It’s official:
The N.C.A.A. recommends that women not be weighed on a regular basis, said Dr. Ron A. Thompson, a psychologist and eating-disorder therapist in Bloomington, Ind., who consults with the collegiate association. He said he opposed making weights public and the practice of weighing female athletes. Lining athletes up for weigh-ins is a form of “public degradation,” Thompson said.
Naturally, we wouldn’t want to risk breaking their fragile little minds by allowing them to know how much their own freaking bodies weigh! Women apparently can’t handle that knowledge. But they can handle the sacrosanct responsibility of voting… which tells you all you need to know about how important voting truly is.
The thing that’s so stupid about this is that weight is an important aspect of many competitive sports. It determines whether a football team will try to run on its opponents defensive line or not, it is part of the equation determining whether a basketball center will need help defending against his opposite number and it is intrinsic to most martial arts matchups.
If single-sex education is banned, single-sex sports should be too. If you’re not good enough to compete with the big boys, then you’re not good enough, period. Or the little girls, for that matter. I wouldn’t expect men to compete in certain gymnastics events any better than women would in the NFL.