Womenism and sports fairness
By Bruce Walker
web
posted September 2, 2002
Feminism is finally receiving general contempt from sensible people.
The better name for this most perverse modern misology is womenism, and
its malice toward "maleness" reaches the nadir of those other
vile secular religions which reject "Jewish science" or "European
values."
The absurdity of womenism sometimes appears in innocuous places. A recent
news story announced that a young woman had earned a place on Mercer County
College football team as a place kicker. Those of us sympathetic to competition
applaud the general principle that people should not be kept from enjoying
government supported benefits because of artificial barriers, but those
of us once sympathetic to womenism know that womenists do not genuinely
believe in universal principles: they only believe in the parochial interests
of women and especially in the interests of those women who agree with
womenism.
 Drumareq |
As a counterpoint to the Mercer County College story, another recent news story noted that Michelle Drumareq, a transsexual, had earned a place on Canada's World Mountain Biking Championship Team. Sylvia Allen, Canada's top female mountain biker, planned to file a formal protest because Michelle, as a transsexual, was not a "woman" (i.e. the Womenist equivalent of a "pure Aryan").
This ugly side of womenism appeared thirty years ago when Dr. Rene Richards, then a fifty-year old transsexual athlete who had once been an average male tennis player, was prevented from participating as a professional woman tennis player because she was not "really a woman." Like Jews in Nazi Germany who had converted to Christianity, men who had become women could never be "true women."
If womenists will not even grant equality to those men who have become women, then what are the chances that womenists will grant men equality? The blatant bigotry of segregation in sports programs supported by tax dollars shows the gender equivalent of Hitler's racial theories: team athletics that involve serious competition are not open to both sexes on an equal basis, because strong, fast young men are not allowed to participant in competition with women.
Why? As with all leftist poison, the underlying theme is "The end justifies the means." If sports teams were open to both sexes, if there was fair competition for each position, then the best female high school basketball player would have a difficult time earning a starting position on the worst coed basketball team in America. The result - all that matters to leftists - would be "unfair" because one gender would nearly always do better than the other gender.
But this rule only applies to gender, and not to other natural differences in human beings. Only a few people are athletically gifted, and only a few men or women ever have a chance to become a competitive sport athlete. womenists do not suggest that short women, for example, should be allowed to form a separate, government supported basketball team - even though short women cannot compete with tall women in basketball.
What womenists loath admitting is that the segregation of males and females in athletics was never intended to be a tool of oppression by a patriarchal cabal, but that it was intended to do just what womenists want also: to protect girls and young women from real competition with boys and young men.
The pretense that these inferior levels of competition ought to be judge equal to adult male athletic competition is absurd, and the corollary to this - that WNBA games should be as prominent as NBA games (although the latter allow women to compete with men, and the former allows only women) is also absurd. The interest in professional athletics is precisely because it is the very best against the very best.
History means nothing to womenists, Nazis or other leftists. If the lessons of past human experience guided womenists, then they would perceive those demands for "women only" sports look only not like the Nuremberg Laws, but also like the wretched segregation of black athletics so rightly deplored by those who believe in equal opportunity.
The consequence was not just to deprive black athletes of the most basic rights of opportunity, but to diminish the whole concept of professional athletics. The college football records of Red Grange must be considered in the light of racial exclusion that kept a defensive player like Lawrence Taylor or Reggie White from tackling him. Serious competition - the sort of competition in college sports and professional leagues which people pay to watch - involves all the unfairness of gender, age, and inborn ability.
But is pure, naked competition what most of us seek for our children in sports? What parent truly wants his sons and daughters competing against big, tough boys? Or, without any mocking intending, what parent of a retarded child wants that Special Olympics open to all children?
There is nothing wrong with a girls' softball team or a boys' football team. Consent, not coercion, should govern all types of sports - some of which are intended to be high-level competition and commercial activities and some of which are intended as social, friendly activities.
This means that if men wish to gather at a club for males only, then womenists may whine but not sue, and this means that if Canadian women wish to form "Women's Only Mountain Biking Inc." (as Canadian women, in fact, have done) then the fellows accept this with good cheer.
Conservatives believe that biggest problem in modern life is that leftists have regulated everything, including morals and manners. I am offended by country clubs that do not allow blacks or Jews or Catholics, as I am when the Ku Klux Klan, which makes the same invidious distinctions. But this offensive attitude manifests itself by my election not to support these bigots with my vote in the marketplace of social, cultural and economic intercourse.
I am offended by private organizations which irrationally exclude women, but not by a National Football League rule which simply reflects the obvious and natural differences between men and women or by the decision of the Boy Scouts not to include girls. These discriminations are no more intended to offend than the rules of a Reform Temple which require that the rabbi be a Jew or the exclusion of men from La Leche meetings.
As with is true with every other human activity, left alone people will
act with common sense and allow our natural differences to not impede
a happy and friendly community of human activity. When womenism - like
Marxism and Nazism - is recognized as simply another name for the Ku Klux
Klan, then men and women can begin to enjoy the blessings of differences
in human interest and ability, instead of seeing every deviation from
the arithmetic mean as a sinister plot. 
Bruce
Walker is a senior writer with Enter Stage Right. He is also a contributor
to Citizens View, The Common Conservative, Conservative Truth and Port
of Call.
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