A female advocate of the WNBA lectures people on why their reasons for not watching a terrible parody of a men’s sport are not acceptable:
This friend played sports at a high level, and he asked me, tentatively, whether he could explain why he doesn’t watch women’s sports. “Of course,” I said. “Let’s hear it.” I wanted nothing more than to understand why someone like him—an athlete, a millennial, a feminist—had never turned on a women’s basketball game. Or, more precisely, I wanted to hear why he believes he hasn’t.
“I’ve actually thought about this a lot over the years,” he said. “Because I often feel some level of guilt about it, but when it comes down to it, I just think that if I’m going to take the time to watch sports, I want to be watching them at the peak of how they can be played—speed, strength, all of it. And to me, that pinnacle is happening on the men’s side.”
I nodded as my friend spoke. He hit all the expected notes. I don’t watch because they can’t dunk; I don’t watch because they’re like a good boy’s high school team; I don’t watch because, you know, I could probably beat them one-on-one.
Perhaps you even saw your own reasoning reflected in his. At its heart, this reasoning insists that people don’t watch the WNBA because men run faster and jump higher. That is, in fact, true. Most men do run faster and jump higher. And, yes, it’s incredibly exciting when one of those men runs fast and jumps high and we watch, in awe.
It’s a soothing rationale, this little story we tell ourselves about our insatiable appetite for windmill jams. It’s foolproof, too, because this reasoning doesn’t just absolve sports fans of any further introspection, but more important it absolves the marketers, the TV networks and the sports apparel companies. Hell, it even seems to pardon the women themselves: It’s not your fault; sports fans crave something you just can’t give them. This reasoning presents itself as more than logical; it’s biological.
Actually, it’s pathological. It’s chronic, and irrational, and it’s been stalking the WNBA since its founding. In the U.S., this lie is the serial killer of women’s professional leagues. To name a few: the American Basketball League (1996–98), the Women’s United Soccer Association (2000–03), the Women’s Professional Softball League (’97–01) and Women’s Professional Soccer (’07–12).
The WNBA, though, is resilient. When launched in 1996, the league was ahead of its time—in almost every way. Long before Big Business saw the value, the players of the W stood against racial injustice, and for equality, and took the hits—“Every direction we turned, we were walking into a wall,” says WNBA legend Sue Bird—for representing the folks at society’s margins. “People think you’re supposed to look and talk and be a certain way, but the WNBA blasts all of those things out of the water,” says A’ja Wilson of the Las Vegas Aces. “And you should want that. We are standing on the shoulders of women who didn’t back down just because casual sports fans didn’t think they were worthy. That’s what makes our league better, because we have faced those hurdles. I can’t think of another league that gets hit with every single last knock, and I don’t see that going away, but we’re not going to let that stop us.”
Understanding why we watch sports isn’t just a thought experiment. It has practical implications. Rather than passively believing the WNBA is biologically inferior, we can actively recognize that no athletes in modern history have faced more cultural obstacles than the players of the W. Not only are comparisons to the men ubiquitous—and the differences rendered clearer because of the unique intimacy of the sport—but also, more important, no women’s league has a higher percentage of Black athletes, meaning that for nearly a quarter century the WNBA has been rowing against the headwinds of racism, sexism and anti-LGBTQ sentiment.
What a deeply stupid article! The amusing thing is that this idiot woman is trying to sell the WNBA on the very same basis that has most – not many, but most – former NBA fans turning off the men’s game, thereby offering additional support for my hypothesis that SJWs are both evil and stupid.
Most women’s sports are not an alternative or a variant of the similar men’s sport. They are parodies. And they harbor absolutely no appeal for any actual fan of the sport itself, unless one happens to find entertainment in the comedic aspect of watching sustained incompetence.
There are some women’s sports that are superior to the men’s versions. For example, women’s tennis is better in the rare circumstances that it is competitive for the same reason that men’s tennis was better when the players used smaller wooden rackets. It’s boring to watch two 6’6″ men using oversized titanium weaponry to launch rocket serves at each other that neither of them can return. And women’s soccer actually makes for relatively interesting viewing now that no top-level male player not named Ronaldo or Messi is capable of beating a defender one-on-one anymore.
(I think the men’s game could use bigger fields or two less players per side to open up more space, but that’s a tangent for another day.)
In general, women’s sports are tedious, parodistic, and parasitical on the male versions. Which is why the WNBA will collapse, sooner rather than later, as a consequence of the NBA’s vanishing audience.
