Rant. You've been warned.

[astra_nomer]

I found myself offended by this story I heard on Morning Edition today.

Basically, Frank Deford argues that Michelle Wie's playing against male golfers is bad for women's sports as a whole. By playing against and beating men, she draws attention to herself perhaps, but also draws attention away from women's sports, which already suffer from lack of audiences. And he trotted out the usual arguments about smaller muscle mass and physical differences leading to women being unable to compete fairly with men.

Of course, being a woman who competes with men on a daily basis (careerwise anyway), I felt like he might as well have said that since women's brains are smaller, they can't fairly compete again men intellectually, so why not set up a parallel women's career ladder in the sciences. Then you can systematically marginalize women scientists the way women athletes have been.

Okay, so maybe it's not a fair comparison. But the attitude about the inferiority of women's bodies is all too similar to attitudes about the inferiority of women's brains.

Grrr.

Comments

[rifmeister.livejournal.com]

Hmmm... other comments were made while I posted my comment. It seems like this commentator really is a jerk. But I still don't quite understand what he said that enraged.

[narya.livejournal.com]

I think what you're missing is that he said that Wie had, in effect, a moral obligation to not compete with other men because by doing so she might be attracting attention away from the equivalent womens sports. He said this even though he acknowledged that in her case she was competitive with the men.

I support the idea of women's sports, with the rationale that men do have a physiological advantage in most sports. However, his logic had nothing to do with her ability to compete and came across just as a very patronizing "even if you're good at the sport, you have to stay over there".

[rifmeister.livejournal.com]

Ah. Yeah, I certainly don't agree that Wie has any obligation not to compete against men.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

If I were to try and make the argument that women shouldn't compete in the men's league (I think it's a choice between two non-ideal answers, so I don't know which one I like better), the argument it sounds like he's making would be sort of a second-order subsidiary.

In an ideal world, there would be a women's league and a men's league, and they would have the same amount of prestige, and the same amount of money associated with winning, and the same TV coverage, and so on. But we don't have that ideal world, what we have is something between that and having the Good League and the Less Good League. The Less Good League has less money and less public interest. So, of course the really good players in the Less Good League want to go play in the Good League. But the less good players in the Good League can't go play in the Less Good League, so that seems unfair - it's not actually dividing based on how good you are (sort of like the major leagues and minor leagues in baseball).

So, for any individual really good woman, it's better for her right now to play in the men's leagues. But it's less good for the women's leagues if what they end up with is not just the women (who are on average less powerful), but the *less good* women (since you lose all the really good women to the men's leagues). In the ideal future world, maybe someday the winner of the women's golf tournament would have a better score than the winner of the men's golf tournament, and then golf aficionados would actually watch the women's tournaments! That would be exciting.

So it's really an argument that women should sacrifice their own potential accomplishments towards the goal of moving women's sports more towards equality. Which would be a nice thing for people to *do*, sure, but it's not something you can *tell* people to to do, or find them morally unrighteous because they're not doing.

[nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com]

Actually, I'm not sure that an ideal world would end up with the men and women's leagues having equal publicity and rewards. I mean, if you want to watch the fastest people run, and that happens to be the men's league, why would you be equally excited to see the women's race? As far as school or municipal programs whose main purpose is to facilitate participation, they should give equal money to men and women's teams and facilities to provide equal opportunities. But commercially, it seems like just a question of what people would want to pay money to watch.

[narya.livejournal.com]

I think the idea is that in an ideal world you wouldn't need to artificially induce commercial equality, it would just happen naturally.

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I think it depends.

So, if the non-ideal world we live in is the one where people think men are better than women, and that's why they watch men's sports, then the ideal world would have commercial equality, because we would no longer be sexist pigs.

However, nuclearpolymer is saying that there may be sexism-orthogonal reasons why people express spots preferences. If we live in the ideal world where no one is a sexist pig, and people's motivation for watching running is that they like to watch really fast people, men's running will still be more popular than women's running, because the best men are just faster than the best women.

