John McEnroe stepped into yet another controversy at then end of August after The New Yorker published an interview in which he said that the best women’s tennis players in the world wouldn’t stand a chance against a middling male tennis player. Asked specifically what he thought of the rise of Serena and Venus Williams, McEnroe told the magazine that “any good male college tennis player could beat the Williams sisters and so could any men on the senior tour.”

That might have been a bit of an overstatement, but the underlying sentiment is certainly correct — competing against women, the Williams women are fascinating to watch. Mix them in with the male circuit and they’d be very lucky to get past the opening round of a tournament. This is largely a matter of biology — the additional upper body strength that the male players have would totally overwhelm the women players.

This can be seen just by watching men’s and women’s tennis, and actually benefits the women to a large degree in that the women’s game is more interesting to watch. The men’s game is all about power, power, power. As in other sports the physical training has advanced so quickly that men are now hitting serves at 130 miles an hour. Much the same occurs in the Women’s National Basketball Association. The best WNBA team would get demolished by a middling NBA team, but in some ways the women’s game is more exciting since the men’s game as devolved to feats of physical prowess over skill. In many ways, in both sports revolutions in training as well as the huge sums of money have led to men’s teams who are able to play well above the game.

It was fascinating to watch the politics of gender in sports play out at a national event held in my home of Kalamazoo this August — the Little League Softball World Series. Until the early 1970s, Little League teams were strictly sex segregated; boys played baseball and girls played softball. Under threat of lawsuit, the Little League organization allowed girls to play on baseball teams and in the early 1980s a girl played for the first time in the Little League Baseball World Series. Of course there were all-male teams who at first didn’t want to play with girls — some claimed the girls would get hurt — but the sex barrier eventually fell.

At some point in the 1990s, however, the Little Leagues realized they still barred boys from playing softball and, fearing a lawsuit, they removed the sex requirement for softball. Which brings us to this controversy. When the only baseball league in their town folded up, several boys decided to join the local Little League softball team and their team made it to the world series held here in Kalamazoo, Michigan. And a firestorm ensued.

Parents of all-girl teams were extremely irate that young boys were playing baseball. Many told reporters they were afraid that the boys, with that extra upper body strength, would end up hurting the allegedly fragile girls. Other said it was simply unfair for boys to be competing with girls. Paralleling the protests when girls tried to play baseball, one team chose to forfeit its game rather than play on the same filed as boys.

Although the team the boys played on didn’t have a perfect record in the tournament, they did walk away with the championship. The person who oversaw the tournament responded by vowing to do everything in his power to make sure no boys were involved in next year’s World Series.

Which brings us to the main point of contention — do women always have to compete in separate but equal sporting contests? Writing about McEnroe’s comments, The Sporting News’ David Kindred summarized the view that women will always have to compete separately,

Men’s and women’s tennis are different games, just as women’s soccer, basketball and track and field are different from the men’s games. Women’s sports are to be appreciated for what they are, not denigrated for what they’re not.

On the other hand, both athletes as well as feminists don’t seem content for Venus Williams to be simply one of the best women’s tennis players, in large measure because of the fear that it sends a bad social message — if Serena Williams is simply a good woman’s tennis player who would get blown away in a direct competition with professional male athletes, does that mean that women who are successful in other areas of life don’t truly compare with men? That is an absurd idea, but it is also one that both anti-feminists as well as some feminists both lend support. The anti-feminists, of course, are always prepared to pounce on something such as the biological advantage men have in upper body strength to argue that this applies to every other attribute as well. On the other hand, some feminists are so committed to the principle that there are no fundamental differences between men and women that the obvious counter-examples threaten to bring down the entire edifice of sexual equality.

The confusion over exactly what women’s sports is simply mirrors the confusion that still remains in the larger society over the role of women and what genuine equality entails.

Source:

McEnroe reverts to childish blather – or does he? Dave Kindred, The Sporting News, August 31, 2000.

In its September 7 edition, USA Today ran a long, well written piece on female sports broadcasters — both the advances they’ve made over the years and the long distance they still have to go. As an avid sports fan, personally I don’t care whether the person in the booth is a man or a woman. Clearly women like Hannah Storm and Leslie Visser have proven they can hold their own when covering basketball and football respectively.

But the article’s coverage of Visser’s demotion was a bit off-base. For those who have no idea who Visser is, she used to be sideline reporter for ABC’s Monday Night Football. Hotshot MNF producer Don Ohlmeyer this year replaced the 46-year-old Visser with 26-year-old Melissa Stark, leading to charges that Ohlmeyer wanted to go with a younger woman.

