I am skeptical that American football was designed to emphasize male superiority over women. Roosevelts statement that football expresses mans virility is entirely different from "displaying his superiority over women". This particular claim seems manufactured to fit the 21st century narrative that anything male dominated was spawned from evil intentions. It's more likely a group of rich kids at Yale needed something to do with their free time and created a new game from Rugby as a new form of recreation rather than for female exclusion or misogyny.
With due respect to Dr. Pielke, I’m afraid I couldn’t disagree more. To say that “almost all sporting competitions that we celebrate today were inventions of the late-19th and early 20th centuries” belies the fact that for thousands of years humans from all corners of the globe have been competing in feats of speed and strength. To get Biblical, one could quote 2 Timothy where the author speaks of “finishing the race.” Certainly that wasn’t written in the 19th century! (And, yes, I know the author was speaking metaphorically, but the mention of a “race,” coupled with the historical record, throw shade at Pielke’s contention.)
Ultimately, athletic competition is a celebration of the human form. Those of us who are merely average are drawn to sports to witness those godlike creatures who can run faster, jump higher, and achieve feats of strength or endurance of which we could never dream. To insist that sports are merely social constructs ignores the competitiveness inherent among humans. Put any two people in a particular situation and it is highly likely that at some point the situation will evolve into a competition. (Academe is no exception!)
Dr. Pielke notes that candidates for gender neutral sports “would include equestrian (where men and women compete against each other), shooting, archery, gymnastics, ice skating and dance, synchronized swimming and diving.” While these are fair to mention as sports where male biology has no clear advantage over female biology, some of these (archery and shooting) are not so much athletic sports as highly developed skills—impressive skills, to be sure, but skills nonetheless. Many others (gymnastics, skating, synchronized swimming, etc.) are based on a subjective judging system that is maddening in its inconsistency. And to be fair, equestrian is a celebration of the equine’s athletic prowess—the rider certainly plays a role in the duo’s performance, I would contend that an average rider on a superior horse would beat out a great rider on an inferior horse more often than not! The drawback to any of these sports is that they fail at the task of determining who is the fastest or strongest—the tenet around which athletic competition has existed for millennia.
Athletic competition is a celebration of those who exist on the far right side of the bell curve, physically speaking. Like it or not, no amount of championing the rights of transgender athletes will change the fact that in the vast majority of athletic endeavor, male biology always has and will likely always remain superior. I say that not from any sense of misogyny or “Old Testament” sentiment but as a father who loves watching his athletic daughter compete in a variety of sports, and as a father who loves watching his athletic son compete in a variety of sports—and realizes full well that as successful and hard working as my daughter is, she would have no hope of succeeding in any sort of post-gender society that maintained athletics as a celebration of human strength and speed. That she will never be as fast or as strong as her brother—or indeed a large percentage of biological males—is a result of nothing more than biology. Ignoring this fact is very much an insult to biological women who love to compete to see who among them is the strongest and fastest.
This is an odd article. Men are in general faster, stronger, and more streamlined than women thanks to testosterone and having a body that does not need to accommodate the demands of childbirth. In any competition that relies on muscular strength, which is most conceivable physical sports, men will outcompete women, by a lot. (Contrary to the claim of RFHirsch below there is not a single female basketball player on earth who could compete with the worst male NBA player, let alone an average one). In sports which have an aesthetic component in judging it is true one could imagine women coming out on top, depending on the aesthetic standard applied, but these start to move away from sport and toward art (e.g if ballet was a sport - think of ice dancing).
This is an interesting article about an important topic.
One sport that could have been mentioned is basketball. The best female players are as good as some average male players. However the U.S. National Basketball Association (NBA) rigidly segregates women in a separate league (Women's NBA or WNBA), where they are paid about 2% of what players in the NBA earn (about $6 million/player on average in NBA, $120,000 in WNBA: https://www.sportingnews.com/us/wnba/news/wnba-salaries-players-rookies-2022/vh258kpsm7xbnuj4cghmigfl).
The claim that the best female basketball players are as good as an “average” male NBA player is just completely wrong and indicates you don’t know much about basketball. (Of course the best WNBA players are far better than the average civilian male who might play occasional casual pickup ball but that is a whole different thing). The WNBA and NBA actually end up playing entirely different styles of basketball due to the physical differences between men and women; you can find people who claim to prefer the WNBA style but if they shared a court under the same rules the NBA players would certainly outscore the women
I am skeptical that American football was designed to emphasize male superiority over women. Roosevelts statement that football expresses mans virility is entirely different from "displaying his superiority over women". This particular claim seems manufactured to fit the 21st century narrative that anything male dominated was spawned from evil intentions. It's more likely a group of rich kids at Yale needed something to do with their free time and created a new game from Rugby as a new form of recreation rather than for female exclusion or misogyny.
