It is ironic that nothing has garnered more publicity for women’s sports than the encroachment of men (i.e., trans women) into women-only spaces. Women crashing men-only spaces is now a given, and men in drag is not a new thing but men dressing up in the uniforms of female athletes and competing against them is definitely something new under the sun.
Predictably, the lunatic fringe supports the idea of trans women competing against women, even though all evidence indicates the result is that it enables also-ran male athletes to dominate in the female realm and in some instances results in violence against women! If you like to root for the underdog (or should I say underbitch?), go ahead, but in this situation, you’ll likely die of old age before your faith is rewarded.
There is plenty of pushback against this nonsense. In essence, the “conservative” position is that there is no place for wannabe women in women’s sports. I concur, but is this truly a conservative opinion?
For the most part the trans infiltration has been limited to amateur sports. Thanks to the famous/infamous Title IX, which has been in effect for more than 50 years, “equity” in college sports is mandated. While this has resulted in more intercollegiate sports teams and athletic scholarships for women, the nasty secret is that in order to maintain said equity it has been necessary to cut men’s sports. Of course, this is not happening with football or basketball, since those sports are major revenue generators. Other sports, even baseball and men’s track and field, are vulnerable, however.
Men’s college teams have long served as quasi-minor leagues for professional teams. Professional sports leagues for women, however, are few and far between. The best known, the WNBA, is largely subsidized by the NBA but the league has never been self-supporting since its inception in 1997. Clearly, no matter how good a woman player is she will never be “promoted” to the NBA, but it’s a good PR move.
There is also a National Women’s Soccer League but the players are not getting rich. The average salary in May 2022 was $54,000. Obviously, a woman could take a traditional job as a schoolteacher or a secretary and do just as well – with more job security. FIFA (International Federation of Association Football), which governs national soccer associations, has been under fire for inequity in men’s and women’s prize pools. Even after coughing up more dough for women, the men’s payout is still four times the women’s payout ($440,000,000 vs. $110,000,000). The fact that men’s soccer brings in much more revenue, thanks to higher attendance and higher ticket prices, is ignored by the equal-pay-for-equal-work ideologues.
If sports fans are reluctant to spring for tickets to watch women play soccer and basketball, one factor might be the high percentage of lesbians. The obnoxious soccerette Megan Rapinoe is perhaps the best known sapphic athlete (saphlete?) in the United States. If you Google “Lesbian Soccer Players,” however, you will see she has plenty of companions. A writer named Natalie on Autostraddle, a lesbian web site, noted that the 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup “just might be the most openly queer sporting event in history.” If the soccer moms of yesteryear only knew!
Basketball is also a lesbian hotbed, pun intended. Sheryl Swoopes was the best known until Brittney Griner ran into that little drug dustup while playing in Russia. Another is Sue Bird, who is “engaged” to Megan Rapinoe. Interesting to note that another famed lesbian hoopster, Kate Starbird, a former basketball star at Stanford, is currently an advocate for government censorship of social media.
On Outsports, another queer-oriented web site, Ken Schultz posted a 2021 article titled “Over a third [e.g., 9] of all-time Top 25 WNBA players are out LGBTA athletes.” One can’t help but wonder if the NWSL and WNBA are broken down into cliques of heterosexuals and lesbians.
If you took a poll of the fans in attendance at NWSL or WNBA contests, I suspect you would find a disproportionate number of gender queer folk. This is not new. Many years ago (1980 or thereabouts) I went to see the Dallas Diamonds of the short-lived Women’s Professional Basketball League. Though I was not a big basketball fan and could have cared less about women’s sports, a friend of mine wanted to go see Nancy Lieberman, who was the face of the franchise (and perhaps the league) and had a highly marketable (i.e., she was white, heterosexual, and personable) personality. Tickets were cheap and I had nothing better to do so I went along. I don’t remember much about the game but to this day I will never forget the crowd. I have never seen so many people of indeterminate sex in one place. (Admittedly, I have never attended a Pride parade.)
A latter-day femme phenom is Caitlin Clark, a University of Iowa senior who has been rewriting the college basketball records books. Another highly marketable athlete (not only white and heterosexual but religious!), she has put butts in the seats wherever Iowa plays. She will surely boost attendance in the WNBA when she turns pro, but the revenue increase will hardly challenge NBA standards.
Given the high proportion of lesbians in basketball and soccer, it is remarkable that parents would encourage their daughters to play these sports. I’m not saying such girls wouldn’t turn out to be lesbians anyway, but I can’t help but wonder if some sort of grooming isn’t taking place. For sure, if the percentage of homosexuals were this high on male basketball and soccer teams, many parents would steer their boys away from these sports. Of course, in men’s sports homosexuality is relatively rare. They do crop up occasionally in solo sports, such as swimming and diving, figure skating, and tennis, but they are exceedingly rare in team sports. There have always been more rumors than out-of-the-closet players. For boys, grooming is more of a problem with clergymen, male teachers and scoutmasters. After a bad first-half, a football coach might break your balls but he won’t caress them.
No matter what the sport, homosexuality is much more popular in women’s sports than in men’s sports. When a female athlete comes out of the closet, it is a ho-hum event. When a male athlete does so, it is headline news because it is so unusual. It is a rare indeed when a man can lay claim to be more stunning and brave than a female counterpart!
Sexuality aside, is there any benefit to society when women play sports? Now I’m all for physically fit females, but this was not a problem in years past. When women’s sports teams were few and far between and fewer women went to college, land whales were almost as rare as white whales. Today body-positivity has clearly triumphed over physical fitness.