Of course hinted at, but missing from the piece, is the fact that in one of the most idiotic moves in all of sports broadcasting history, when he first came onboard Ohlmeyer also essentially fired long time MNF analyst Dan Dierdorf and replaced him with the younger, and far less competent, Boomer Esiason. The charge that Visser was let go simply because she was older reminded me of charges that the only reason the Green Bay Packers fired not only coach Ray Rhodes but also his entire staff at the end of last season was because Rhodes was black.

The real bottom line is just that — on both sides of the camera there are millions and millions of dollars at stake and the pressure is constantly on to win and win big now. Visser wasn’t fired because she’s 46, she was fired because MNF ratings haven’t been very spectacular the past couple years, and Ohlmeyer pretty much fired everybody except Al Michaels in a desperate attempt to find some magic formula that would increase the ratings — much the same reason that Green Bay quickly fired Rhodes and his entire staff. The name of the game today is immediate results.

Personally, the real loser here was ABC since Stark and former NFL player Eric Dickerson, who was also tapped to be a sideline reporter, aren’t going to do anything for ratings (they are both inadequate at best compared to Visser), and they lost Visser who bolted to CBS to do football coverage.

Source:

Aiming for more time. Rudy Martzke, USA Today, September 7, 2000.

    Wired is running an interesting article (Rape Theory Too Much To Take) on the most recent chapter in evolutionary biologist Randy Thornhill’s controversial claim that impulse to rape has a biological basis. Thornhill details his argument in his book, “A Natural History of Rape: Biological Bases of Sexual Coercion,” in which he argues that there is a “human rape adaptation” that is present in all or most men that biologically predisposes them to rape.

    Wired reports that several men in the audience tried to shout Thornhill down, and his book received very negative reactions when it was first published, from feminists, from those who reject sociobiological principals, and others.

    I haven’t read Thornhill’s book, but have read enough excerpts and criticism and defense of it to be very wary of his specific claims. On the other hand the broader issue that Thornhill raises, and the reaction to it, especially by feminists, is worth pondering further — are there biological roots to violence?

    As Richard Pipes notes in “Property and Freedom” even many hard core defenders of evolutionary biology end up in weird contortions in order to assert that violence is almost environmental. Pipes writes that many the same folks who would cringe at the idea that human beings are a unique or special species have no problem insisting that unlike every other species human beings have no innate predispositions to behaviors such as violence. In fact on the radical feminist spectrum there are not a few theorists who claim that a) human beings have no innate abilities or impulses at all — everything is environment, and b) Darwinian evolution is simply wrong to the extent that it implies otherwise.

    Unfortunately, science often gets in the way of political fantasies, and the evidence for a wide range of innate behaviors is pretty overwhelming at this point, with language acquisition being the real lynch pin. It is very difficult to look at the available evidence and conclude that language is acquired in any way accept through innate structures in the brain/mind. Given that violent acts appear to be an integral part of lives of many mammalian species, especially those living species closest to our own, it would be astounding if there weren’t some biological predisposition to violence in our own species.

    People seem to want to avoid reaching this conclusion for two separate but closely related reasons.

    First, they want to avoid simple biological determinism, which is understandable. Just because I might be predisposed to act violently in certain situations thanks to my evolutionary heritage does not meant that I inevitably must act violently. In fact Freud was hardly the first person to suppose that the main project of civilization was the tempering of such innate behaviors. While evolutionary biology might explain a certain level of violence across human beings as a species, it doesn’t necessarily explain individual acts of violence nor does it mean that I lack the power to choose whether or not to commit violent acts (in fact the vast majority of human beings are, judging by how they live, fully capable of interacting peacefully with other people).

    The second objection is a bit harder to comprehend. As conference organizer Gerfried Stocker tried to explain the controversy, “Some of the people got the idea that he thinks rape is natural or good.” It is interesting that Stocker chose to equate “natural” with “good” since that is exactly the heart of the problem — just because something is natural does not in any way mean that it is good. This should be self-evident given the numerous example of natural things that are definitely not good. One wonders, for example, if Thornhill published a book entitled, “The Natural History of Small Pox,” if protesters would show up to silence him with shouts of “You’re saying small pox is good!”

    Radical feminists have contributed to this ridiculous view that natural=good with their glorification of nature which is set in opposition to “patriarchal” science’s “reductive” view of the world. Many radical feminists, especially in academe, like to contrast women’s inherent, deep connect with an idyllic nature with that of a harsh, cold view of men and accomplishments such as science (ignoring, of course, the important contribution made by female scientists, or denigrating that contribution as self-loathing). If women are good, as represented by their special connection with nature, then certainly the millions of years of brutal killing that is evolution and natural selection certainly creates problems.

    The bottom line is that violence almost certainly has some sort of biological imperative behind it, which is entirely natural, and definitely not good when it goes beyond merely defending oneself and into striking out against other people. To reject such ideas simply because they don’t comport well with how we wish the world worked is to reject rationality itself (which, again, not a few radical feminists are more than happy to do).