Lisa McVea

Contingent technology recruitment via AMS. Sportsfan and amateur athletic sprint coach. Enthusiastic wine-taster.

[SubRosa )✿( Magick @subrosamagick.bsky.social @SubRosaMagick]

She was 57 years old.
White hair. No carefully managed image. No media training designed to make her more palatable. Just thirty years of accumulated knowledge and the calm, unhurried authority of a woman who had spent her life mastering her subject.
She sat on a BBC panel, answered questions about immigration and politics, cited evidence, made arguments — and then went home.
The next morning, her inbox looked like a crime scene.
Her name is Mary Beard — Cambridge professor, classicist, one of the most respected scholars of ancient Rome and Western civilisation alive. And the internet had decided that a woman speaking with quiet authority on television needed to be punished for it.
The messages were not criticism. They were not debate. They were rape threats. Death threats. Coordinated campaigns of personal destruction targeting her appearance, her age, her voice — anything that could be used to remind her that spaces like the one she had just occupied were not meant for her.
Most people would have gone quiet.
Mary Beard went further in.
She did what scholars do when they find a pattern that disturbs them: she followed it backward. Through decades. Through centuries. Through millennia. All the way back to some of the oldest texts in Western civilisation.
And she found it had always been there.
In Homer's Odyssey — one of the foundational works of Western literature, nearly three thousand years old — there is a scene that most readers pass over without registering its quiet violence. Penelope comes downstairs and asks the poet to sing a different song. Her own son, Telemachus, cuts her off. He orders her back to her room and tells her plainly: speech is the business of men.
She goes.
Mary Beard read that scene and recognized it immediately.
Not as ancient history. As a pattern.
In ancient Rome, women who dared to speak in public were not described as orators or thinkers. They were described as noise — disorderly sound, something that did not deserve to be called language or argument. Their voices were not speech. Their thoughts were not thoughts.
In the medieval world, women who claimed public authority were labeled as witches.
Elizabeth I — Queen of England, ruler of a nation — had to rhetorically reshape herself into something masculine just to be taken seriously as the leader of her own country.
The silencing of women who speak with authority was not invented by social media. It was not a modern pathology or a cultural accident. It was built deliberately, over centuries, into the very foundations of how Western civilisation defined who gets to speak, what authority sounds like, and who is allowed to take up space in public life.
Mary Beard had found something important.
In 2017, she published Women & Power: A Manifesto — short enough to read in an afternoon, substantial enough to reframe everything you thought you understood about why this keeps happening.
Her argument was precise and devastating.
The problem is not that women lack the ability to lead. The problem is that the model of leadership itself — the template for what public authority looks, sounds, and feels like — was built by men over centuries and has never been redesigned. When a woman enters public life and doesn't fit that template, she is not failing. The template was never built for her. It was built specifically to exclude her, and it has been doing exactly that, efficiently and continuously, for three thousand years.
The solution, Beard argued, is not to teach women to perform power the way men have always performed it. The solution is to dismantle and rebuild the very concept of what power is allowed to look like.
She kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept appearing on television — white-haired, unhurried, carrying her decades of authority without performing it, without packaging it for comfort, without apologizing for it.
The threats continued.
But other messages began arriving too. Letters from women and girls who had spent their entire lives feeling that every door was slightly too narrow, every table slightly too high, every room slightly reluctant to make space for them. Women who had spent years wondering what was wrong with them — why they couldn't quite fit, couldn't quite belong, couldn't quite be taken seriously no matter how much they knew or how hard they worked.
They read the book and understood, perhaps for the first time, that nothing had ever been wrong with them.
The room had been designed without them in mind.
That is not a personal failing.
That is a three-thousand-year-old architectural decision.
And one Cambridge professor with white hair and a calm voice — who refused to go quiet when the internet told her to — spent her career documenting it, naming it, and handing that knowledge to everyone who needed to hear it.
Telemachus told Penelope that speech was the business of men.
He was wrong then.
He is still wrong now.
And Mary Beard has three thousand years of evidence to prove it.
via The Inspireist

#FeministFriday #HERstory

[Dan Walker @mrdanwalker]

I must confess to being a bit emotional this morning at the news of a knighthood for Kevin Sinfield.

I’ve always called him ‘Sir Kev’ and it’s hard to think of a man more deserving. He showed us all what it is to be a friend. What it means to step up when people need you and he did it all for his mate ❤️

After he carried Rob across the line in the Leeds marathon someone sent me this poem anonymously and I kept it on my phone. They called it ‘Arise Sir Kev’…

When shadows gathered, and hearts would break
Kev knew it was time to take…
One step, another, through wind and rain,
Carrying hope, despite the pain.

He never stopped, mile after mile,
Driven by loyalty, strength… a smile.
For Rob, his friend, he aim was true
Showing us all, what friendship can do.

Not measured in trophies, applause, or fame…
But turning up, again and again.
And in every mile he chose to run,
He showed us how friendship is truly done.

[D Prasanth Nair @DPrasanthNair]

The famous incident from the 2003 Carlsberg Cup, where Danish midfielder Morten Wieghorst intentionally missed a penalty against Iran.

The referee had awarded the penalty because an Iranian defender caught the ball with his hands inside the box, mistakenly thinking he had heard the half-time whistle.Since the penalty was awarded due to a misunderstanding, Wieghorst consulted his coach and deliberately fired his shot wide as a display of sportsmanship, an act for which he later won an Olympic Committee Fair Play Award.
Football is great

[When Football Was Better @FootballInT80s]

BBC and ITV’s World Cup themes from Mexico 86

[Lisa McVea @LisaMcVea]

We lost our beautiful mum today 💔

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

CHARIOTS OF FIRE was released 45 years ago today.

David Puttnam struggled for years to get the film made because studios believed a slow British drama about Olympic runners had no commercial appeal. It went on to become a global hit & Best Picture winner.

[The Shift Journal @TheShiftJournal]

“The biggest mistake we make in life is thinking we have time”

―Kobe Bryant

[Darknight 🇳🇬 @MOON_WALKER6]

Back when the pole vault GOAT and the 400m hurdles GOAT raced each other in a 100m dash

[cinesthetic. @TheCinesthetic]

The Breakfast Club (1985) ending with Don’t You (Forget About Me) blasting while Bender throws his fist in the air is one of the most iconic final shots of the entire ‘80s.

[DiscussingFilm @DiscussingFilm]

The new trailer for Christopher Nolan's ‘THE ODYSSEY’ has been released.

In theaters on July 17.

[Darknight 🇳🇬 @MOON_WALKER6]

That night in Budapest when Femke Bol pulled off one of the most insane comebacks in a 4x400m championship final

[Rob Lowe @RobLowe]

My arm still hurts.

[✒️ @Literariium]

“You won't find the same person twice, not even in the same person”

— Mahmoud Darwish

[80s Kidz @80s_Kidz]

Our generation was expected to climb a 30 foot rope with a life saving 2 inch think matt below.

[BBC Sport @BBCSport]

WHAT HAVE WE JUST WITNESSED? 🤯

Sabastian Sawe has just become the first person in history to run a sub two-hour marathon in race conditions.

Yomif Kejelcha was also under two hours for second!

[Matt Casey 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿 🇬🇧 @MattCas04807118]

Our cricket season starts tomorrow🫡,summer is on the way.❤️

Poor lady, cricket can catch you out but at least nobody saw.🫣🫣