Straw man fallacy. He simply said that men would dominate women in sports.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_physiology (NSFW I guess).
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Top WNBA star being paid by her Russian team to sit out the WNBA season
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Straw man fallacy. He simply said that men would dominate women in sports.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_differences_in_human_physiology (NSFW I guess).
I feel like, while this will probably always be the case for the NBA (where height plays such a prominent role), for other sports I see integration as not necessarily unrealistic. It is nearly impossible to know what kind of representation women would end up with if exposed to the kind of pressure and funding that men are.
Basically what I'm saying is that "the patriarchy" (or however you'd like to think of it) makes it impossible at this time to determine how significant sex is in explaining gender gaps in sporting ability, except in extreme cases like basketball where height, reach and arm span play enormous roles.
Tennis is the only mainstream unisex sport I can think of where the women's game is almost as popular as the men's.
My theory is that it doesn't feel like you're watching a totally different sport if you watch the best men and women play.
In the WNBA, they rarely dunk. Women's baseball isn't even baseball etc.
My theory is that it doesn't feel like you're watching a totally different sport if you watch the best men and women play.
In the WNBA, they rarely dunk. Women's baseball isn't even baseball etc.
Ninja Scooter
Member
I'm saying that if they did way with Men's/Women's sports, and just had a mixed gender basketball teams, every team would be filled with men and women would not be able to play. The best women's college basketball teams get dominated by intramural men's squads in practice. These are not actual men's college players, just male students they round up to have the women practice against. Serena Williams I believe has been quoted as saying she would not be able to beat any top 100 mens tennis player. Biology matters. Men are simply genetically physically bigger, faster and stronger than women and a sport like basketball is a lot more physical than people give it credit for. If there were no split squads for men and women, and only combined gender teams, every spot on that roster would be filled by a man in almost 99.9% of the cases.
andthebeatgoeson
Junior Member
Congrats to women's tennis.
Social pressure of high school recruiters and funding aren't responsible, millennia of evolution and the resulting athletic predisposition of men are.
This doesn't go just for basketball, also that is an extreme example, but any sport that favours raw athletic ability.
When I see an integrated sports team that has given men and woman the same training and coaching for 5+ years and the woman then fail to be on the same level as the men, I will agree with you
Until then I respectfully disagree with you
Ninja Scooter
Member
And you will continue to be horribly misinformed and flat out wrong. But feel free to wallow in your ignorance.
So you disagree with biology? Sounds reasonable.
Wiktor
Member
At most physical sports? Yes. Even the very best women would have trouble getting a spot at the worst teams in the league. It's not about discrimination, but facing the facts. Just like you won't put kids into adult teams.
Take a look at Tennis, which has Williams sisters. They're beasts on the court, but theirr fastest serve wouldn't even quality in top50 (heck, maybe even top100) if the list wouldn't be separated into genders. They're best, heck..any women's best, is to slow to be even registered at male's tennis. That's how big the gap is.
The point of having gender segregated is to have actual women in sports. Otherwise you would barely see a woman playing professional sport on TV. I know there's a desire to have everyone treated equally, but sports are a rare case where doing that would actually screw women badly
So you are disagreeing with Biology itself?
The NBA actually generates interest and makes money. The WNBA doesn't. The salaries reflect this.
They only play a 34 game season, and NBA games are 20% longer. They also bring in less revenue.
Coaching and training isn't going to undo the fact that men have natural HGHs that women don't have. You think a 7' man is rare? Let's see how many 7' women exist. Biology simply inhibits women from being 6'8'', 250 lbs of muscle. I'm not saying no women exists with that body, but to act like there are enough women like that which will be dedicated to the said sport to fill up a team or program is ridiculous.
Fotheringay
Member
lol no. The USWNT for soccer has on multiple occasions played high school boys teams. They get trounced. Everytime. That's an entire nations worth of talent, combined with the highest level of funding playing high school teams, and they still lose.
That's nice and easy to say but when it comes down to actually drawing out the proportions of sex and society, there are simply too many factors to control to make any kind of conclusive, scientific statement.
Furthermore, the idea that society has played no role (or even an insigificant role) in the massive gap in prominence between male and female athletes is absurd. The potential of a female athlete is stifled at all ages, which is only compounded by the fact that their opponents are, generally, similarly stifled female athletes. Chess provides a pretty decent case study for this, where a large gap continues to exist between male and female (although with an increasingly large list of exceptions).
"The highest level of funding" simply does not go to an all-female soccer team. Nobody watches women's soccer, so there's little funding at the top level and increasingly less at every other subsequent level. This, in conjunction with a society that, by and large, has only come around to the idea of female athletes outside of a select few areas relatively recently, means that women are exponentially less likely to experience the kind of pressurized environment that produces a top tier athlete.
andthebeatgoeson
Junior Member
Might as well. We were just throwing out vaccines, hand washing.
100 meter dash times are due to societal norms and not muscle, body alignment, etc.
Ninja Scooter
Member
Brittany Griner is as fast, agile and athletic as Shawn Bradley yet she is built like Michael Carter-Williams. What exactly is she going to do playing with/against any competent men's team?
DiscoJer
Member
Most major league sports teams in the US (and Canada) scour the world looking for players. If a woman was good enough, they'd almost certainly be signed.
As it is, there have been a couple women pitchers in the minors. Their results weren't great
http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/player.cgi?id=yoshid001eri
http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/player.cgi?id=border001ila
The thing you fail to grasp is that these are leagues with the very best athletes. If you had lower level leagues mixing men and women in basketball, yes, there will be women that can compete with the men. But when you're picking the very best athletes that had to win the genetic lottery to even have a slim chance to make it into the league, they're going to be all men.
