Local law student and standout athlete Karin writes in with the last word on women's basketball. Is it compelling as an athletic event? Is the media hype justified? Are the gender roles confused and bizarre? Is support for the sport also tacit support for radical feminism? How many more times can Saint Paul use other people's writing to fill space on Fraters Libertas instead of coming up with his own ideas?
All these questions and more are answered in Karin's insider's account and brilliant dissertation upon women's athletics. Take it away my dear:
I wish I had heard the third hour (of Northern Alliance Radio) on Women's basketball last Saturday, but I enjoyed the recap on the site. I was on scholarship (I graduated 3 years ago) in a D-1 women's basketball program, so I've got some authority to speak on the subject.
As far as the general slowness and lethargy of the women's game, you're right. The women's game does not produce the display of athleticism you'll see in the NBA or men's college ball. The women's game is for purists. For those who love the art of the game. The women's game is bedrocked on fundamentals, discipline, and teamwork. The reason the women's brackets in the tourney were so less tumultuous than the men is because success in the women's game is founded upon much more predictable factors than the men. The women's game rewards great coaching, and team cohesiveness. The men's tournament is most certainly more exciting.
Before I started law school and actually had time to watch television, you couldn't pull me away from ESPN in early March. I love the upsets, the underdogs, and the uncertainty of it all. And there are some men's coaches who I can always count on as putting together great team basketball rather than just herding phenomenal athletes (Mike K. at Duke and Rick Majerus at Utah come to mind). But if I want to appreciate the finer points of the intellectual pursuit of basketball, give me the women's game any day. Whether there's enough of an audience of weirdoes like me who think basketball is an intellectual pursuit to warrant giving the women's game as much time as it gets, I don't know. I don't necessarily contest your conclusion, just thought I'd provide another perspective on the debate.
The other point I thought I'd comment on, is your observations about women's players acting like men on the court. I completely concur with your assessments. From my perspective this side of women's athletics is just another outgrowth of the radical feminist left's disdain for femininity. Throughout high school, I bought into the feminist agenda. I'm not sure where I picked it up, but somewhere along the line early in my educational career I heard, and started subscribing to the belief that women and men were the same. I whole heartedly believed the feminist line that gender didn't make me any different than men, other than the fact that they could stand to pee and I had to sit. I was taught by my peers, my teachers, the media, and the overwhelming majority of women in power during the 80's and 90's that my job as a progressive woman was to throw off the old stereotypes that had chained the women of previous generations. I was taught making it in a "man's world" required I live, act, and interact like a man.
The great irony of the feminist movement is that it hasn't empowered women to embrace and utilize the inherent differences that come from being a woman. It has taught women those inherent differences need to be beaten down at there every appearance because they are not a product of our gender, but a product of a male dominated society that has sought to keep women in an oppressive state. It has taught women that the mark of a real woman is that they act, think, dress, speak, and interact, like men.
This erroneous belief is reinforced and propagated by the culture of women's athletics. Female athletes are conditioned to have a victim's mentality. The constant undercurrent of women's sports is that the patriarchal male establishment actively seeks to discriminate against capable women athletes, and that it is our job as female athletes to prove to those men we are just the same. This widely held belief both overstates the problem, and provides a harmful remedy.
Now that I'm out of college, I play with mostly guys. And maybe I just happen to find guys to play with that happen to be considerably less chauvinistic than their male brethren, but no matter where I have joined a game I have not found this male contempt for me as a female athlete. And even in those rare circumstances where there has been a chauvinistic attitude displayed, once I proved my abilities on the floor they backed down. None of this required I swear, beat my chest, hit guys on the butt, or trash talk. I do not have to become a man to be accepted in a man's game, I just have to be a lady that happens to play that man's game as well as any man on the floor.
The rituals you found so distasteful displayed by women in the NCAA tournament are just one example of the larger feminist myth that gender identity is cultural rather than genetic, and that making it in a "man's world" requires that women become men.
Just thought I might provide a different perspective on the subject that you might enjoy. If you have read this entire e-mail I commend you.
I did enjoy the perspective and found the trip enjoyable, as I'm sure the broader FL readership does as well. No need to commend me for reading it. Remember, I get five or six emails per day from the pride of Folsom, CA, James Phillips. Reading those, that's an experience in opportunity cost.
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