Imagine if instead of ranting about women, OP started a thread like this:
“I don’t understand why anyone watches AAA baseball. The players are not as strong, fast, or capable as a major league team. Would any AAA team even stand a chance against a major league team?”
Does it matter to fans? Do fans still want their local AAA teams to have good records? Would they not be exited if their team won the AAA championship? Does the fact that a pro team, which isn’t allowed to compete, would probably win the AAA championship if they were? Does that diminish the winning team’s pride?
I see your point, but a quibble is that AAA baseball / minor league baseball is professional baseball, and a modern-day AAA team is a farm/developmental team for a Major League team: such a team’s primary reason for being is to develop young players to step up to the parent Major League team. They certainly draw fans to watch their games, but the nature of a AAA’s player base is much more transient than that of an MLB team, because the star players on your local AAA team are going to get promoted soon.
But, similar to your point:
I’ve been a fan of American (gridiron) football for my entire life. That’s primarily been expressed as being a fan of the NFL, and my hometown Green Bay Packers, but I’m also a fan of Canadian football, and the CFL. For that matter, I’ve kind of fallen out of love with the NFL over the last decade, for various reasons, and I’m at the point that I enjoy watching the CFL more than the NFL.
CFL play is absolutely at a lower level of overall skill than the NFL, for a bunch of reasons, including that CFL teams have a salary cap which is a tiny fraction of the NFL salary cap ($6.3 million (Canadian), vs. $301 million for the NFL). American players who are fringe/backups in the NFL sometimes go to Canada, and wind up as starters and stars.
Doesn’t matter to me. The Canadian sport is somewhat different from the American sport (field dimensions, number of players on the field, number of downs, motion before the snap), and is a different style of play, but the fact that very few CFL players would even be able to get a cup of coffee on an NFL team doesn’t detract from my enjoyment of the sport, as its own thing.
Both of which are higher for the women’s US soccer team than for the men’s.
And they win butts in seats, eyeballs on TV sets, and dollars in box offices. Which is exactly what a professional athlete’s job is. The women don’t do the same job the men do; they do a better job.
Being a professional athlete is being an entertainer. It’s no different than being an actor or a musician. You go on a stage and perform for people, and if they are entertained, you did your job.
That’s why so many former athletes go into jobs on television. It’s not that much of a career change.
However, I would point out that people can’t be lectured into being interested in something they are not interested in. If they prefer to watch men’s sports, telling them that women win more titles (in women’s sports) isn’t going to persuade them. The phenomenon of people following men’s sports more than women’s sports isn’t an America-only phenomenon; it is seen in many other nations as well.
Of course not, and I don’t think anyone here is trying to do that.
What people are reacting to is the premise/opinion, stated by a couple of posters, that women’s sports are de facto inferior to men’s sports, and cannot be otherwise, because men are superior athletically, and female teams/athletes would lose, badly, to men at comparable levels in their sports.
@mglambo 's OP set out that he feels women’s sports are an inferior product, because women are inferior athletes:
When I pointed out to @nonobaddog that the USWNT has won a ton of soccer championships, far outperforming the performance of the USMNT, his response was dismissive:
Are they entitled to their opinions? Certainly. Do their opinions come across as a bit sexist? I’m pretty sure that they would vehemently disagree, but it comes across that way to me (I won’t speak for anyone else).
I’ll also point out that @mglambo said this in his OP:
The choice of picking on “but they’re good at fundamentals” is interesting, because it’s been a long-standing backhanded compliment/critique of women’s sports: “they’re good at fundamentals” is code for “but they aren’t really athletic.” I can’t say for certain that he intentionally chose that phrase, but it stands out to me for that reason.
Well, they’re going to keep trying, and be “they” I mean people in the sports entertainment business who want you to buy more product. Uninterested consumers, I dunno, feel some need to provide a reason they’re not watching that’s not sexist, and so we get threads like this where they’re preemptively arguing their case. But what they should be saying is “why are all of these capitalists annoying me with sales pitches all the time?”
Eta: Like, “I only want to watch the pinnacle of sports” is a bad reason, as this thread has established. It makes no sense because there’s lots of sports people enjoy that aren’t their respective pinnacles. So it’s a bad reason but it’s not a sexist reason; it passes muster in that regard. But why do they need a reason? “I don’t enjoy the WNBA.” OK, fine, that was always allowed.
Everyone in the thread has been answering you. If you wanted to talk about something else, you should have made a thread about that, instead of the thread you did make.
Absolutely not, @Chronos–the OP asked a crystalline-clear question about which level of men’s basketball would consistently beat the WNBA champs, and only a handful have even acknowledged, much less answered, that particular question. The vast majority of respondents have criticized, mocked, belittled and undermined the premise of the question (that men’s basketball is played at a higher level than women’s basketball) while contradictorily conceding that men have an undisputable physical advantage over women.
@RickJay said, correctly, that "Literally no sane person on earth thinks that men athletes at a given level of accomplishment aren’t better than women athletes, at least not in 99.5 percent of sports.
What is unclear is where this connects to popularity." The answer is: it doesn’t connect to popularity. At all. The OP never mentioned popularity—he merely expressed his opinion that women’s basketball didn’t interest him personally.
Some people have responded by throwing in all sorts of off-topic non sequiturs such as @Der Trihs’ crack about the question depending on "Playing by whose rules, and with whose equipment? "It’s a round ball, and a round hoop, and that covers most of the rules and the equipment–but if you gave every single conceivable advantage to the WNBA rules and equipment, and gave the high school boys zero time to adjust to it. I think they’d figure it out by the second half of the game at the latest and mop up the floor with the WNBA champs. But Der Trihs’ cavil is irrelevant anyway—if he wanted to answer the OP’s question, he might have said. “With WNBA rules and equipment, they’d beat a Division I men’s team sometimes.” But he didn’t want to answer the OP’s question—he wanted to invent issues that might distract from the OP’s question. Color me undistracted.
Only after he spent three paragraphs detailing his opinion that women’s sports are uninteresting and inferior to him, and poisoning the well for the thread.
Out.