“brain-rot pseudo-history.” A very useful phrase! This seems to me (admittedly from way outside academia) to precisely characterize what is being and has been taught in schools for decades in what passes for objective American History. I can see it in some of my own schooling from back in the 60s, but a lot more in that of my children and now, my grandchildren.
The females in the WNBA earn most of their revenues on the backs of the males in the NBA. It’s interesting to see how much society can influence social behavior.
If you are located outside of the U.S., then you are forgiven for never having heard of the WNBA. Most people here have never watched a single game, ever.
The exception being soccer. The smaller, slower bodies leave more room for increased activity and scoring. I find the womens' game more "open" than the mens'.
That said, it's still soccer, and I'd rather watch golf. Even womens' golf.
I can't get into any repetitive sport much. Basketball always looks the same and ends up with a bunch of foul shots. Cycling, curling, soccer, auto racing... just not enough happening. Football at least has gadget plays, baseball tricks you by doing nothing for 2 of 3 hours, even golf has different holes and shots (always like seeing them in the trees, because I can do that too!) and hockey at least has being blazing fast going for it.
Not sure what you mean by closer. The pack is closer? The finish times are closer?
Thanks for replying. I don't like the sort of team sports you mention, but golf and snooker can keep me enraptured for hours - regardless of which sex is playing. Athletics and tennis, too. F1 stopped being interesting when the equivalent of an entire team got into the cockpit, but Touring Cars and rallying are still quite exciting, though going the same way. I suppose I just like sports where the result depends heavily on one person's performance.
When I referred to women's cycling being "closer", I meant it in both ways you mention. There aren't any Tadej Pogaçars racing away to take everything - men's cycling as gone into another of its periodical one-winner episodes, and it is, frankly, boring to me.
Here's my theory about why women's sports are not as interesting as men's.
There is some sort of psychological transference going on when we see an athlete compete.
When I watch them it somehow feels like I'm out there making the tackle scoring the goal too. This works collectively as well, they whole team is my team, my boys, my guys fighting for the trophy and I will rise and fall with them.
It's always more difficult to make that transfer to a person very different than yourself, I don't see a female athlete as an avatar of myself, and women seem to have this capacity for the psychic transfer of the self to the group at a much lower level.
When, throughout all of human history do we see 100 women pulling on the same rope or 10,000 women marching to the same beat?
Knitting, sewing and weaving circles just don't count.
a high percentage of women who complain about the salary disparity in professional sports wouldn't be caught dead watching a single game or financially support a women's league through becoming a fan. if they ever do go to a game, it becomes a politicized event instead of a mere entertainment choice.
Same here - I’ve never watched a single WNBA game. However, with the WNBA fully welcoming trans (wo)men and doing all the woke verbal pirouettes around it, now two tall and very fit 6'10" former NBA players are semi-mockingly declaring that after a deep introspection they find that sometimes they may feel like women, and are applying for the draft in the 2027 season. And sure, by any performance tests they will leave everyone else in the dust. There’s a lot of outrage from the right about it, yet I for one say just do it: if the majority of women players seem to be supportive of this, let them have it. I’ll surely watch some of the games for the laughs, and thus they will gain yet another spectator!
Enes Kanter declaring himself for the WNBA draft is an interesting example of Agitprop or "Culture Jamming".
Using the system to transmit a signal within the system to show the system is utterly absurd.
Like when the "Yippies" Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin nominated a pig "Pigasus the Immortal" as a presidential candidate at the 1968 Democratic convention.
Now the Left to Right signal has flipped polarity and is running Right to Left.
Classically, men produce or acquire resources, then give them to favoured women who use and distribute those resources to care for children, family & community.
We’ve broken the pipeline at both ends.
At the destination, women in the upper classes are no longer being raised to see care work as a primary calling, so resources directed to these women just get consumed on the self.
