Rosemary McLeod: Dead or alive, heroes seem to come in all guises

Photo / Thinkstock

It used to take a lot to be a hero - slaying a dragon, swimming to Australia, rescuing a child from a crevasse as deep as the Empire State Building, things like that.

Dying while heroic was better still, the risks being so great that death was inevitable. We've also made heroes out of folly and losing, as in the Charge of the Light Brigade, Gallipoli, and Robert Falcon Scott's Antarctic expedition a century ago, which made him a hero of the British Empire for getting to the South Pole second, after Roald Admundsen. I've never understood why the Norwegian wasn't the hero, but never mind.

Scott and his men all died, and Admundsen got back alive. What a cad.

And so to sport, where one writer has declared rower Robbie Manson a hero. Manson is gay, and he's told everyone. What's more, he has reportedly acknowledged, "How important it would be in New Zealand for a top rugby player, especially an All Black, to come out."

The catchment for heroes has been widened, I suggest, when you qualify simply by stating your sexual preference - quite legal, and not unusual - in public.

Maybe an All Black will man up, if we care, but do we really?

So much about us is baffling. Why do gay women outnumber gay men in same-sex unions? It surely can't be the frocks, although one commentator suggests women may want to have children with someone.

Moving right along, all complications aside, permission has been granted for a dead young man's sperm to be used to impregnate someone.

Could this become a trend, obviating the need for live men? Who can be such a drag?

There's the matter of the rights women have over their bodies to consider here, as a current decision by the Dublin High Court also illustrates.

Three judges have agreed that life support can be removed from a brain-dead woman because her 18-week-old foetus could not survive to birth, and had nothing but distress and death to look forward to. The woman was declared clinically dead on December 3, but had been kept functioning without her brain, against the wishes of her family, because of Ireland's right-to-life laws. This decision may not apply in future, the judges warn, to equally dead Irish women whose foetuses are closer to birth. If there's a good side to keeping dead women artificially alive because their foetuses are more important than they are, I will be truly intrigued to hear it.

Staying with women's rights, or lack of them, over their bodies, are we to believe that pretty North Korean women are really being obliged to get pregnant to visiting foreigners in the interests of blackmailing the fathers, or is this yet another North Korean spoof for the festive season?

What's truly amusing then?

Baring your breasts and trying to grab a statue of baby Jesus from a life-size Nativity scene in St Peter's Square on Christmas Day, surely.

Ukrainian Femen activist Yana Zhdanova was quickly nabbed, and her breasts covered, by a Vatican guard. Breasts shrouded by his cape, Zhdanova shouted, "God is Woman". As of course She is, albeit blocked by male chauvinism and bosom envy. And why so coy about breasts, anyway, when paintings of the Virgin routinely had hers on show for centuries?

And a paradox strikes me as the old year passes, the whimpers from England that Winnie-the-Pooh, the actual bear, belongs in Christopher Robin's homeland, not the New York Public Library.

The Times protests that this is not a mere fictional bear, but, "a national concept of childhood Eden - an identifiable woodland in which stuffed animals, belonging to an archetypal nursery, roam in gentle complacency"; a complacency echoed, surely, by Britain's refusal to return the Elgin Marbles, snatched from the Parthenon, to their homeland in Greece.

The argument, I expect, is that they're legitimate plunder, and too good for the Greeks.

• Rosemary McLeod is a journalist and author.