My local WNBA team is called the Washington Mystics. While I love attending live sporting events, I have yet to attend a Mystics’ game. If I were given free Mystics tickets, I doubt that I would go. I don’t find the level of basketball played in the WNBA to be worth the hassle of D.C. traffic, even if the tickets are free.
Saying that does not make me a misogynist.
However, according to feminists like Maggie Mertens, my dislike of women’s sports undermines gender equality. In a finger-wagging article published by The Atlantic, Mertens makes this astounding claim:
The thinking goes that if women’s sports were worthy of more coverage, they would receive it. But as Cooky points out, a lot of our perceptions of how interesting women’s sports are come from the media itself. “Men’s sports are going to seem more exciting,” she says. “They have higher production values, higher-quality coverage, and higher-quality commentary … When you watch women’s sports, and there are fewer camera angles, fewer cuts to shot, fewer instant replays, yeah, it’s going to seem to be a slower game, [and] it’s going to seem to be less exciting.”
Setting Mertens’ assertion of media bias aside, I want to point out that when my daughter was a toddler, I bought her all manner of age-appropriate sports equipment — little basketballs, soccer balls, and even a tiny little glove and baseball. Turns out, she excels at math and science. Which is good since it also turns out that she’s not very athletic. We gave it a shot, though. For a few years, she even played soccer. And I continue to play baseball with her in the backyard.
I relate that anecdote about my daughter to point out that I am not opposed to women playing sports. I’m all for encouraging our daughters to play sports; if, by some miracle, my daughter scores a sports scholarship to college, I’ll cry tears of joy.
I just don’t want to watch women who aren’t related to me playing sports.
Because women aren’t nearly as athletic as men. In turn, that means that women’s sports are an inferior product to men’s sports. That’s a fact. At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it’s a fact because it’s a biological fact that men are bigger, stronger, and faster than women.
Sadly, though, in our society that is increasingly dominated by progressive ideology and easily triggered SJWs, saying those facts out loud will get you branded as a misogynist.
John McEnroe found this out the hard way almost a year ago. McEnroe made the mistake of speaking the truth in a now-infamous interview on NPR, when he was challenged by Lulu Garcia-Navarro for referring to Serena Williams as the best female tennis player of all time. Garcia-Navarro insisted that Williams should be considered the best tennis player of all time without the qualifier of “female.” McEnroe bluntly responded: “[I]f she played the men’s circuit she’d be like 700 in the world.”
I don’t know if McEnroe’s ranking is correct (he does know far more about tennis than almost anybody else on the planet), but his point stands. As great as Serena Williams is on the women’s tour, she would be an afterthought — at best — on the men’s tour. Because she is a woman, Serena Williams could not compete with the best male tennis players, not even close.
In 1998, Serena Williams lost to Karsten Braasch, who was ranked #203 on the men’s tour at the time. This match happened because both she and Venus Williams thought they could handle him:
[T]he two siblings had something of an inflated understanding of their abilities, developed from their being fresh-faced, and still in need of a few life lessons learned. So they marched themselves into the men’s ATP office to announce rather confidently they were ready to beat any tour player ranked around the Top 200 if someone wanted to take the challenge.
It just so happened that Karsten Braasch of Germany, once a top-40 player, but at the time ranked 203rd, was in ear shot. He thought it would be fun so stepped up to say he’d be happy to take them on.
The date was set and the day arrived. Braasch played a warmup round of golf in the morning, then came to Melbourne Park. The threesome went out to a back court where each sister would have a one-set shot at Braasch. Word had spread around the grounds that the event was taking place, which caused tournament officials to restrict admittance to the area to only those with badges.
Braasch would smoke cigarettes and sip beer during the changeovers, and to be honest no longer looked the part of a fit professional athlete. It made no matter. Braasch led 5-0 over Serena before winning the set 6-1, and then posted a 6-2 set victory over Venus.
The uproar caused by McEnroe’s commonsense answer is the reason I’ve made it a general rule not to express this particular opinion — I don’t like watching women’s sports — because I’ve been afraid of the backlash from those I consider friends. The cultural climate has caused otherwise rational people to bristle at someone expressing a preference for men’s sports over women’s sports, nevermind someone expressing the fact that men are better at sports than women.
Upon reflection, I’ve decided to put my opinion in print because if we allow ourselves to be bullied out of expressing the truth, our society is lost.
So I unabashedly state that I don’t like watching women’s sports because women aren’t nearly as good as men are at them. I love watching sports, but I only have so much leisure time to do so. Why should I spend that time watching an inferior product?
During this past March Madness, I switched over from a men’s game to a women’s game. The difference was astounding. The pace of the women’s game and the skills of even the best of the women on the court were noticeably inferior. It’s not misogynistic to say so; it’s just speaking the truth.
The website LiveStrong points out:
Due to higher estrogen levels, women have more body fat than men. The leanest female athletes, such as top marathon runners, have body fat of approximately 8 percent, compared with 4 percent for their male counterparts. In addition, women’s bodies are less muscular, but their joints are more flexible, which gives them greater range of motion — an advantage in sports such as gymnastics. The wider female pelvis also affects the alignment and movement of the extremities. Men have higher levels of testosterone, which gives them a performance advantage in other ways.
Testosterone enables men to develop larger skeletal muscles as well as larger hearts. Men also have a larger proportion of Type 2 muscle fibers, which generate power, strength and speed. Testosterone also increases the production of red blood cells, which absorb oxygen, giving men an even greater aerobic advantage, reports New York Times writer Gina Kolata, in an interview with Dr. Mark Tarnopolsky, an exercise researcher at McMaster University in Ontario.
Denying that men have physical advantages over women, specifically in regards to sports, requires squinting your eyes tightly shut and plugging your ears while screaming “I can’t hear you!” Yet, while blaming things like media bias, people like Maggie Mertens still assert that women’s sports are not an inferior product to men’s sports, and to say otherwise is misogynistic. In the Leftist world, a circle can indeed be a square.
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