Meanwhile, the economic shift is to give the state the primary role in resource distribution. But the state is mostly not a producer, just a redistributer - or it creates synthetic wealth to make up the difference. This insulates women from the male role of actually generating wealth and provides socio-economic advantage to those who are best at convincing the state to give them stuff.
This whole process starves wealth production among the lower classes, so the dam is running dry. It also inserts the state into the historical connection between lower classes labour and lower class provision. Lower class women are less able to get state money, especially on terms that don’t feel like begging, but lower class men are struggling to provide for themselves, let alone anyone else.
Prioritising the service economy doesn’t help either. Service economy is great, but it plays in the realm of existing resources. Offshoring so many of our production pipelines is hollowing out the lower classes, which will eventually destabilise our economic foundations.
I question whether upper class women ever in any general way regarded care work as a primary calling. The calling was to produce progeny, for economic and political purposes. But the actual work seems to me to have been eagerly farmed out.
Great points, but to be honest a fit 14 year old boy (playing say football, soccer, lacrosse, track, basketball, even baseball) would likely wreck fit 21 year old women playing the same sport in a strength contest. My son was a baseball player and benched around 155 max when he was 14 which was strong for his age but not super notable — meanwhile I’m guessing less than 1% of 21 year old fit softball playing women could bench 155 across the entire sport.
Very few women on a football national team are going to be bench pressing 70kg.
Plus, it's football. I grew up with a lad who went on to be a standout athlete in the premier league. He was MAYBE the 5th best athlete in our school year of 80 boys at 14, and that's with the premier league academy S&C plus a more extensive sporting background than most at that age.
And if perchance age 14 is still too young to evidence that equivalent or superior strength and agility, etc., by age 15 or 16 he almost certainly is [while granting there are some larger women who might still beat them, but comparing common build to build would not].
I was surprised when I first heard that 15 year old male soccor teams were providing training for (and beating) professional women's teams. But raw biology does eventually win out.
It still works at the other end of the age range, too. I know as a 44 year old I was still a stronger jogger than my 20 something female business colleague when we found a race track to run on during a business trip [no hanky panky either]. Now, 3 decades later I might struggle to match such a young women, but you can't have everything!! :-)
In my 40s I ran marathons and the like where I would beat all but a handful of women - who were generally speaking about 21 and attending university on an athletics scholarship or similar
I ran a half marathon earlier this year (I am now closer to 60 than 50) and not much had changed though my time had dropped by 5 or more minutes from my best a decade and a half earlier. I came 142nd out of ~850 men who completed the race and I beat all but three out of 100+ women.
Yes I think this underplays the difference. I played one year of baseball in junior high. I sucked. I only got up when we were down, like, 11-0 with 2 outs in the 9th and all I ever managed was 2 walks.
But at the end of the year the boys played the girls in softball. And suddenly I went 4 for 4 with 3 doubles. Hitless and inept against men, just a body to fill out the thin roster, but I looked like freaking David Ortiz (Big Papi) against the girls. And keep in mind I was probably one of the WORST baseball players imaginable. They could hardly even get us out and the innings usually ended by mercy rule (once everyone batted and the remaining runners scored).
This was the 80s though so I never would have even thought of pulling a "Lia" Thomas.
It takes a physically superior woman to best the physically average man, talent being otherwise equal. But sometimes a weaker woman with superior or better trained talent can best a physically stronger man. And there’s the rub in all these conversations - we seem to think that acknowledging the exceptions concedes the argument.
It seems that a good place to start is to make very clear that the myth of women and men being interchangeable is just that: a myth.
I have been mulling over the effect of this matriarchy we're in for a while now. The so-called "loneliness epidemic" seems so counterintuitive for women, but it does seem to be driven by women prioritizing career over creating communities where women of childbearing age (not starting in their forties because a few women were able to) formed lifelong friendships and created real, living places where people actually felt "safe."
Ironically, in the female-dominated society, no one feels "safe" in the institutions if their beliefs deviate even a bit from the imposed narrative.
