this is like a rant which is not well-phrased at all btw.
i know that usamerica is a country obsessed with athletic spectacle but i feel like it just doesnt compare to australia's obsession. it is just totally baked into social life. the image of the ideal australian is a white family playing beach sports. everyone must follow a footy team. in primary school, my grade had a trip to the nation's capital for what was basically a civics course - learning about the way the government works and all that. the trip included a visit to the Australian Institute of Sport, run by the Australian Sports Commission, a government agency.... isn't that strange?
the pressure on children to be athletic and sporty ridiculous. especially boys, but girls also. it's tied to masculinity. australian popular culture is one which eschews femininity totally. it might seem like everywhere is like that under patriarchy but it isn't; the us, for example, has many icons of femininity of different kinds; australia has nothing like that.
australia as a nationstate does not have a strong cultural identity. it's a colonial outpost of the commonwealth, still with the king of england as the head of state. it's also a lapdog of the united states, a regional base of operations for its military. it's a nothing country. asserting a strong cultural identity creates the illusion that australia is an independent political entity. but there is basically nothing to go off of, right? australia also is an extremely racist country, with an extremely racist past and present. obviously that's not good either; liberals would rather not draw too much attention to that, especially the "present" part, and furthermore it is intrinsically tied to australia's colonial status.
so everything is placed on this masculine athletic spectacle instead. you know, the boys, the mates, the lads. the women are also sporty, but they do not get a collective noun. afl, cricket, rugby. swimming, so much swimming, and surfing, and so forth (beach nation, right? everyone lives on the coast, right?). also bushwalking, hiking etc. is all tied into this outdoorsman personality. i mean, the links to colonialism here are obvious too, but its sort of a cleaned up image. like the emphasis is on "nature". and "health." and government money goes into producing athletes that are famous on the world stage. oh, also sports betting, of course. horse races, the melbourne cup! greyhound races. the only other thing besides sports is the anzacs, lol, and that's basically the same thing, what with mateship and all that.
there isn't any socially legible alternative; it's quite totalizing. it's really lauded above all else. famous men who play sports are very much protected from accusations of abuse, also. and you're expected to take part in one form of athletic activity or another if you want to gel with people socially. if you're unathletic or disabled or fat, if you don't want to change in the boys' locker room because they'll molest you. god forbid if youre gay or trans. if youre an immigrant and havent come from a culture where so much emphasis is placed on athleticism or you dont know how to play the sports that everyone else in your year does. if you just dont like sports that much. if you're a younger kid and your parents are any of those things, because largely children's social life is facilitated by their parents, e.g. for having friends outside of school, and if another kid's parents don't like yours. then get fucking fucked.
like for these people if you want a social life then you dont have any choice but to get older, get internet access (which they're taking away btw), and then find people who have heard of the same cultural imports from other places as you.
and the worst part is that none of this is acknowledged at all by even, like, the more left-wing politicians, as being at all a problem, or an indication of larger social issues in australia. it's just praised
