A recovering misogynist's defense of women's sports no one asked for

BREAD & CIRCUSES | ISSUE EIGHT | SCREENS

Written by Luke Fisher (he/him) |  @lukefish7 | Sports Columnist Annotated by Tashi Donnelly (she/her) | @tashi_rd | Editor

Statistically, women’s sports aren’t as good as men’s. *

*Starting strong with what is arguably the worst opening sentence we've ever published.

The ball hits the back of the net with less ferocity. The runaway tries are scored at a less-than-blistering pace. The sixes sail over a boundary rope dragged closer to the middle to account for the power differential. There are fewer dunks. The serves are slower; forehands aren’t as vicious. The drives don’t travel 300m.* *The "women are biologically worse at sport" conversation gets a bit awkward when someone like Kelsey Pfendler rows across the Pacific in 43 days, beating the men's record by nine days.

On average.

But, is our enjoyment of sport really all about the metrics?*

*You could've just started with this.

I had this thought while reflecting on the wet sock of an event that was the Enhanced Games. For background, the author of a tweet that did the rounds a while ago finally got his wish this year:

The multi-million dollar sporting event allowed liberal use of performance-enhancing drugs, and featured several previous Olympic medal winners. Upon its conclusion, Enhanced Games CEO ­Maximilian Martin claimed they had “changed the world”. But only one competitor went faster than an official world record. It was Greek swimmer ­Kristian Gkolomeev, who completed the men’s 50m freestyle in 20.81sec and beat the previous record by 0.07 seconds. 

To rub some extra trenbolone into the wound, some athletes who were competing without the use of drugs won their events. Tristan Evelyn won the women’s 100m clean in 11.25 seconds - nearly an entire second slower than the world record. Fred ­Kerley, who won the men’s 100m sprint race, said this after his race:

“Man, they need to do better than that. They need to work a little bit harder, get on that shit a little bit more.”

Around a quarter of a million people worldwide watched the event online. That’s around 1/20,000 of the viewership of the most recent Olympic Games. “How many of those then bought the supplements and testosterone creams on Enhanced’s website is less clear,” a Guardian piece reads.

What does this have to do with your so far blatantly misogynistic take on women’s sport, you may ask? It speaks to the question I posed earlier, I stutter, a little red-faced and taken aback by your willingness to challenge me. The event promised so much: faster, stronger, more explosive athletes than ever seen before. I continue, building back my confidence. And yet nobody gave a rat’s ass.* Which brings me to my first of three points in my defence of women's sports no one asked for.

*Turns out people like sports more than chemistry experiments. If only they'd spent all that money on female athletes instead.

The numbers, Mason, do they really mean anything?*

*Couldn't you have found a woman to quote? smh

As I’ve got older, I’ve realised sport is built not on numbers, but rather on narratives.* Numbers only really matter if they serve a narrative within a sport. It’s about the underdog story. The tournament dark horse.* The footballer who grew up in the slums of São Paulo and learned to play on a bare patch of dirt using boots he found in a landfill. The Kiwi who got a phone call while out whitebaiting in the Waikato and two weeks later scored the decisive conversion to win the All Blacks the 2011 Rugby World Cup.

* You know those memes where men discover existential dread in their twenties, while girls have already stared into the abyss sometime around Year 8? That.

* Tell this to Imane Khelif. Women are criticised no matter what they do or where they've come from.

Not many could tell you off the top of the dome how many goals Lionel Messi has scored in pro football (917). But the words “Ankara Messi” will activate any football fan like a sleeper agent. Side note: if any women are reading this who would like me to mansplain to them how FC Barcelona agreed to pay for the then 13-year-old Messi’s growth hormone treatment with a contract written on a napkin (the greatest investment of all time given he became the greatest footballer of all time),* my Instagram is at the top of this piece. *

* Incredible. A pre-emptive mansplain that became a regular mansplain halfway through the sentence.

* Unsolicited football lectures are not a recognised love language.

There is no reason why women’s sports can’t provide the same compelling stories - they are. It’s down to a combination of character deficiencies and various external forces* that I can’t recite very many off the top of my head. But I have a few.

* You mean "misogyny and structural inequality"

One set to play out in front of our very eyes in the near future is the plight of embattled Silver Ferns coach Dame Noelene Taurua. She will be in charge of the No.2-seeded New Zealand netball team at the Commonwealth Games in Glasgow later this month. Their first game against Scotland will mark 634 days since her last game in charge, after Netball NZ sensationally stood her down from her role on the largely unsubstantiated grounds of concerns about the team environment. 

She was guilty until proven innocent, inspiring most of the country to rally around her, including Silver Ferns shooter Grace Nweke, who took the microphone in a post-match presentation to say “If you're listening, we love you, and we miss you … we want you back, Noels.” If Taurua manages to take the Silver Ferns deep into the games (or even win it), it might be one of the biggest fuck you stories in the history of New Zealand sport. What a tantalising prospect.