My YouTube short video feed is interesting. I´ll click on one gorgeous surfer in Bali, and get an absolute flood of young gorgeous tits and ass videos. Then I´ll type in a search for "automatic transmissions" or something, and be presented with a few options that have nothing to do with tits and ass, but if I don´t click on any of them, all of a sudden I´m back to getting tits and ass. Well, I give up then!
Depressing, but in a good way. It is important for preservation of these truths that they be laid out in their tragic awful comprehensive reality. The take away summary and brilliant meme is the clip from X which concludes: "This is the banality of feminism winning"
"One of the striking things about contemporary Western societies is how little active concern that female university graduates show for people, including other women, of lower socio-economic status within their own societies."
This would explain why Western feminists are generally silent about Muslim-majority countries where women and girls are abused by their culture.
I don't disagree with your general thesis, but I think this bit is not as correct as the rest
"It is not strength difference that leads schoolboy teams to regularly beat women’s national sporting teams. From adolescence on, boys and men are systematically stronger than girls and women of the same age: but even a fit 14 year old boy is not likely to be stronger than a fit, athletic 21 year old sportswoman. It is difference in male and female cognitive and behaviour patterns that leads to teenage boys sporting teams beating national women’s teams."
Specifically athletic early male teenagers are frequently right up there with the best of the women of all ages. It's obviously going to depend on the boys in question but a top school sports team will have 14 or 15 yo boys who have greater endurance and faster sprints than any woman. It is possible that one of two women in the team will be better than the average boy in the team, but most will not be. They won't be far off, but a couple of years of testosterone is enough to build the muscles the ladies mostly just don't have. Now it is true that team work is also better but they are going to be physically slightly better too.
I agree with most of what you say, except the male population that you’re talking about is largely Anglos. Males in most other cultures are not especially adept at teamwork or dispassionate debate either. They have not built the heights that Anglo men have built, particularly not with the level of Christian mercy that Anglo men have displayed. The Greeks and Romans are long gone. The thing we take for granted is even more precious than we realize. Similarly, the heights of cultured and companionate femininity are unique to Northern European, Protestant women. We are retreating to a global norm.
There is good at teams in a narrow sense, which is a general male trait, and good at scaling that up. That is much more variable between cultures. Europeans and East Asians are the standouts there.
Fair. East Asian men do not stop to rescue women or kids being harassed on the street (or other situations). The culture is about self-sacrifice but never heroism. Anglo culture values both. We need both for everyone’s fortunes to rise.
I don't claim to be certain about any of these questions. BUT I am certain that there's a great deal of uncertainty - that the social consensus is false and enforced by shaming and pressure and reputational penalty (all feminine social strategies). When did we ever have an open and searching conversation about any of this? A demographic that refuses to countenance criticism of it, seeks to amass power even at the expense of the public good, and reacts emotionally to logical claims and questions is NOT a demographic that I want wielding power.
In my experience, most of these descriptors (or all of them) describe most women, to a significant extent. Naturally we can't discuss that either.
Your comments about Hollywood are interesting. I've thought about this for some time and hadn't worked out why, but in the relatively recent film of The Hobbit, the whole book was turned from a Quest into a Pursuit. Having read your essay, I wonder whether this was because they had to change Bilbo from a Hero into a Victim....
I watched the first film and never bothered with the others. It was crap.
“brain-rot pseudo-history.” A very useful phrase! This seems to me (admittedly from way outside academia) to precisely characterize what is being and has been taught in schools for decades in what passes for objective American History. I can see it in some of my own schooling from back in the 60s, but a lot more in that of my children and now, my grandchildren.
The females in the WNBA earn most of their revenues on the backs of the males in the NBA. It’s interesting to see how much society can influence social behavior.
If you are located outside of the U.S., then you are forgiven for never having heard of the WNBA. Most people here have never watched a single game, ever.
News of Caitlin Clark and Sarah Cunningham has reached even the Antipodes. As has the failure to block the Trans nonsense.
