex then it should also say 'men's football',
right.
As Peter Klevius for long has stated,
evolutionary (i.e. biological) heterosexual attraction (the only
analytically relevant distinction between the sexes, according to Peter
Klevius - and islam) has to be "civilized" in our daily encounters - but
without islamic sex segregation*. And the tool for this was given 1948
with Art. 2 of the Universal Human Rights declaration (the world's most
translated document), which main purpose is to stand as the bedrock not
only for legislation but also as a bulwark against sexism hiding in
culture. In other words, we need to get rid of sex segregation. No
matter of biological sex one should be free to lead once life as one
wishes - which also means that you have the right to appear
"feminine"/"masculine" (whatever that means) without being in any way
criticized by e.g. Peter Klevius - as long as it's not part of
sexism/racism against others.
Lily Parr, the world's by far best* football player ever - no matter of sex!
*
If Marta (six times chosen as the world's best football player) when
she was at her best, had time travelled and played against Lily Parr she
would probably have outperformed her in dribbling although perhaps not
in kicking. However, that's not a fair comparison - just think if Lily
had stopped smoking and got the same training etc. possibilities as
modern top players! And compared to Lionel Messi, who as a teenager was
taken care of by the world's then best football club Barcelona FC, Lily
Parr got just the very opposite - a ban on her putting her feet on any
English football ground for the rest of her career!
Lily Parr was
born in St Helens in 1905 where she as a child learned to play football
in games with her brothers. At 5ft 10ins tall, Lily was said to have a
'fearless streak' and 'robust frame'. As a teenager, her first games
were with her local side, St Helens Ladies.
There was a growth in
interest in women's football in the late 19th century and early 20th
because of the huge popularity of men's football combined with the fact
that so many young women met football playing men in factories etc.
Dick, Kerr & Co was such a factory where women worked making munitions.
When in 1917 office worker Alfred Frankland saw the girls beating their male factory co-workers in an informal lunch-time match, he decided to be their manager, hence unleashing them on the general public, resulting in a game-changing and instantaneous success.
This really shows how sex segregation had kept girls/women back.
Dick, Kerr Ladies F.C. was one of the earliest known women's football teams, and remained in existence for some 50 years, from 1917 to 1965, playing 833 games, winning 759, drawing 46, and losing 28. Nettie Honeyball's team in 1895 was possibly the first.
The matches attracted anywhere from 4,000 to over 50,000 spectators per match. In 1920, Dick, Kerr Ladies defeated a French side 2–0 in front of 25,000 people that went down in history as the first international football game played by women. On the request of female physicians and others the English Football Association (FA) banned women from using fields and stadiums controlled by FA-affiliated clubs for 50 years (the rule was only repealed in 1971). There were 150 women's football clubs in 1921 when on 5 December same year the FA ban was announced.
Dick, Kerr’s Ladies was also the first female team to play wearing shorts.
'Big, fast and powerful', Lily Parr was said to 'take corner kicks better than most men' and she scored 'many goals with a left foot cross drive which nearly breaks the net', according to her profile in a programme of 1923.
There were 150 women's football clubs by 1921 when on 5 December the FA decided to ban females from playing on its members' grounds. As a consequence the women's game declined but Lily Parr and other female players continued to play on non-FA pitches.
Dick,
Kerr’s Ladies became Preston Ladies in 1926. Parr became a psychiatric
nurse at Whittington Hospital but continued to play for Preston, finally
ending her long playing career in 1951.
Why the "beautiful game" is also the hardest to master well
Although
Lily Parr was taller than the average woman, most of the best players
have been below average height, like Pele, Maradona, Marta, Messi,
Modric etc.. However, Ronaldo is 187 cm and a former top player like
Crouch is 203 cm. This just emphasizes the greatness of "the beautiful
game" - a sport that fits everyone, yet is the hardest of all sports to
master because it eliminates tools and hands while keeping the feet busy
with multitasking with running and manoeuvring while also controlling
the ball with the same feet.
The page below in this book made Peter Klevius wipe tears several times
How Sweden was an accomplish to the death of English football for women - and how Lily Parr & Co's heritage created the world's best football team in the 1970s in a forgotten rural setting in Sweden.
Peter
Klevius has written a book with an in depth analysis about the history
of England's hostility against women playing football. Although Sweden
played an important role behind the scene, this has never before been
scientifically scrutinized. It's hoped that Amazon will publish it so to
make its existence more visible. Peter Klevius was about to go for self
publishing but it seemed impossible to reach out in a meaningful way.
After all, it's all about supporting girös and women who want not only
to play football but also lo tead their lives as they wish without
sexism.
Perpetua: 'I saw a ladder of tremendous height made of bronze, reaching all the way to the heavens, but it was so narrow that only one person could climb up at a time. To the sides of the ladder were attached all sorts of metal weapons: there were swords, spears, hooks, daggers, and spikes; so that if anyone tried to climb up carelessly or without paying attention, he would be mangled and his flesh would adhere to the weapons.'
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