Sally Rooney’s “Even If You Beat Me” initially read to me as just a glorified Commonapp essay, but its genius was making me squirm.
Sophia Chen, Staff Writer
Photo source: Gabriel Benois
IT’S 11:47 P.M.. Summer breathes somewhere beyond my window, but here, bathed in the sickly blue-white glow of my laptop, Bangkok, Tokyo, and Calgary flicker on my screen.
Thirty-six hours without sunlight. Hunched over Zoom for an international British Parliamentary tournament on a hot summer weekend, I quietly wait for the beige webpage of Rooney’s 2015 Dublin Review essay “Even If You Beat Me” to open from the dark window of my debate partner’s Discord message.
In another memory, after completing Zagreb’s Pre-EUDC debate tournament, the classic post-round complaints about the absurdity of university debating culture with my partner suddenly spiralled into the exchange of this essay recommendation.
Rooney who? You don’t know Sally Rooney?
It feels astonishingly late to admit now that despite literary phenom Sally Rooney having sold over 6 million copies with Faber & Faber alone since her 2017 debut novel Conversations with Friends, I hadn’t encountered her work until June this year.
From Britannica to Vanity Fair, countless articles have dissected Rooney’s legacy from a debate champion to famous author. After placing Top Speaker at the 2013 European Universities Debating Championship in Manchester, Rooney recounts her uneasy participation as a privileged, jet-setting student debater discussing weighty global topics in this time-crunched and gamified setting, where she and her elite peers faced no real stakes.
Sitting through the same cold cheap airlines a decade later and attending executive meetings for our university’s Hart House Debate Club gave me a first-hand look into this world for myself.
Rooney’s Critiques on Competitive Debating
As much as I hate the gamification of complex ideas in the same way Rooney critiques how debate culture encourages the trivialization of major worldly issues through its rigid rules, I have to admit that debate’s structure of “contentions” are rather effective for communication. From this angle, Rooney’s essay can also be categorized into its three main arguments:
Contention 1 — Gamification of real-world issues
As we acknowledge the brevity of the fifteen minutes teams have for preparing their case before each debate begins, debaters know to detach emotion from whatever ends up said. Everything is for the sake of the game, and so conventional boundaries on morals are gently folded back.
For sensitive topics, trigger warnings are encouraged. However, they’re often given thoughtlessly. Furthermore, research is always strictly prohibited.
In “Even if You Beat Me,” Rooney reflects on how these “depressing and vaguely immoral” conditions led to her advancement in a quarter-final debate, despite debating on the secession of Republika Srpska by fabricating facts and misrepresenting Eastern European history in front of an audience full of Serbian debaters in Belgrade.
Contention 2 — Rigid social hierarchies
Competitive debate also cultivates a rigid, self-perpetuating social aristocracy where status is explicitly tied to perceived performance. If you debate well, you become “based” and well-liked. People listen to you talk.
As Rooney discusses, these effects are magnified as you start going to tournaments and being released on “tabs” which assign you numerical rankings against other speakers.
However, within hierarchies means that “[s]uccess doesn’t come from within; it’s given to you by other people, and other people can take it away.” Rooney realizes this and decides to distance herself.
Contention 3 — Actor analysis on women
There’s always something “not quite” about the assertive woman’s voice, as Rooney explains. A passionate speech by a woman is almost always more frequently registered as a little more shrilling and distracting. However, us women still imitate these sounds from each other across floors of debate.
Regarding herself, Rooney attributes a woman’s emotionally-charged delivery to two factors: the redirected aggression stemming from competitiveness, and the gendered expectations imposed upon her by judges. As she states, “[c]ompetitive debating is, predictably, male-dominated,” leading to a situation where “[i]f you’re a girl, judges don’t just want to know you’re smart; they want to know you care.” This pressure, she implies, forces women to perform emotion to appeal to a male-dominated perspective.
You can’t really complain though, because it’s all meaningless
Writing this article terrifies me. I’ve thought about writing something like this for a long time, but there’s this basic problem rooted in any silly complaints about debate kids.
It’s just so uninspiring to write an overly long article solely focused on a bunch of college kids and their drama from a school club that takes itself too seriously. Is it really the community’s fault that you feel trapped “with people who are not in any meaningful sense your friends,” or is it simply your problem? In the end, I cut back on my words until my first draft of this issue starved into an empty husk of whatever I truly originally wanted to say.
The problem with discussing the issues with the debate community is that our self-feeding machine oils itself. There isn’t really a true problem. The experiences you can take from debate are just whatever you can make of it.
And so, Rooney’s writing initially struck me as a polished artifact of the system it critiqued: sharp observations about debate’s hierarchies and gendered rigging, wrapped in that unsettling sheen of strategic vulnerability.
But her writing really spoke to me, as it did for many others. By writing our experiences, we reclaim agency. We declare that these voices, forged in the crucible of university life, matter. They offer raw, vital testimony about how systems function and fail. If we learn to dissect the power dynamics in our seminar rooms or debate halls with this clarity, we gain the tools to understand and challenge the larger, more insidious hierarchies shaping our world.
From Ireland to Shanghai and Seoul
After reading financial reports for Tencent in Shanghai, I feel Rooney’s descriptions of gamification in Speech & Debate apply poignantly to the office. Human realities like data poverty and cultural barriers become poker chips in abstract bets on performance metrics for maximizing profits by private funds.
Similarly, in a banchan substack piece on Rooney’s essay, Skylar Kim notes how an “any means necessary” drive to win in debate rounds echoed not only her Speech & Debate experience, but also the pressure-cooker environment of Korean international schools.
And that’s where the real power lies, not just for Rooney, but for any of us wrestling with these microcosms, from university debate circuits to the desks of honour students and ivory-tower corporate cogs. Writing about the intense, often absurd social structures of university like Rooney does in “Even If You Beat Me” transforms the experience by picking apart the relentless pressure to perform.