Women’s sport is just not as interesting as men’s, hence the vastly smaller audiences and lower incomes.
The exception being soccer. The smaller, slower bodies leave more room for increased activity and scoring. I find the womens' game more "open" than the mens'.
That said, it's still soccer, and I'd rather watch golf. Even womens' golf.
And cycling. It's much closer than men's.
I can't get into any repetitive sport much. Basketball always looks the same and ends up with a bunch of foul shots. Cycling, curling, soccer, auto racing... just not enough happening. Football at least has gadget plays, baseball tricks you by doing nothing for 2 of 3 hours, even golf has different holes and shots (always like seeing them in the trees, because I can do that too!) and hockey at least has being blazing fast going for it.
Not sure what you mean by closer. The pack is closer? The finish times are closer?
Thanks for replying. I don't like the sort of team sports you mention, but golf and snooker can keep me enraptured for hours - regardless of which sex is playing. Athletics and tennis, too. F1 stopped being interesting when the equivalent of an entire team got into the cockpit, but Touring Cars and rallying are still quite exciting, though going the same way. I suppose I just like sports where the result depends heavily on one person's performance.
When I referred to women's cycling being "closer", I meant it in both ways you mention. There aren't any Tadej Pogaçars racing away to take everything - men's cycling as gone into another of its periodical one-winner episodes, and it is, frankly, boring to me.
Here's my theory about why women's sports are not as interesting as men's.
There is some sort of psychological transference going on when we see an athlete compete.
When I watch them it somehow feels like I'm out there making the tackle scoring the goal too. This works collectively as well, they whole team is my team, my boys, my guys fighting for the trophy and I will rise and fall with them.
It's always more difficult to make that transfer to a person very different than yourself, I don't see a female athlete as an avatar of myself, and women seem to have this capacity for the psychic transfer of the self to the group at a much lower level.
When, throughout all of human history do we see 100 women pulling on the same rope or 10,000 women marching to the same beat?
Knitting, sewing and weaving circles just don't count.
If shopping is female sport, then you are wrong: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/MdfpgBk6k_8?feature=share
a high percentage of women who complain about the salary disparity in professional sports wouldn't be caught dead watching a single game or financially support a women's league through becoming a fan. if they ever do go to a game, it becomes a politicized event instead of a mere entertainment choice.
Same here - I’ve never watched a single WNBA game. However, with the WNBA fully welcoming trans (wo)men and doing all the woke verbal pirouettes around it, now two tall and very fit 6'10" former NBA players are semi-mockingly declaring that after a deep introspection they find that sometimes they may feel like women, and are applying for the draft in the 2027 season. And sure, by any performance tests they will leave everyone else in the dust. There’s a lot of outrage from the right about it, yet I for one say just do it: if the majority of women players seem to be supportive of this, let them have it. I’ll surely watch some of the games for the laughs, and thus they will gain yet another spectator!
Enes Kanter declaring himself for the WNBA draft is an interesting example of Agitprop or "Culture Jamming".
Using the system to transmit a signal within the system to show the system is utterly absurd.
Like when the "Yippies" Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin nominated a pig "Pigasus the Immortal" as a presidential candidate at the 1968 Democratic convention.
Now the Left to Right signal has flipped polarity and is running Right to Left.
Classically, men produce or acquire resources, then give them to favoured women who use and distribute those resources to care for children, family & community.
We’ve broken the pipeline at both ends.
At the destination, women in the upper classes are no longer being raised to see care work as a primary calling, so resources directed to these women just get consumed on the self.
Meanwhile, the economic shift is to give the state the primary role in resource distribution. But the state is mostly not a producer, just a redistributer - or it creates synthetic wealth to make up the difference. This insulates women from the male role of actually generating wealth and provides socio-economic advantage to those who are best at convincing the state to give them stuff.
