By VictorM: FIFA' Women's World Cup is going on in China at this time, with 16 nations making the final cut. Some of the comments I've read about female participation in the sport has been both predictable (from Egypt) and surprising (from England).

From Egypt, this expected passage:

As [reporter Michael] Slackman writes, “It is a challenge to get men to give up some of their control over women.”

Some of that same attitude is on display in this remarkable seven-minute Al-Jazeera report on women’s soccer in Egypt. As a women’s team practices on a city field, a male player nearby tells the camera: “If my fiancee wanted to play football, I would forbid her. I only respect men playing. It could also distract her from her home. In Egypt we believe the woman should look after the home.” Another says of a female player: “She cannot wear a headscarf and play. This is against religion. Football and sports are haram — forbidden.”

In a lot of countries around the world, it takes guts simply to play the game in the first place. In those places, the sight of a woman on a soccer field, the very thought of it, is in itself subversive and dangerous.

From England, where they have shown a general atmosphere of condescension toward women’s soccer:

Even in the pages of the Guardian, a politically forward-thinking newspaper whose soccer coverage is generally unparalleled, you can find surprising expressions of that condescension in passages like this: “The traditional male sneer is to compare women’s football to monkeys playing tennis, but this is wrong and unfair. These days it’s more like watching weak men playing football; or men who aren’t very good at football playing football.”