The dullness of Bronze Age thinking

There is a particular newspaper that has recently refused to change a rather broken record. Similar posts bashing women's sport have appeared in quick succession. Read these if you dare!

http://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/sport/world-of-sport-sorry-ladies-but-you-are-very-dull-1-4811126

http://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/news/columnists/more-world-of-sport-lady-cricketers-an-apology-1-4838238

http://www.peterboroughtoday.co.uk/news/columnists/world-of-sport-the-bbc-and-an-unbalanced-view-1-4894009

My gander was up as I read through each, a mix between disbelief, laugh out loud hilarity, outrage and *faceslaps*. I have now had enough of it all.

I have already engaged in a pretty pointless Twitter debate with the author of these extremely unbalanced articles. I have no interest in further discussions with someone who will obviously never change his mind. Therefore I refer to him henceforth as The Columnist. Nice, impersonal term. I mean no offence in this blog.

It really is sad that someone could be so derisive, sexist and hurtful. But all it takes is a little unbalancing from the legions of (mainly right-wing) Men's Rights Activists to lead down the slippery slope of misogyny, to the “slyme pit” of this type of thinking at the bottom. This shows why sensible men need to constantly be on guard to the regressive ideas of MRAs. I have elsewhere in this blog exposed other holes in their logic, or rather, lack of it.

There are various counter arguments to The Columnist here. Chiefly, the framing of the whole approach is skewed. It is clear to me that The Columnist believes in the “all is as it was, as it is, and as it ever can or will be” paradigm. This only looks at the current situation of women's sport and ignores where it was in the past, so ignoring actual achieved improvement. It ignores the possibility of potential to improve further in the future, on the back of this achievement. This is a flawed and damaging perspective.

With this perspective, no minority group ever discriminated against in the history of the world would have seen any improvement. Although we are not there yet, I hope it is obvious that there is an overwhelming amount of evidence to the contrary of the paradigm above. It is a illogical mentality, firmly rooted in the Bronze Age.

So, his argument goes, men ARE better than women at sport. Even if we accept that argument (and I don't for a minute) it does not take into account the fact that men's sport has been around a whole lot longer. This leads to 2 effects. Firstly, the whole infrastructure is set up to support men's sport above women's. Men's sport has had hundreds of years of development and professional training with the latest available technology to reach its peak. Established and cherished cups, competitions and leagues reinforce the competitive spirit where well paid professional athletes can compete at the top of the game. None of this is generally true for women's sport. So therefore, we should expect men's sport to currently be at a higher level, and I'm afraid men can take no particular merit from this.

Secondly, men's sport is reaching a plateau of achievement, following all the time it has had to stretch the limits of strength, speed, endurance and skill etc. Do we see a noticeable upward trend in standards each year in well-established men's sport? (remember to discount improvement in things like equipment technology, diet and fitness regimes etc. which apply to both men and women). I haven't done any research on this, but I don't think anyone with reasonable knowledge in sport would suggest there is much of a trend. It is certainly very slow at best. Often it is a new fitness regime or piece of technology that will move the game on. The same cannot be said for women's sport – there is clear year-to-year improvement in many sports, particularly that most wonderful of sports, cricket. My own research of statistics in women's ODIs over the past 2 years showed a significant increase in runs-per-match.

Although proving that standards are improving is difficult and somewhat subjective, I think it is fair to say that increased runs correlates to some degree with increasing standards – you don't often see village sides getting 300 in 50 over games nor international sides getting under say, 100. In watching only a few matches over the past 3 years I have witnessed clear improvements. So women's sport is certainly on the upward curve and only needs a little investment and interest to continue to improve.
 

So even if men's sport IS more exciting than women's, it is by no means certain that this will always remain the case. I fully expect The Columnist's views to becoming increasing irrelevant with the passage of time. I now come back to the statement “Ladies cricket remains very dull”. No, it doesn't remain anything! The statement pays clear homage to the “unchangeable” paradigm I have discussed. Thanks for proving my point, Columnist.

 

There are other reasons why we should invest in and support women's cricket. It has a huge potential to cultivate a positive natural social change in the developing world, overcoming seemingly insurmountable barriers such as racial discrimination and religious dogma. People who might otherwise regard each other with suspicion in any other situation are brought together in celebration by cricket. I do not exaggerate when I say that you can gauge the progressiveness of a nation by the standard of its women's cricket team. The best teams like England, Australia, New Zealand and West Indies are years ahead of South Africa, India, Pakistan and Bangladesh in terms of discrimination problems (gender or otherwise) in their society. Not that they are perfect by any means (as The Columnist's articles prove!) but they are some way ahead. This is why the argument that “not many people turned up to watch WWC13 even though it was free” is so fatuous. Apart form the much decried promotional and geographical problems, it was held in India. Hardly a country known for its advocacy of women's sport, so what were we to expect?

And what are we arguing about here? It is not gender wars, I think. There is never much to be gained from such., except perhaps be disgusted at how toxic men can be. The argument distils down to whether or not women's sport has potential and should receive more publicity and financial backing. I hope I have shown that the answer is resoundingly YES IT DOES and YES SHOULD RECEIVE MORE. This conclusion has been reached by logical means and not by gender bias. Leave it to The Columnist to suggest the opposite! I will remind you all that I am a man myself. I receive no thanks or reward for my advocacy. Only abuse.

And if The Columnist really did spend 20 years “raising the profile of women's cricket” then good for him. He was a wonderful person. There, I said it. The elusive compliment he craves. But this just makes it all the more puzzling why he would now choose to completely reverse that sentiment. I asked him that very question “so what made you change your tune?” but have received no reply, nor do I expect to. Unless we are talking about some petty personal difference which has suddenly cropped up, it seems bizarre to suddenly do an about-face on this, just when real progress was starting to be made. With lack of solid facts to the contrary, I must assume that the toxic masculinity of men's rights has found itself another victim. In that case, it is not disgust but pity, that I feel.

My message is, please break free of the negative fallacy of male-dominated supply-and-demand, and reach for the positive potential of a future where well paid professional sportswomen amaze and inspire us all, with their skill and achievement, competing at the top of their game.

In summary: Leave it up to The Columnist to fall victim to bronze age thinking, after once having taken such a progressive stance. Now it's “Ladies cricket remains very dull”. Well, he would say that, wouldn't he?