This whole process starves wealth production among the lower classes, so the dam is running dry. It also inserts the state into the historical connection between lower classes labour and lower class provision. Lower class women are less able to get state money, especially on terms that don’t feel like begging, but lower class men are struggling to provide for themselves, let alone anyone else.
Prioritising the service economy doesn’t help either. Service economy is great, but it plays in the realm of existing resources. Offshoring so many of our production pipelines is hollowing out the lower classes, which will eventually destabilise our economic foundations.
I question whether upper class women ever in any general way regarded care work as a primary calling. The calling was to produce progeny, for economic and political purposes. But the actual work seems to me to have been eagerly farmed out.
Not the elite. But certainly middle and upper middle class did
I don’t get why you say “not the elite”. I would have thought “certainly the elite.”
Great points, but to be honest a fit 14 year old boy (playing say football, soccer, lacrosse, track, basketball, even baseball) would likely wreck fit 21 year old women playing the same sport in a strength contest. My son was a baseball player and benched around 155 max when he was 14 which was strong for his age but not super notable — meanwhile I’m guessing less than 1% of 21 year old fit softball playing women could bench 155 across the entire sport.
I am comparing national women’s teams with school boy teams, so right at the edge of the female distribution.
Very few women on a football national team are going to be bench pressing 70kg.
Plus, it's football. I grew up with a lad who went on to be a standout athlete in the premier league. He was MAYBE the 5th best athlete in our school year of 80 boys at 14, and that's with the premier league academy S&C plus a more extensive sporting background than most at that age.
And if perchance age 14 is still too young to evidence that equivalent or superior strength and agility, etc., by age 15 or 16 he almost certainly is [while granting there are some larger women who might still beat them, but comparing common build to build would not].
I was surprised when I first heard that 15 year old male soccor teams were providing training for (and beating) professional women's teams. But raw biology does eventually win out.
It still works at the other end of the age range, too. I know as a 44 year old I was still a stronger jogger than my 20 something female business colleague when we found a race track to run on during a business trip [no hanky panky either]. Now, 3 decades later I might struggle to match such a young women, but you can't have everything!! :-)
In my 40s I ran marathons and the like where I would beat all but a handful of women - who were generally speaking about 21 and attending university on an athletics scholarship or similar
I ran a half marathon earlier this year (I am now closer to 60 than 50) and not much had changed though my time had dropped by 5 or more minutes from my best a decade and a half earlier. I came 142nd out of ~850 men who completed the race and I beat all but three out of 100+ women.
Flash some awesome titty and the whole boy´s game is ruined.
Yes I think this underplays the difference. I played one year of baseball in junior high. I sucked. I only got up when we were down, like, 11-0 with 2 outs in the 9th and all I ever managed was 2 walks.
But at the end of the year the boys played the girls in softball. And suddenly I went 4 for 4 with 3 doubles. Hitless and inept against men, just a body to fill out the thin roster, but I looked like freaking David Ortiz (Big Papi) against the girls. And keep in mind I was probably one of the WORST baseball players imaginable. They could hardly even get us out and the innings usually ended by mercy rule (once everyone batted and the remaining runners scored).
This was the 80s though so I never would have even thought of pulling a "Lia" Thomas.
It takes a physically superior woman to best the physically average man, talent being otherwise equal. But sometimes a weaker woman with superior or better trained talent can best a physically stronger man. And there’s the rub in all these conversations - we seem to think that acknowledging the exceptions concedes the argument.
Congratulations on setting the Substack record for footnotes.
There aren’t actually any footnotes. Perhaps you mean references?
It the point can’t be won by argument, beat down the foe with footnotes. Samuel Johnson would approve.
It seems that a good place to start is to make very clear that the myth of women and men being interchangeable is just that: a myth.
I have been mulling over the effect of this matriarchy we're in for a while now. The so-called "loneliness epidemic" seems so counterintuitive for women, but it does seem to be driven by women prioritizing career over creating communities where women of childbearing age (not starting in their forties because a few women were able to) formed lifelong friendships and created real, living places where people actually felt "safe."