With due respect to Dr. Pielke, I’m afraid I couldn’t disagree more. To say that “almost all sporting competitions that we celebrate today were inventions of the late-19th and early 20th centuries” belies the fact that for thousands of years humans from all corners of the globe have been competing in feats of speed and strength. To get Biblical, one could quote 2 Timothy where the author speaks of “finishing the race.” Certainly that wasn’t written in the 19th century! (And, yes, I know the author was speaking metaphorically, but the mention of a “race,” coupled with the historical record, throw shade at Pielke’s contention.)
Ultimately, athletic competition is a celebration of the human form. Those of us who are merely average are drawn to sports to witness those godlike creatures who can run faster, jump higher, and achieve feats of strength or endurance of which we could never dream. To insist that sports are merely social constructs ignores the competitiveness inherent among humans. Put any two people in a particular situation and it is highly likely that at some point the situation will evolve into a competition. (Academe is no exception!)
Dr. Pielke notes that candidates for gender neutral sports “would include equestrian (where men and women compete against each other), shooting, archery, gymnastics, ice skating and dance, synchronized swimming and diving.” While these are fair to mention as sports where male biology has no clear advantage over female biology, some of these (archery and shooting) are not so much athletic sports as highly developed skills—impressive skills, to be sure, but skills nonetheless. Many others (gymnastics, skating, synchronized swimming, etc.) are based on a subjective judging system that is maddening in its inconsistency. And to be fair, equestrian is a celebration of the equine’s athletic prowess—the rider certainly plays a role in the duo’s performance, I would contend that an average rider on a superior horse would beat out a great rider on an inferior horse more often than not! The drawback to any of these sports is that they fail at the task of determining who is the fastest or strongest—the tenet around which athletic competition has existed for millennia.
Athletic competition is a celebration of those who exist on the far right side of the bell curve, physically speaking. Like it or not, no amount of championing the rights of transgender athletes will change the fact that in the vast majority of athletic endeavor, male biology always has and will likely always remain superior. I say that not from any sense of misogyny or “Old Testament” sentiment but as a father who loves watching his athletic daughter compete in a variety of sports, and as a father who loves watching his athletic son compete in a variety of sports—and realizes full well that as successful and hard working as my daughter is, she would have no hope of succeeding in any sort of post-gender society that maintained athletics as a celebration of human strength and speed. That she will never be as fast or as strong as her brother—or indeed a large percentage of biological males—is a result of nothing more than biology. Ignoring this fact is very much an insult to biological women who love to compete to see who among them is the strongest and fastest.
This is an odd article. Men are in general faster, stronger, and more streamlined than women thanks to testosterone and having a body that does not need to accommodate the demands of childbirth. In any competition that relies on muscular strength, which is most conceivable physical sports, men will outcompete women, by a lot. (Contrary to the claim of RFHirsch below there is not a single female basketball player on earth who could compete with the worst male NBA player, let alone an average one). In sports which have an aesthetic component in judging it is true one could imagine women coming out on top, depending on the aesthetic standard applied, but these start to move away from sport and toward art (e.g if ballet was a sport - think of ice dancing).
This is an interesting article about an important topic.
One sport that could have been mentioned is basketball. The best female players are as good as some average male players. However the U.S. National Basketball Association (NBA) rigidly segregates women in a separate league (Women's NBA or WNBA), where they are paid about 2% of what players in the NBA earn (about $6 million/player on average in NBA, $120,000 in WNBA: https://www.sportingnews.com/us/wnba/news/wnba-salaries-players-rookies-2022/vh258kpsm7xbnuj4cghmigfl).
The claim that the best female basketball players are as good as an “average” male NBA player is just completely wrong and indicates you don’t know much about basketball. (Of course the best WNBA players are far better than the average civilian male who might play occasional casual pickup ball but that is a whole different thing). The WNBA and NBA actually end up playing entirely different styles of basketball due to the physical differences between men and women; you can find people who claim to prefer the WNBA style but if they shared a court under the same rules the NBA players would certainly outscore the women
Thank you for your comments. I think I should have said "The best female players might be competitive with the lowest level of NBA players".
thanks for replying politely when I was slightly quarrelsome -- breath of fresh air on the Internet!
You were not out of line!
I appreciate that the SubStack places I use generally have good discussions.