I found this blog, which doesn’t allow comments, so I can’t comment there. I’ll comment here. It’s a women’s sports blog, and the writer makes the argument that even if women suck at a sport, it’s okay.
In the debates over women’s suffrage, some proponents argued that women should vote because they would provide an ethical balancing influence to men, who are naturally prone to immorality. The rejoinder, voiced by Jo in Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women, is that “Men do not vote because they are good, they vote because they are men.” In other words, it’s a right granted to them as human beings regardless of how they may or may not use it. If I had a cup of chai for every terrible, non-competitive contest I’d seen played by men on TV, I would be awake until Christmas. Everyone knows men’s teams play some games that suck. Because of the double standard, no one uses those games to judge the sport or male athletes as a whole. We need to proceed as if that were also true of women’s sports. Of course I understand worrying that low-quality games are going to hurt the league’s image, because I worry about it too, but if we don’t treat ourselves as human beings who are allowed to have a bad day without it reflecting on womankind/africankind/queerkind or whatever, then nothing’s going to change.
My previous comments were based on a data sample of 1, so there may be some error there.
I would take one bad day, but on average, the women’s game has a lot of bad days relative to a men’s league.
Basketball, like all professional sports, is entertainment business. There are people who are entertained by watching women play. There are many reasons for people to be entertained. Sometimes they are entertained even if the level of play is pretty crappy.