Ironically, in the female-dominated society, no one feels "safe" in the institutions if their beliefs deviate even a bit from the imposed narrative.
My YouTube short video feed is interesting. I´ll click on one gorgeous surfer in Bali, and get an absolute flood of young gorgeous tits and ass videos. Then I´ll type in a search for "automatic transmissions" or something, and be presented with a few options that have nothing to do with tits and ass, but if I don´t click on any of them, all of a sudden I´m back to getting tits and ass. Well, I give up then!
Sometimes it’s a myth. And sometimes, for some purposes, it’s not. The true myth, so to speak, is that what is sometimes the case is always the case.
Talk about this? Not a chance.
E.g. men make teams, women make collectives.
Depressing, but in a good way. It is important for preservation of these truths that they be laid out in their tragic awful comprehensive reality. The take away summary and brilliant meme is the clip from X which concludes: "This is the banality of feminism winning"
"One of the striking things about contemporary Western societies is how little active concern that female university graduates show for people, including other women, of lower socio-economic status within their own societies."
This would explain why Western feminists are generally silent about Muslim-majority countries where women and girls are abused by their culture.
I don't disagree with your general thesis, but I think this bit is not as correct as the rest
"It is not strength difference that leads schoolboy teams to regularly beat women’s national sporting teams. From adolescence on, boys and men are systematically stronger than girls and women of the same age: but even a fit 14 year old boy is not likely to be stronger than a fit, athletic 21 year old sportswoman. It is difference in male and female cognitive and behaviour patterns that leads to teenage boys sporting teams beating national women’s teams."
Specifically athletic early male teenagers are frequently right up there with the best of the women of all ages. It's obviously going to depend on the boys in question but a top school sports team will have 14 or 15 yo boys who have greater endurance and faster sprints than any woman. It is possible that one of two women in the team will be better than the average boy in the team, but most will not be. They won't be far off, but a couple of years of testosterone is enough to build the muscles the ladies mostly just don't have. Now it is true that team work is also better but they are going to be physically slightly better too.
I agree with most of what you say, except the male population that you’re talking about is largely Anglos. Males in most other cultures are not especially adept at teamwork or dispassionate debate either. They have not built the heights that Anglo men have built, particularly not with the level of Christian mercy that Anglo men have displayed. The Greeks and Romans are long gone. The thing we take for granted is even more precious than we realize. Similarly, the heights of cultured and companionate femininity are unique to Northern European, Protestant women. We are retreating to a global norm.
realize.
There is good at teams in a narrow sense, which is a general male trait, and good at scaling that up. That is much more variable between cultures. Europeans and East Asians are the standouts there.
Fair. East Asian men do not stop to rescue women or kids being harassed on the street (or other situations). The culture is about self-sacrifice but never heroism. Anglo culture values both. We need both for everyone’s fortunes to rise.
The Heather Heying link is broken.
Fixed, ta. https://youtube.com/shorts/aR3xTWNDIu4?si=lnJ25OcrRz4nyrYI
I don't claim to be certain about any of these questions. BUT I am certain that there's a great deal of uncertainty - that the social consensus is false and enforced by shaming and pressure and reputational penalty (all feminine social strategies). When did we ever have an open and searching conversation about any of this? A demographic that refuses to countenance criticism of it, seeks to amass power even at the expense of the public good, and reacts emotionally to logical claims and questions is NOT a demographic that I want wielding power.
In my experience, most of these descriptors (or all of them) describe most women, to a significant extent. Naturally we can't discuss that either.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/feminism-as-entitlement-pt-5
You nailed it! And we like the ladies even
Your comments about Hollywood are interesting. I've thought about this for some time and hadn't worked out why, but in the relatively recent film of The Hobbit, the whole book was turned from a Quest into a Pursuit. Having read your essay, I wonder whether this was because they had to change Bilbo from a Hero into a Victim....
I watched the first film and never bothered with the others. It was crap.