I agree with all that (even the sexist part). I sometimes get carried away with my sympathy for women's discrimination from a large part of the male population, but you should hear what some of them say about women in the locker room.
It's disgusting.
Oh I'm at least partially aware. My government issued spousal unit has a really low opinion of most of the male population, for the same reasons. There's some reasonable tolerance for the fact that regardless of our big frontal cortices, we're still animals... and males are highly sexually motivated in all sexually reproductive animal species. That comes with being a critter. But yeah, you're not wrong on that point.
ETA: Although I'm going to wait until after this before saying elite women athletes will lose against elite male athletes from the same sport:
Klay Thompson Open to NBA Three-Point Contest With Curry, Clark, Ionescu
Story by Tim Capurso
and then, there's this:
Caitlin Clark makes more history, surpassing Steph Curry’s three-point record
By Thomas Schlachter, CNN Published 7:29 AM EST, Sat March 9, 2024
And this is while on the floor doing all that same fancy stuff that men do during a game.
And if one thinks women aren't as rough as men on the floor, it's obvious you've never watched a WNBA game.
Plus, don't women spend less time on the court than men, so if that's true, this is even more impressive.
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Clark is phenomenal, and is definitely a exemplar in the WNBA... and maybe it's possible that she'll win out in a controlled contest like this. I wouldn't really be shocked. But again - Clark is *exceptional*, and far outside the normal range of elite female basketball players.
What you seem to keep whistling past is that if you take all of the WNBA and you put them in games against middle school male basketball players, the WNBA as a whole is going to lose 99% of the games. That's not a slam against female players, it's an acknowledgment that males and females are physically different. It's not just the presence or absence of boobies - there are a LOT of differences that are of material importance when it comes to sports.
Off the top, there's the simple reality of size, and in a whole lot of sports, size matters. Even when you control for size and compare a male and a female of the same height and physical volume, males have denser musculature with lower body fat - same sized males are simply stronger than females. Male muscles are also built different, with different amounts of fast-twitch fibers and some other bits I can't remember - so even if you have a female with unhealthily (for a female) low body fat of the same size, male muscles pound for pound are just straight-up more efficient at using energy.
Beyond all of that (and that's not nothing) males and females have different tendon, muscle, and ligament attachment points, and we have different pelvises. That pelvic structure means our legs
move differently. When we're walking, females don't roll our hips for giggles, and it's not something we practice because dudes like it - it's because our femurs attach at a different angle. We "swish" because that's how our bodies evolved to walk. It's the result of our skeletons.
There are a few athletic events where females excel, mostly ones that benefit from being bendy. Like floor gymnastics and balance beam. But for other events even in gymnastics, strength is a bigger factor - it's why males far outperform females on the rings or vault.
Some events that might or might not qualify as sports depending on your perspective don't really have a lot of difference. For example, even though more males participate in target shooting, females perform on par. And even though males can draw a heavier bow, females are as accurate at the same draw weights.
I strongly support sports continuing to be separated on the basis of sex, not because I'm sexist, but because I understand that males and females have
different bodies.