Given the fact that goalkeeping, ball handling, making corner kicks, shooting free throws, and other sports-specific skills are of little use in the real world, why waste so much time developing them? The human body is at its peak for relatively few years. For most people, just when they get good at something, their body starts to fall apart. Also, if such skills are developed to their utmost, all it takes is an injury to render them mediocre.
Of course, in days of old, a girl whose tomboy ways persisted into adolescence would have been severely discouraged. She would have been taught sewing, cooking, and the basics of childcare and running a home. Of course, those are merely skills that last a lifetime, so you can’t expect a modern woman to waste time on such trifles.
While many parents might not want to push their daughters into sports, they can’t help but notice all the female college scholarships on the table. If competing in sports helps alleviate the parental burden of financially supporting a college girl, mom and dad might reluctantly encourage their daughters to play sports and pray that they won’t get groomed in the process. After all, mom and dad probably want grandchildren more than they want their daughter to be a college grad.
Of course, young men have always been motivated by athletic scholarships. If your chances of an academic scholarship are slim and you have some sort of athletic talent, you can still go to college for free. This has long been a way out of the ghetto for young black men, and if a college ever did decide to deep-six a losing men’s basketball program or football, charges of racism and BLM demonstrations would likely result.
Defenders of men’s college sports acknowledge that few amateur athletes will make a living as professionals but extol the “life lessons” they have learned. You know, teamwork, discipline, the importance of playing by the rules, etc. The implication has always been that the lessons learned in any collective enterprise such as a sports team will carry over to one’s demeanor in a corporation or society at large. Since life lessons were a thing before organized sports leagues were founded, it makes one wonder how society got along before Major League Baseball, the National Football League, the National Basketball Association, and the National Hockey League were invented. I would suspect that one could learn many life lessons from pursuits other than organized sports…like learning to play a musical instrument, taking care of younger siblings, doing chores, running a small business, learning a foreign language. Before big bucks took over sports, parents were less inclined to indulge their sons’ interest in baseball, football, basketball, or whatever.
There may be some truth to the assertion that if boys are playing sports it keeps them out of trouble. This does nothing for boys without athletic skills, but let’s assume that for those who do participate in organized sports are venting a fair amount of male energy that might otherwise be expended on anti-social pursuits. The female rates of violent crime are nowhere close to the male crime rate, however, so if female sports were banned, a female crime wave would not result.
Of course, life lessons can also be dragged out to justify women’s sports, but with the added benefit of showing women how to compete in a male-dominant world. While the feminists have long decried male culture, they applaud women who adopt that culture, whether in sports, the military, or corporations.
Men’s sports at least generate revenue for a university, and for the select few there is the chance at a lucrative professional career, or at least some sort of sinecure as a high school or college coach. Women’s sports are generating more revenue than they used to, but still lag way behind men’s sports. Thanks to Title IX, however, those women’s teams, even if they are financial drains, will remain at colleges and provide coaching jobs for former athletes.
While I don’t find tattooed lesbians making layups entertaining, this is not to say I am totally against female sports. If you’ve ever happened upon a women’s beach volleyball tournament on ESPN, you know what I mean. Butt-crack fetishists rejoice! I’m sure sports bras help them play better but if they played topless, the TV ratings would go through the roof.
Female tennis players have long been a source of eyeball candy. Over the years, many of the most popular (not necessarily the best) players were attractive. The web site Ranker has an article by Aaron Hager entitled “The Most Beautiful Female Tennis Players Of 2024.” Of course, lesbians are not unknown in tennis (remember Billie Jean King and Martina Navratilova?), but the numbers are not off the charts. The same author also posted “The Most Beautiful Female Golfers of 2024.” Again, there have been famous lesbian golfers (Babe Didrickson, Sandra Haynie, Kathy Whitworth) but the numbers are less than overwhelming.
Public interest in female sports is largely a function of how much sex appeal the participants possess. What is true of tennis and golf is also true of figure skating and gymnastics, but since most of the participants in the latter are what used to be called jailbait, male ogling strikes me as a bit creepy. Also suspect is Women’s Mixed Martial Arts. I’m not a fan of femme fisticuffs but I realize there is a niche market for same. Frankly, I don’t know how you can call it mixed when scratching and hair-pulling are prohibited. Think I’ll stick with lingerie football and mud wrestling.
Male or female, spectator sports are clearly a form of bread and circuses to keep the masses amused. Of course, the media promote sports because a large part of their business is broadcasting sporting events and make money off them. The ratings for women sports are much lower, however, as is the income potential for the franchises.
When the media promote women’s sports, is it a backhanded way of promoting queerness? Or more to the point, is it a way of promoting birth control? A male athlete can sire children all throughout his career, no matter how long it lasts. A female athlete, however, is at a disadvantage, as she spends her most fertile years on the court, the pitch, or the field. A working woman with an office job can work pretty much all the way through pregnancy. Not so with a female athlete. I seriously doubt that any team doctor would give the OK to a WNBA or NWSL player to continue playing if she was in a family way.
It has long been known that participation in sports puts females at risk for amenorrhea, or menstrual dysfunction. This could range from irregularity to outright cessation of periods, estimated at 25% among “elite” female athletes. While exercise increases male fitness and hence the ability to reproduce, the opposite is true for women. Ironically, the most physically fit women, due to menstrual problems and/or lesbianism, are much less likely to reproduce than their male counterparts.
The world got along just fine before female sports were a thing and would get along just fine if female sports vanished. Of course, we could do without male sports also, though it would leave a bigger vacuum. In the history of civilization men being paid to play games in organized leagues is relatively new. Play is part of being human, but it has usually been a leisure time pursuit, a form of recreation.
Recess was never meant to be turned into a profession. But decadent societies offer its members all sorts of novel ways to make a buck.
