Has anyone heard that there is a dangerous virus going around? A worthy subject for a blog. Worthy, as the President would say in his mini-vocabulary way, “very powerfully, very strongly, like you wouldn’t believe, probably the most-worthy subject in the history of, probably, the world.”
Occasionally, though, I like to think about other stuff.
This blog will be about other stuff. There are, after all, other things going on. I am afraid that this blog will likely go against the grain of a lot of people. No matter. I could never get that grain stuff right in wood shop anyway. I want to talk about why women athletes are not as good as men.
I got to thinking about this because of the lawsuit brought by women soccer players. They want “pay equity” with men. So, the lawyers on the other side, as was their job, argued against that. Part of what they said involved a distinction in skill levels. They cited a deposition from Carli Lloyd, star of the World Cup winning US Women’s Soccer Team admitting that the women’s national team could not compete successfully against the senior men’s national team because competing against 16 or 17 year-old-boys “is about as far as the women’s national team can go.” They also cited a Duke University study that explained a scientific basis for “the average 10-12% performance gap between elite male and elite female athletes” based on “skeletal structure, muscle composition, heart and lung capacity, including VO2 max, red blood cell count, body fat, and the absolute ability to process carbohydrates”; and, finally noting that the same study said, “no matter how great Katie Ledecky gets . . . . she will never beat Michael Phelps or his endurance counterparts in the pool.”
These arguments created a furor. The public uproar over the sexism of actually saying that stuff ultimately got the lawyers fired. The client replaced them in the lawsuit. Yes, they actually got fired. C’mon! Has the Trump attack on facts so perverted us that we’d rather retreat to comfortable bromides rather than face the possibility of conditions we’d rather not accept?
It is hardly unreasonable to say that female athletes are not as skilled as male athletes. Actually, the arguments that the fired lawyers made are somewhat tame.
I would also point out the obvious fact that men’s and women’s sports are played separately. This would be entirely unnecessary if men and women were equally skilled. There would be no WNBA. There would be no men’s and women’s Olympic teams. There would be no “ladies tees.” Hell, men and women billiard players don’t play against each other.
And don’t give me Bobby Riggs and Billy Jean King. Bobby Riggs was 55 and Billy Jean King was 29 and the best woman player in the world. That match meant nothing. If there is truly athletic equality between the sexes, then the reverse of the Riggs/King match should also be meaningful – that Rafael Nadal, now 34, would lose to Steffi Graf, now 51. Never happen.
Let me explain what I am not saying. First, I am not saying that the lesser athletic skill of women justifies even slightly an argument for general male superiority. That one gender might be better at one thing or another hardly means that being one or the other means that they are not entitled to equal rights. But, as I once told a woman with a speech impediment who came to me wanting to sue an employer who fired her from her telephone operator job, “you can’t be a blind bus driver.”
I am also not saying that the skill distinction between women and men in sports must necessarily mean that women should be paid less than men. In our capitalist system, compensation is not determined by skill level. It is determined by how much money the compensated are making for the compensator. If a women’s tennis tournament makes as much money as a men’s, even though the men may play the game better, the men should not be paid more.
O.k. I’ve had my say. Go ahead and disagree. Get mad. Throw something at the computer. For at least a little while, that’ll take your mind off this crazy coronavirus shit and the Orange Menace. I hope so.
We were right 