Sorry Ladies; It’s Just Biology, Psychology, and Economics

Just like probably 90 percent or so of those virtue signaling in favor of “pay equality” for the American women who won the FIFA Women’s World Cup, I’ve never paid to attend a women’s soccer game. In fact, as best I can recall, I’ve never paid to attend ANY women’s sporting event. The only girl I’ve ever paid to watch compete in sports is the beautiful and talented Caroline Thomas—the (now) 13-year-old karate champion:

Yeah, that’s my girl, and she has about 15 of those first-place trophies—in both karate fighting (which involves contact, but is not very violent) and forms, or “kata.” Caroline also plays in a co-ed basketball league. Like most other fathers, I would pay (up to a point) to watch my daughter show off her talents in almost any venue—whether in sports, performing on stage, or in a cooking contest (Caroline also likes to cook). However, it doesn’t mean that the public at large is interested in forking over their hard-earned dollars to watch my daughter perform—especially in the realm of athletics.

The “inequality” that exists in women’s sports is nothing new, and in spite of what many on the left would have us believe, involves nothing nefarious. As I noted several years ago, the fact that consumers overwhelmingly prefer men’s sports to women’s sports is merely a matter of biology and psychology and not due to some mythical misogynistic plot. The facts and the data clearly bear this out.

Just as was the case in 2015—the latest data available when I last wrote about this issue—in 2018, when examining sports audiences, men’s sports dominated television ratings. Of the 50 most-watched sporting events in 2018, 43 of them were men’s football—40 NFL games and three college football games. The other seven were events from the Winter Olympics.

According to Sports Media Watch, including pre-game coverage, Fox earned a 7.7 rating and had 12.98 million viewers for the Women’s World Cup final. These number are nowhere close to what was needed to make the top 50 most-watched sporting events of 2018. The 50th place event—Winter Olympics night 6—had an 11.4 rating and 19.3 million viewers. There’s virtually no doubt the Women’s World Cup final will not make 2019’s top 50 list either.

If you exclude the NFL and the Winter Olympics, women’s sports are still nowhere to be found among the most-watched sporting events in 2018. Again, as was the case in 2015, even non-humans outperform women’s sports in viewership—two of the 2018 non-NFL/Winter Olympics top 50 were horse racing events. The Kentucky Derby was 16th on this list with an 8.5 rating and 15 million viewers.

When it comes to television audience and paid attendees, the women’s professional sports that compete annually are not in the same universe as men’s sports—or even horse racing. In 2018, the top-rated women’s tennis event was the U.S. Open Women’s final. It earned a 1.9 rating with 3.1 million viewers. The top-rated women’s golf event for 2018 was the U.S. Women’s Open Final Round. It earned a 0.6 rating with 878,000 viewers. The top-rated WNBA event for 2018 was the WNBA All Star Game. It earned a 0.5 rating with 709,000 viewers.

Thus, as such consumer data implies, according to Forbes—from boxer Floyd Mayweather ($285 million) to basketball player Nicolas Batum ($22.9 million)—of the world’s 100 highest paid athletes in 2018, not a single female athlete made the list. Again, there is nothing evil at work here; it is simply a matter of economics. Whether in person or through television or live streaming on their phone or computer, fans simply prefer to watch men compete than women.

Of course, this does not mean that fans are “discriminating” against women. Fans are discriminating, just not in the way the “equal pay” loons of the left would have us believe. I’ve jokingly told the left before how to make women’s sports more interesting: allow men to compete as women. Forgetting that the left takes jokes and makes them into policy, I never thought they would take me up on it.

Given the pay disparity that already exists among male and female athletes, and given how the left is determined to convince us that this is “unfair,” the fact that liberals are now allowing men to take trophies and dollars from women is the height of absurdity. It just goes to show how tragically devoted to the perverse LGBT agenda is the modern left.

Unless the left continues down this road where gender-deluded (or financially savvy?) men are allowed to compete as women, there will never be “equal pay” or “gender equality” when it comes to athletics, because human genders are not—and will never be—equal. Men are bigger, faster, and stronger than women. And “bigger, faster, and stronger” makes for more exciting and interesting sports.

What’s more, as most anyone not devoted to a liberal worldview who has observed human beings for at least 15 minutes was already aware, men are naturally more physically aggressive than are women. As Psychology Today points out:

The fact that males are more aggressive and more violent is reflected by their anatomy itself; in many animals species they are heavier, more muscular, better armed with means of attack and defense. In humans, for example, the arms of men are, on average, 75 percent more muscular than those of women; and the top of a male body is 90 percent stronger than the top of a female body [Bohannon, 1997; Abe et al., 2003, apud Goetz, 2010, p. 16]. Also, men are taller, they have denser and heavier bones, their jaw is more massive, their reaction time is shorter, their visual acuity is better, their muscle/fat ratio is greater, their heart is bulkier, their percentage of hemoglobin is higher, their skin is thicker, their lungs bigger, their resistance to dehydration is higher etc. In other words, from all points of view, men are more suited for battle than women, and these skills are native.

As Ann Coulter noted over a decade ago, “Competitive sports are ritualized forms of fighting, and boys like to fight.” In other words, sports—especially those involving heavy contact—is a form of battle, and in spite of what the foolish left would have us believe, men are much more suited for battle than are women. No amount of legislation, legal wrangling, or whining is going to change these facts.

(See this column at American Thinker.)

