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

[narya.livejournal.com]

Oh! I heard that and it also pissed me off to no end! I was even thinking about writing some comments on it! You're my hero :).

[rms10.livejournal.com]

Frank Deford is the guy who does the sports commentary on Wednesday mornings, right? Oh god, I hate him. Gah.

Anyway, one day soon either Michelle Wie or Annika Sorensten is going to make the cut in a big PGA tournament, and it's going to be awesome. I can't wait.

[rifmeister.livejournal.com]

I don't mean to be antagonistic, and I didn't hear the speech, but surely you agree that sports and science are substantially different fields? I can't imagine you arguing, for instance, that we should abolish all women-only sports leagues and require all women to compete head-to-head with men at all sports? It's wrong to segregate intellectual fields precisely because there is no (to my knowledge compelling) evidence of difference in ability between genders. That the most athletic men are larger, faster, and stronger than the most athletic women is fairly well-accepted. Am I missing something?

[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.

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

Well, there are those who would argue that women have less intellectual capacity than men. Like presidents of prominent universities. So be careful there.

And I'm not saying that all women should be required to compete head-to-head with men in all sports. But what if you're a woman who does have that ability? And what if the prizes for the men's competition happen to be far greater than those of the women's? I see no reason to bar her from competing at the highest level just because the highest level happens to be all-male.

And I just don't buy the argument that a woman competing in the Masters would spell doom for women's sports in general. On the contrary, I think it would encourage more women's participation, whether as athletes or spectators.

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

I'm considering writing to NPR about it. We'll see if I get that far.

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I've found him annoying in the past, but this time he really got on my nerves.

[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.

[lokiect.livejournal.com]

do it! do it!
sounds like a bunch of people should... I hate to think that people in general think this kind of attitude is ok (yeah, I know, i know, ideals, reality, I know, but still!)

[nuclearpolymer.livejournal.com]

I guess it's a question of why there are different competition categories. For example, a sport might have a category for people over a certain age. There is usually the expectation that the senior group is set up so that older people can compete against their peers and get recognition, and that the senior group will be less good than the standard group. But if an older person could be competitive in the standard group, it seems like they should be allowed to go for the greater rewards there.

[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.

[dcltdw]

I know ballroom has Adult A and B categories; B is 35+. I don't remember offhand if 35+ can even compete in A...

Without reflecting on it much, I think it'd be great if Wie trashed the living heck out of the men's tourney. :)

[ukelele.livejournal.com]

I am just as happy as anyone to see Annika Sorenstam kick ass :), but there's an asymmetry here that I wonder about. So we say -- let's let the women who are really good compete against the men, sure. I think this is equivalent to saying -- the men's level is the good level, and the women's level is inferior. Because...do we let men compete at the women's level? Well, no, we don't seem to. Who would? The men who miss the cut in the PGA? But then we're back to the same thing -- the good level (coincidentally almost all male) and the inferior level (coincidentally all female).

I do think there's an argument to be made here that by having Sorenstam et alia compete against men we are, at the very least, exposing that assumption, and that exposing that assumption might be bad for women's sports (who wants to watch an inferior product?). I do not contest the axiom that Mr. Deford is a jerk (I'm not familiar with him but am happy to defer), and I'm not going to make the leap of logic that women shouldn't compete against men on that basis.

I think there's an important way in which the sports and science realms are parallel, and an important way in which they are not. The "are not" is that, in fact, men have a large statistical advantage over women in terms of strength and height and mass, and those are crucially important in some sports. (Of course, there's dexterity and quickness, and there are sports which don't care so much about height. I'm sure the picture is very different for tennis than it is for football.) The same doesn't hold for intellectual capacity. (I know that this is not settled in all circles, though I also think that Summers's remarks were more nuanced than people generally gave him credit for.) The "are" is that gender segregation runs the risk in both cases of a separate-and-unequal scenario, and that gender competition exposes underlying (possibly bogus) assumptions about sex-linked abilities (preferences, values, etc.).

I think I ought to have a point here, but I don't, because I'm still in the "struggling to articulate" stage.

[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.

[gigglefest.livejournal.com]

Almost entirely off-topic, but... Frank Deford lost a little girl to cystic fibrosis when she was 8 or 9. His book about Alex goes into some discussion of kids, gender and athleticism: how once kids with CF survive past early childhood, boys typically live a few years longer (he was writing in the early 80s, I don't know if this is still the case). Doctors don't know why this is but he suspects it's because little boys with CF are still encouraged to play outside, and so they still develop lung capacity, etc, and this doesn't happen so much with girls. Alex was a very feminine little girl, but he wished she were more interested in sports - in the end it wouldn't have mattered, but maybe it would have kept her alive a little bit longer...

[narya.livejournal.com]

Well, it's nice to know that because it makes me more willing to give him the benefit of the doubt that the comments had good intentions and weren't intended purely as abstract social opinions. And if what he wants is more girls to be involved in sports and to have that be a normal part of girls' lives, I could get behind that as a goal. Unfortunately, he didn't really seem to articulate that and what he did say just came across as really patronizing.

[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!

[astra-nomer.livejournal.com]

yes, men and women differ physically. Men are going to win in terms of strength and size, but not all sports are about purely strength and size.

And men and women *think* differently, too. I think that's been pretty well documented. But just because your approach to problem-solving is different, doesn't mean you're wrong. So the parallels are still there -- men and women have different strengths, both mentally and physically. Perhaps it's just that the physical differences are more obvious.

[veryhappykayla.livejournal.com]

But physical strength and size, while certainly affected by environment (quality of practice and training), are quite directly a function of genes and gender. On the other hand, intellectual abilities, while certainly affected by genes and gender (which chemicals we've each got soaking our gray matter), is much more influenced by environment. The average difference math scores between males and females certainly exists, but it is very much dwarfed by the difference in math scores between rich and poor kids.

I'm never going to be able to successfully wrestle my 6'4"" brother -- and believe me, it's not through lack of trying. But he and I can go head-to-head (pun not *really* intended) on thinking stuff and it doesn't matter in the slightest whether I've got a Y chromosome or not. And I'll cheerfully wrestle anyone, 6'4"" or not, who suggests otherwise.

I'm not sure exactly what I feel about the actual issue with the NPR guy. But while I don't think one needs to, or should, make the jump from physical differences of ability to intellectual, denying that they and their resultant level consequences exist simply because one might (accurately) fear others doing so... seems not quite right either.

[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.)