That does not, however, mean that all men's sports would be more popular than all women's sports. For example, women's soccer or basketball might be more popular than the men's versions if people happened to really enjoy watching teamwork and cooperative strategies and group loyalty (which women are Just Better At in those sports than men, though perhaps that is culturally linked and would no longer be true in our non-sexist-pig world). If people's motivation for watching sports was hot people in Lycra, the Women's Tour of Italy would be more popular than the Tour de France, because women are just on average hotter. All of these motivations interact in some way with sex differences, but none of them is sexism-motivated and subsequently they would not be erased in the Ideal No Sexist Pigs World.

[nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com]

It is a little hard for me to postulate about why people like watching sports, because I don't. My guess it that one big reason is that that some folks like to identify with the winner by cheering them or wearing the same T-shirt. And while society considers the "generic person" to be male, both men and women may identify with a male athlete, but men will not identify with a female athlete. Thus, men's sports are going to be more popular until society's concept of a "generic person" changes. This is maybe the same reason that the main character of most children's books or cartoons is male, and that the main character of most movies is male. Yet at the same time, I think that women identify with male athletes/characters less strongly than they might female characters. So they are getting less encouragement to play sports or be superheroes or whatever.

Now, some of you are probably going to claim that you like to watch sports to see the demonstration of skill, or because athletes are sexy...but do you think that's why most people watch sports? Because I've always been kind of curious.

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

And while society considers the "generic person" to be male, both men and women may identify with a male athlete, but men will not identify with a female athlete.

It's also the case that up until the last century or so, sports were considered unfeminine, so that kept a lot of women from becoming atheletes. That is part of why most sports fans are men and why the most popular (i.e. lucrative) sports are played by men. I think it's only now that we're seeing a large numbers of women athletes, and only now that they are beginning to compete on equal footing with men in certain sports, like golf for instance.

I think you can draw a lot of parallels to women's education, for instance -- separate colleges for men and women, active discouragement to women pursuing certain subjects, etc. Heck, it wasn't until the 1960's that Harvard allowed women undergrads use its libraries!

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

There are some sports where there's closer-to-equality, either in ability or publicity. There are women jockeys, and they compete in the same races. (Only one woman to win the Triple Crown yet, though).

In tennis, though, I can name about the same number of women and men, though they don't play against each other. The prize money in Wimbledon for women is, well, nearly as high as the prize money for men - compare that with PGA versus LPGA in golf, where it's a five-fold difference. Maybe some of the equality in tennis popularity has come about due to Billie Jean King beating Bobby Riggs back in the '70s. (He was 55 and she was 27, so they weren't equally at the top of their game. But it was still exciting.)

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

I think this is a really important point. Women's tennis is as popular as men's tennis. If a world-class female player played a world-class male player, the woman would get crushed. People are perfectly happy to watch tennis games that they know are not between the Best Players in the World.

If the best three or four women left women's tennis to compete in men's tennis, women's tennis would suffer badly. Why the hell would I watch women's tennis knowing that I wouldn't see Maria Sharapova?

(Admittedly I'd pay to watch Maria Sharapova set a thermostat, but my main point is still true.)

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

But most sports don't have gender parity anywhere near that of tennis. How many world-class female athletes can you think of outside tennis stars? I bet you can count them on one hand. Now how many males? Bet you run out of fingers.

If all sports had equivalent women's leagues that were as prominent as in tennis, then this wouldn't be an issue.

[firstfrost.livejournal.com]

If all sports had equivalent women's leagues that were as prominent as in tennis, then this wouldn't be an issue.

Well, yeah. That's back to my "in an ideal world." So one question is whether women playing in the men's leagues when they aren't equal prominence pushes things towards or away from the ideal world, and after thinking about it more, I think it pushes *towards*.

The LPGA has much less publicity and money. Wie playing in the PGA gets her tons of publicity, which bleeds into publicity for golf for women, which perhaps brings LPGA tournaments more publicity and money, which then perhaps eventually means that Wie doesn't *have* to play in the men's leagues.

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

You're probably right, but I think it would be reasonable to say that Michelle Wie playing in the PGA means that the LPGA can't benefit as much from her star value. I don't happen to agree with that, but it's not a crazy argument to make.

[kirisutogomen.livejournal.com]

Well, yeah, obviously. My only point was that simply not being as good as the men doesn't relegate women to lower public profiles. Simply playing at a lower level doesn't explain why the women's side of a sport is so much less popular.