Copyright 2019, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor is the author of the The Miracle and Magnificence of America
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com

Racists and Transgender Apologists Both Reject Basic Biology

My wife’s mother was born and raised in Nigeria. Her parents were Baptist missionaries from America. Thus, in spite of the fact that my wife Michelle is almost as pale as I am, I sometimes (lightheartedly) tell people that I’m married to an “African-American.” This is (barely) humorous because of the modern left’s obsession with skin color and what is typically denoted as “race.”

It’s rare that Ken Ham (an evangelical Christian) and Bill Nye (a devoted Darwinist and secular humanist) agree, but when it comes to the issue of race, both rightly conclude: “There’s no such thing as race.” As Ham puts it,

As a result of Darwinian evolution, many people started thinking in terms of the different people groups around the world representing different “races,” but within the context of evolutionary philosophy. This has resulted in many people today, consciously or unconsciously, having ingrained prejudices against certain other groups of people.

However, all human beings in the world today are classified as Homo sapiens sapiens. Scientists today admit that, biologically, there really is only one race of humans. For instance, a scientist at the Advancement of Science Convention in Atlanta stated, “Race is a social construct derived mainly from perceptions conditioned by events of recorded history, and it has no basic biological reality.”

Bill Nye concludes,

We’re all the same, from a scientific standpoint. There’s no such thing as race — but there is such a thing as tribalism.

Many biologists avoid the term “race” and prefer a phrase such as “continental ancestry.” Thus, to prefer one “race” over another, or to declare one “race” superior to another, is biologically ignorant. Or, put another way, the “racists”—or “race-baiters”—of any era, of any color, on any continent, who battled against the cause of human rights of those of another skin color are guilty of contradicting the laws of basic human biology.

Likewise, those who fight to further the cause of the gender-confused (“transgenders”) are also guilty of contradicting the laws of basic human biology. Only in a world corrupted by liberalism must we debate who is a male, who is a female, and what restroom they get to use. The next time you encounter a liberal—especially one claiming the mantle of “champion of science”—who wants to lecture you about global warming—I mean climate change—or stem cells, or evolution, or the ignorance of Christians, conservatives, and the like, remind him that, when their side can settle on what is a male and a female, then you might only consider them ignorant and lost. Otherwise, tell them you have no time for madness.

And consider the ignorant irony: the modern liberals championing the cause of the gender-confused are on the same (wrong) side of science as those who fought against the civil rights of black Americans. As I began this piece, I encountered the following on the front page of the website of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution—the largest newspaper in my home state of Georgia:

When I clicked on the link, I was taken to a page headlined, “7 African American museums to visit with your kids for an unforforgettable (sic) history lesson.” The image above is taken from the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis. It’s from a display that depicts the 1968 Memphis sanitation strike.

Barely a week into the strike (it lasted over two months), at a rally with the strikers (black sanitation workers), The Rev. James Lawson declared, “For at the heart of racism is the idea that a man is not a man, that a person is not a person. You are human beings. You are men. You deserve dignity.” Rev. Lawson’s uplifting words became the message on the iconic placards seen above. In other words, there was a time when liberals knew what was a man. No more.

Chris Cuomo of CNN, and—being the son of Mario Cuomo, former New York Governor, and the brother of Andrew Cuomo, current New York Governor—of strong New York liberal stock, provides the perfect anecdote here. After President Trump this week reversed the Obama administration’s perverse decree that instructed public schools to allow the gender-confused to access the bathrooms and locker rooms they prefer, Cuomo (Chris) went on what David French called “one of the strangest tweet exchanges I’ve ever seen.” (The Blaze provides a good summary of the tweets.)

As Cuomo attempted to promote the transgender agenda via Twitter, he was voluminously challenged. His retorts are telling. Most revealing is Cuomo’s response when one tweet asked, “What do you tell a 12-year-old girl who doesn’t want to see a penis in the locker room?” To this, Cuomo answered:

Only a mind and heart corrupted by liberalism could “wonder” about a young girl in a locker room with boys, and her “intolerant” father who merely wants to guard the eyes (not to mention, the rest of her body) of his 12 year-old daughter. Amazing, but not surprising.

On “tolerance,” G.K. Chesterton declared: “Tolerance is a virtue of a man without convictions.” As the debate over bathrooms and gender reveals, what better describes a modern liberal than “a man without convictions?” Thus, we see again that liberalism corrupts not only sound science, but common sense and morality as well.

What’s more, the “tolerance” of which Cuomo speaks is little more than a self-refuting system of thought that attempts to impose liberal values onto any culture unable or unwilling to recognize the fallacy. The United Nations’ Declaration of Principles on Tolerance (which Cuomo has probably memorized) instructs, “Tolerance … involves the rejection of dogmatism and absolutism.”

How about that, a dogmatic and absolute statement decrying “dogmatism and absolutism.” How intolerant! Given that its foundation is filled with lies—and as Cuomo, and his fellow gender-denying apologists well demonstrate—liberalism is filled with such contradictions. The fact is, we’re all intolerant. It’s just a matter of who’s right.

Again, some things deserve no debate. The great C.S. Lewis alludes to this as he rather bluntly declares, “An open mind, in questions that are not ultimate, is useful. But an open mind about the ultimate foundations either of Theoretical or of Practical Reason is idiocy.” More plainly put, one would have to be an idiot not to recognize that certain things—like a person’s gender—are settled for all time.

(See this column at American Thinker.)

Copyright 2017, Trevor Grant Thomas
At the Intersection of Politics, Science, Faith, and Reason.
www.trevorgrantthomas.com
Trevor is the author of the brand new book The Miracle and Magnificence of America
tthomas@trevorgrantthomas.com