The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Gender Equality,’ World Cup Edition

Posted on | July 13, 2019 | Comments Off on ‘Gender Equality,’ World Cup Edition

 

Nearly as soon as the women’s World Cup ended, public interest evaporated, because almost nobody really cares about women’s sports and Americans don’t much like soccer. Every four years, during the Olympics, there is a temporary burst of interest in the women’s gymnastics team and a few other gold-medal hopefuls, but once that quadrennial spike fades, we return to a world where sports is basically about men, and the only professional athletes that matter are in the NFL, the NBA, major-league baseball, the NHL and the PGA. Because of Title IX, which mandates “equality” between men and women in athletic programs in schools and universities, Americans live with a government-enforced illusion that men and women are equally interested in sports, but everybody knows this isn’t true, even if they don’t want to admit it.

Male athletic prowess confers superior status. Men who are tall and muscular not only command greater respect from their fellow men, but also are considered by women to be more desirable as mates. Furthermore, the personality traits necessary to success in sports — aggression, competitiveness, persistence — are highly correlated with success in the business world. Male varsity athletes are at the top of the social food chain in high school, and that adolescent hierarchy tends to replicate itself in adult life. Even if you don’t wish to concede that boys are naturally more interested in athletics than girls, nevertheless there are powerful social incentives for boys to admire athletic heroes and seek to emulate their feats. These incentives are largely absent, if not indeed reversed, when it comes to women and sports. However, the same obsession with “equality” that imposes Title IX regulations on scholastic sports programs is reflected in a tendency of journalists to ignore the reality of male-female differences, and attribute to “discrimination” — sexism! — any disparity between men and women in athletics.

After the U.S. women won the World Cup, their fans began chanting “equal pay,” and this demand got a boost from Democrat politicians:

Shortly before the Women’s World Cup finals kicked off, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-N.Y.) gave a shout out to the U.S. soccer team. Schumer took it upon himself to complain about how much less the female players get paid, in numeric terms, than their male counterparts.
“The women make just as much of a sacrifice, put in just as much mental and physical energy, absorb just as much risk of injury as the men who play for our national team,” Schumer said. “Yet, when you break it down, a women’s national soccer team player earns a base salary of $3,600 per game while a men’s player earns $5,000.”
An impassioned Schumer continued, “Discrimination is staring us all in the face. These women, who inspire our country with their poise, tenacity, skill and excellence every time they take the field, deserve to be fairly compensated.”

However, that “discrimination” is actually an illusion:

When viewed objectively — based on how much money each competition generates — women actually make more than men. How so?
Well, there is a sizable difference in the revenue available to pay the male and female teams. According to Mike Oznian, a writer for Forbes, the 2015 Women’s World Cup “brought in almost $73 million, of which the players got 13%. The 2010 men’s World Cup in South Africa made almost $4 billion, of which 9% went to the players.”
Last year, the men’s World Cup in Russia generated more than $6 billion in revenue; the participating teams shared about $400 million. That is less than 7 percent of overall revenue. Meanwhile, the 2019 Women’s World Cup made somewhere in the region of $131 million, doling out $30 million, well more than 20 percent of collected revenue, to the participating teams. 

In other words, there is so much more interest in men’s soccer worldwide that the men’s World Cup generates 45 times more revenue than the women’s tournament, so that the lower pay of women’s players is actually a larger percentage of their game’s revenue when compared to men.

It’s not just soccer, either. Consider basketball. Attendance for the NBA set an all-time record last year, with nearly 22 million tickets sold, and a record 760 sell-out games — maximum capacity. By comparison, average attendance at WNBA games last year was less than 7,000, and in Atlanta and Dallas was less than 5,000. As for TV revenues, well, have you ever watched a WNBA game on TV? Does anyone you know watch the WNBA? Last night, the Phoenix-Connecticut WNBA game was televised on ESPN2, and how many people tuned in? According to Wikipedia, the average TV audience for the WNBA last year was 231,000 viewers, whereas regular-season NBA games on ESPN averaged 1.6 million last season — roughly eight times the size of the TV audience for the WNBA.

Oh, by the way, nearly every player in the WNBA is a lesbian. (“I would say 98 percent of the women in the WNBA are gay women,” according to former player Candice Wiggins.) Homosexuality is pervasive among top female athletes, whatever the sport. Like, if you tune into the NCAA championship tournament in basketball, softball, volleyball, soccer — pick a sport, any sport — you’ll be watching one team of lesbians play another team of lesbians. There are female scholarship athletes in the NCAA who are heterosexual, but the top players on the top teams are almost all gay, although the sports media makes a point of ignoring this. However, the prevalence of lesbianism in women’s sports is not a stereotype, but a fact, and it holds true not only in team sports, but in individual sports like tennis and golf. Did you know, for example, that America’s largest annual gathering of lesbians occurs every April in Palm Springs, California? It’s called “The Dinah,” because it was originally scheduled to coincide with the LPGA’s Dinah Shore golf tournament. That a major lesbian festival originated in conjunction with a sports event should tell you something about women’s athletics in general.

We are not supposed to notice this, however, and the sports media seldom breach the unacknowledged journalistic rule against mentioning how pervasive lesbianism is in women’s athletics. An exception occurred last week when a writer for the British ITV network asked, “Why are more female professional footballers openly gay or bisexual than male players?” Notice a few things here: First, soccer is called “football” in England, as in the rest of the world, and second, the use of the adverb “openly.” This would seem to imply that there are gay men playing soccer who are “in the closet” about their homosexuality, except of course that the writer also employs the deliberately ambiguous phrase “gay or bisexual.” Notice this in the article:

Across the whole [2010 Women’s World Cup] tournament, there were at least 41 female players or coaches who are openly gay or bisexual.
During the male tournament in 2018, there were none.
Similarly in the Premier League [i.e., the English men’s pro soccer league], there is not one single player who is openly gay or bisexual.
At least five members of the Lionesses [i.e., the English women’s World Cup team] are gay or bisexual, compared with none of England’s male players.

In saying that “at least” five players for the English women’s team are “gay or bisexual,” the writer implied that the number might actually be higher, because some of the lesbians are still in the closet and maybe most of the allegedly “straight” women players are actually bisexual, too. And I’d say, yeah, he’s almost certainly onto something there.

The ITV writer goes on to discuss the influence of “heteronormativity,” blah blah blah, without ever really getting down to the basic truth that men and women are different, and that these differences are reflected in many ways, including the fact that homosexuality is rather rare in men’s athletics, but is quite commonplace in women’s sports.

You can research the U.S. women’s World Cup roster and draw your own conclusions, but remember the journalistic rule of enforced silence, so that if you fail to turn up any information that might offer a clue to a player’s sexual preference, this probably means she’s gay.

FACT: In April 2017, the U.S. Women’s National Team played a scrimmage against a team of 14-year-old boys, and lost 5-2.



 

Category: Gays, Sex Trouble, Sports

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