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I am a woman and I can recognize that the athletes in women's competitions have a similar strength as myself. I don't really have a problem looking at a female Olympic swimmer and saying, "Yeah, she's way better than me at swimming. She trained very hard to get there." She is "best in the world" in a category I belong to.
Meanwhile, I could look over at the high school boys team and say, "They are going through the exact same training regimen as myself, I'm even practicing in the same lane as some of them, but their race times are still faster than mine. Sexual dimorphism is weird." It's like we were two different species. I wouldn't try to race a barracuda.
I'm not arguing "fair competition" though some are in this thread. I'm arguing largely "freedom of association," our long lost freedom's last vestige. It should be possible for people with particular handicaps to set up leagues that only people with those specific handicaps can participate in. Why might they do this? if it doesn't appeal to you, don't worry about it. It appeals to a lot of people, hence Women's and Paralympic Games.
Sure. Now think of how boys who have physical development issues feel when they put in more effort than said girls, get less results because of their development issues, and are then told "tough luck, you lost the genetic lottery" while they see the girls who didn't work as hard as them celebrated. I have no problems with the existence of women's leagues. I only take issue with the lack of humility some people exhibit in demanding to be considered the equal of people who they have explicitly excluded from competing with them while sneering at those with other types of disadvantage.
Do people sneer at Junior Varsity, Paralympics, and club sports? In the US at least we seem to be happy that someone's moving around at all, and will set up leagues for all sorts of ability levels and shower them with participation awards until kingdom come.
nobody sneers at those things, but nobody really watches them either unless you personally know someone on the team. But meanwhile the women who win gold medals are showered with prizes and fawning acclaim. It's ridiculous.
In the US, a bigger issue than the olympics is college athletic scholarships. There's only so many, and they're required to give them out equally to men and women, and all the men's are used up with the football and basketball teams. So colleges go out of their way to recruit women for relatively obscure sports like lacrosse or field hockey, give them a huge boost to admissions and possibly a full scholarship. Meanwhile the men who are objectively better at those sports get nothing, and often not even a division 1 team to play in. This is expliclitly and openly used to promote feminism by showing that "women can do anything that men can do," even though women are already ahead in college admissions. The ones at elite schools then go on to become management consultants or whatever, with the power to promote feminism in the workplace, while the men get sidelined. It's a very deliberate and intentional effort to take away something that men are obviously better at and give affirmative action to women.
I will not defend Title IX. The rest of your comment reads like a "sour grapes" complaint. If people like to watch something, buy merchandise, etc, shouldn't they be allowed to do so? And if other groups do not inspire such a fandom, unfortunate for them but they can't force people to appreciate their matches.
Women's sports isn't as popular as male sports, so it's not as if there isn't some bias for excellence in what people prefer to watch.
It's tough to find the right words to write about this without sounding unhinged or sour grapes. I personally don't care about sports at all, I just recognize that other people care about it. And I find it... odd, that there seems to be this huge push at all levels to promote women's sports far above whatever the normal baseline interest would be.
Like, I have never in my life met anyone who did female boxing. As far as I know it just didn't exist in my town growing up, unless there's some weird underground female boxing club I wasn't aware of. There was nothing to stop it, women just weren't interested in getting punched in the face. And yet apparently we need this huge international tournament to promote it, with endless television hype and big cash prize for whatever woman brings home the gold? Seems fishy.
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College crew was known for years as the Title IX destroyer. Our men's team didn't own any boats, we borrowed them from the women's team, who happened to own twice as many as they needed.
I should also note, I watch a decent amount of women's sports. I used to catch a lot of Roussey's championship bouts, and my mother and I watched a lot of Caitlin Clark's basketball games last year. It's perfectly possible to make an entertaining and profitable women's product, doing so just often goes against the ideology they're trying to promote. I actually think social media has had a salutary effect, hot Olympians can do the influencer thing, which encourages an emphasis on physical beauty, which makes it all more entertaining.
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That’s not true in the Ivy League lol.
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