I also told them that we felt that women should play among themselves and that they could not help but appear inferior in athletic competition with men. What really struck me about that statement from the president of the league is that even though it was made in , it might have been made yesterday. The idea that women, while totally deserving of their own leagues, are unfit to play with and against men, is still alive and well today.
Athletics is, as it was back in , one of the areas where sexism can be easily explained away by invoking biology. For example, in grand slam tennis, women play three sets while men play five. To which I say: Bullshit. Sixty years later, the WNBA is guilty of doing much the same thing. The more things change, the more they stay the same. The point of pledging and of following through, of course is to show your support, with your presence and with your cash, for women who play sports and the institutions that make that possible.
Chloe Angyal is a journalist and scholar of popular culture from Sydney, Australia. She joined the Feministing team in She makes regular appearances on radio and television in the US and Australia. Her academic work focuses on Hollywood romantic comedies; her doctoral thesis was about how the genre depicts gender, sex, and power, and grew out of a series she wrote for Feministing, the Feministing Rom Com Review.
You can read more of her writing at chloesangyal. Feministing is a labor of love and all our staff have other full-time jobs to support their work on the site.
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