“Some ideas are so absurd that only an intellectual could believe them,” observed George Orwell. Making it worse today is that intellectuals are in short supply (and perhaps always were), leaving nonsense of the now to be propounded by pseudo-intellectuals. But, asserts one writer, the embrace of a certain fashionable absurdity — misnamed “gender ideology” — “has broken the media and their so-called ‘experts,’” robbing them of credibility.
At issue for Washington Examiner commentator Zachary Faria, writing Monday, is an Atlantic article titled “Separating [School] Sports by Sex Doesn’t Make Sense.”
In it, one Maggie Mertens claims that “though sex differences in sports show advantages for men, researchers today still don’t know how much of this to attribute to biological difference versus the lack of support provided to women athletes to reach their highest potential.” She later adds that maintaining “this [sexual] binary in youth sports reinforces the idea that boys are inherently bigger, faster, and stronger than girls in a competitive setting — a notion that’s been challenged by scientists for years.”
“Challenged by scientists”? Social “scientists,” maybe. And, in fact, one of the only two “experts” Mertens cites in her article is a Canadian sociology professor!
Faria points out that any “researchers” confused about the biological advantages males enjoy in sports are in the wrong business. He then writes:
It is not a lack of resources that explains how the average NBA player is 6’6” and the average WNBA player is 6’0”. No lack of resources can explain how the record for dunks in one NBA game is 23, which is almost the same amount that the WNBA has seen in its entire 26-year history. No lack of resources can explain how world-class female sprinters and swimmers see their times regularly beaten by college men or high school boys who are average or barely above average.
You can go through sport by sport and athlete by athlete, from the world champion U.S. National Women’s Soccer Team losing badly to a teenage boys’ squad (14-year-olds!) to Serena and Venus Williams losing handily to the No. 203 ranked man in tennis. Neither national women’s soccer teams nor the Williams sisters lack resources or support.
The average man is bigger, stronger, and faster than the average woman. You can’t blame “resources” or a “lack of support” for biological facts.
In reality, females have arguably long had more athletics resources than males. For decades now society has been aggressively encouraging girls to play sports, and “proportionality” applications of Title IX have robbed men of college athletic opportunities (wrestling in particular) in the name of providing them for women.
Yet while Faria’s article is excellent, there’s something he doesn’t mention. If Mertens’s “theory” could discredit the media and its pseudo-experts, they would’ve been history long ago. You see, Mertens’s ideas not only aren’t new, but were the wokeness of the time for decades up until about 15 years ago. In fact, one could say to Mertens that the ’90s called, and they want their “gender” theory back.
Feminists in those days widely espoused the notion that if women only had the same opportunities, they’d equal (or even outdo) men in sports. Ex-tennis star Billie Jean King — most famous perhaps for beating out-of-shape, 55-year-old Bobby Riggs in the 1973 “Battle of the Sexes” match when she was 29 — once lamented that athletics was the only area in which males and females didn’t compete. (Since she couldn’t even beat over-35 player Eugene Scott despite his giving her a great lead in a 21-point game, she should have understood why.)
Then there was the claim by two exercise physiologists that, based on their analysis of the sexes’ world records’ progression, women would surpass men in track and field in the 1990s. The media at the time reported this widely — and uncritically.
In reality, the track-and-field intersex performance gap actually widened in the ’90s, no doubt due to more stringent performance-enhancing drug testing, which eliminated the East German-woman factor. Yet it wasn’t this or any other inconvenient fact that scuttled Mertens-like feminists’ agenda. Something else did.
One Thing to Thank the Sexual Devolutionaries for
In truth, I’d go Mertens one better and eliminate sex segregation in all sports. Oh, I know the consequences: the end of visible women in athletics. But it would be a great object lesson in reality. After all, to use a twist on an H.L. Mencken line, if people want equality, they should get it good and hard.
This will likely never happen. Yet something else did provide that object lesson: MUSS men and boys started competing in females’ sports and winning their titles and trophies. Some feminists then cried foul. What they couldn’t cry, though, was what they used to.
After all, you can’t very well say, “It’s unfair that these [partially demasculinized] MUSS men are taking away our sporting opportunities!” while also claiming, “We women can equal you men in sports, you’ll see!” The old unscientific feminist claim had to go so that feminists could combat the new unscientific MUSS claim. The kicker?
Decades ago, bucking the feminists’ sports-equality narrative and expounding upon men’s innate advantages, as Faria did above, could get you canceled; thus were even conservatives loath to do it. Now not only do they do it, with vigor, but the feminists cheer them on in their anti-MUSS chivalry! Well, it is a woman’s prerogative to change her mind, they say.
And this won’t end until, with respect feminist and other left-wing narratives, we just change the channel.