It’d also be remiss not to mention the Black Ferns - the pride of our nation. They represent us so well wherever they go, including Buckingham Palace, where they gave King Charles a big ol’ group hug. And I’d give anything to have been at Eden Park after the 2021 World Cup when Ruby Tui got the whole crowd singing Tūtira Mai Ngā Iwi.*

* The solution to misogyny is not benevolent sexism. Putting women on a pedestal still denies them the complexity and flaws we allow in male athletes.

“I’m just so proud to be a New Zealander right now,” she said.

“They said nobody cared about women’s rugby; well, guess what? We're out here. We’re going nowhere.”

A self-fulfilling prophecy

Typically, people neglect to watch women’s sports because they hold the inherent belief that it is an inferior product to the male equivalent. And in many ways that’s true - decades of underinvestment have made it so. For a start, female athletes have for a long time been paid three-eighths of fuck all.* Think of how much talent has gone unrealised because of money. Not many can afford to commit full-time hours to a sport when it doesn’t provide full-time pay. Think of the Stephen Jay Gould quote about Einstein in The Panda's Thumb.

* Gave up on citing statistics for the women's sport section, I see.

“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”

This underinvestment has extended to all facets of women’s sport. To me, though, the most consequential has been in meaningful competition. A nation only achieves sporting greatness when its children have something to look up to. Lionel Messi grew up idolising Diego Maradona.* Now, many players who grew up idolising Messi are playing in a Football World Cup alongside the 39-year-old. In 2015, a then 15-year-old Enzo Fernández was on Facebook begging him not to un-retire from the Argentinian national team:

* WARNING: mansplaining returns.

“Do whatever you want, Lionel, but please think about staying. But stay to have fun—that’s what these people have taken away from you… Play to have fun, because when you’re having fun, you have no idea how much fun we’re having.”*

*Is this relevant? Or just interesting to you?

Fast forward 10 years to mere hours ago on the day of writing, and Fernández is locked in a gleeful embrace with Messi after scoring the decisive goal in Argentina’s dramatic comeback win against Egypt. When a competition doesn’t exist, or isn’t marketed well, or doesn’t attract the best players, it can’t claim a meaningful place in people’s lives. For decades, female athletes have had next to nothing to look up to. No one to idolise. No great team to dream of playing for. Star White Ferns all-rounder Sophie Devine summed this experience up beautifully when speaking to the NZ Herald in 2021:

"I didn't see many female players – it wasn't really on TV," she said. 

"The first time I saw a female team was at the 2000 World Cup in Christchurch. I was like 'oh, we have a New Zealand women's team'.

"I didn't know there was a Wellington women's team,

"It wasn't till I was picked in the side that I knew. It's that visibility; if you can't see it, how do you even know about it?”

Things are undeniably on the improve. The nation’s cricketing girls can grow up idolising Sophie Devine and dreaming of repeating the White Ferns’ T20 World Cup final victory in 2024. And if cricket isn’t their thing (fair), they can idolise the likes of Ruby Tui, Portia Woodman, Dame Lisa Carrington, Dame Valerie Adams, and Grace Nweke, all dominating their respective sports. *

* So I know more about Lionel Messi from reading this article than any of the women listed here. Cheers for that.

But there is still a long way to go - even in New Zealand, where we like to think of ourselves as punching above our weight in the realm of ‘doing the right thing’. According to Sport NZ, the median annual income for women in the sector is 14% lower than that for men, compared to the national average of 8.2%. And take the ANZ Premiership netball league, which hasn’t even confirmed it will be running next season. Professional athletes should not have to worry each year about whether the competition they play in will continue to exist.

How can we help? Switch on the TV, buy the tickets, sit down and enjoy.

Women’s sports can still be enjoyed obnoxiously

While writing this piece, I thought back to one of my first times getting proper into women’s sport. It was the 2023 Women’s Football World Cup, and matches were being broadcast in a packed-out Cloud down at the viaduct.

I sat there with my mates, overpriced beer in hand, roaring at every goal, chastising players who made mistakes, and blurting half-baked opinions into the ether. This is such an important part of the collective male sport-watching experience, and if more of us realised it can be flawlessly executed across both men’s and women’s sports, we’d benefit as a society.

So go on. Be an inclusive pillock.

EDITOR'S FEMINISM RATING: ★★★☆☆ (3/5)

Would have been four stars if Luke hadn't made me read three paragraphs about football to get there. This is still an article about women’s sport, not Messi fan fiction.

I'll give credit where credit is due; this article didn't ask us to "support women" like it’s a charity raffle. 

Luke, I suggest you pick up a copy of Invisible Women by Caroline Criado-Perez. 

Ladies, Luke’s Instagram DMs are open. My feminist assessment: flawed, occasionally in need of correction, but ultimately salvageable. A passing grade.