Have you ever seen an NBA game? Are you being serious?
I don't think Ninja is implying any of those things. Women's sports exist, because they allow women to participate in athletics. The physical differences between sexes in athletics are usually apparent by adulthood. Look at the difference between women's high school sports and men's high school sports. Look at every track and field event.
I think the average height in the NBA is 6'8"
breakfuss
Member
Ridiculous. You must live among Amazons. I just can't understand this line of thinking.
benjipwns
Banned
Be acquired by the Knicks.
The athletic gap between men and women is a biological reality, not a social construct.
But sure society played a role in that, if you count the Stone age as a society. Because that's where it started.
Fotheringay
Member
Who do you think has better training facilities, access to advanced medical care, and more dedicated to their profession, the USWNT, or high schoolers? This is a sport where the world's best player is only 5'7 and 150lbs, and yet the disparity is still humongous.
Back when the men's professional leagues were small and lacked powerful unions, they weren't average players weren't played much at all. Most had to hold full-time jobs in the off season. It wasn't until unions, free agency and lucrative television contracts entered the mix that player salaries drastically increased.
The pro/minor leagues don't exist in a vacuum. Even if we pretend for a minute that the notion of a female professional athlete doesn't rub a significant percentage of the population the wrong way (which subsequently drastically reduces the population of female athletes, pro or not), it is impossible to ignore that the institutions involved in professional athleticism are not at all inclusive. For unequivocal statements to be made about the potential gap between males and females to be made, there would have to be no huge funding/prominence difference and no society with a laser focus on males.
OH YES. I'd even say women's volleyball is more popular than the men's.
It's not about dedication or training facilities, it's about selection. The genetic freaks that populate professional sports are, in male sports, selected from a pool that is significantly greater and, on average, more skilled and better funded (due to a greater emphasis on male sporting than female in culture since just about the beginning of time) than their female counterparts. It's simply not fair to say that the gap in skill that exists between males and females now is representative of the different capabilities of the sexes in the presence of so many outside influences.
EDIT: Seriously guys, explain the gender gap in chess (without resorting to unscientific and sexist bullshit). Society plays a big role in these kinds of things.
The easiest examples would be tennis and athletics. Look at Serena Williams who has been dominating tennis for a decade. She doesn't hit as hard as the men. Look at pole vaulter Isinbayeva who has modelled her career after Bubka. Her world record is 5m06cm. Bubka cleared 6. 18 men cleared 6. Two women have cleared 5. Usain Bolt ran the 100 meter sprint in 9.58; Florence Griffith-Joyner in 10.49. She wouldn't be close to the top 25 men. 94 people have broken the 10 second mark. The best woman in the sport wouldn't qualify for the top 100. She is the best the USA had to offer, she is being beaten by men that wouldn't have access to the same facilities due to their country of origin.
I'd honestly doubt that, simply due to soccer being so popular worldwide.
They have to or the best players would not play in the WNBA
The NBA is very profitable, the WNBA is barely reaching profitability (half the teams still don't even break even) after around two decades in existance and being subsidized by the former league.
Your argument is very analogous to evolution-deniers that cry how no human was present millions or billions of years ago to witness the evidence first hand. Forget what we can plainly see, understand and deduce. There is a small nebulous grey area we can just cry "We can't know this is true until every single untested idea is resolved!"
It's both.
Men are on average more athletically inclined, but if you threw the same money, time and effort into women's sports as you did men's, the gap would shrink. It wouldn't be 1:1, but the difference wouldn't be as dramatic.
benjipwns
Banned
Only the stars got paid anything really until the TV deals took off.
And even then a lot of them got screwed as those took off even more. Magic signed a $25 million over 25 year contract for example.
Skill doesn't even enter the conversation. When it comes to athletic ability, men have an inherent advantage that can't be overcome by all the funding and training in the world, if you put the best of both genders against each other.
That's not sexist, just reality.
You could look at China, which probably funds women's sports as much or even more than men's sports, since they have a higher potential to get Olympic medals against underfunded women's programs in other countries. The women still put in worse times than their male compatriots for runs/swims, they lift at lower weights in the weightlifting competitions. They also have a larger pool of girls to select from due to the gender ratio in the country, especially the rural areas where many athletes come from.
Fotheringay
Member
The genetic freak argument only comes in to play when you're separating the absolute cream of the crop from the other highly skilled professionals. And seriously, do you think there are plenty of Brittany Griner and Serena Williams just wasting away out there? The gap between women and men in physical sports is far far beyond the gap between say Michael Phelps (a physical freak whose entire body is designed for swimming) and the person who finishes 8th in the 100m butterfly. Your chess analogy is correct when it comes to purely mental exercises (aka Judit Polgar and her sister being trained from Day One to be chess experts) but has very little relevance to the topic at large.
Okay, prove it.
It's not "very analogous" because it's not a small, nebulous grey area.
Ninja Scooter
Member
Did you miss all the posts about basic biology?
You literally just asked him to prove that men are naturally better equipped to hit higher physical talents. This is a known aspect about human biology. This is analogous to demanding for evidence of evolution while blatantly ignoring the well documented evidence since the beginning of modern human biology.
I promise you, Biology is very real, its not something the patriarchy made up.
perfectchaos007
Member
WNBA players are paid like shit because the lack of interest in the sport. They either need to find ways to fabricate drama, or make the gameplay more exciting for fans. For the latter to occur, perpaps lower the basket to 9 feet so more players could dunk.
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