Sexism, god help us (3 Viewers)

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There's an awful lot of sexism accusations and counter-accusations and talk of patriarchy and shit charging round the internet, and most of it totally mystifies me. I'm not going to ask for a general explanation of what the fuck everyone is going on about, because it'd take forever and I don't have the energy BUT ...

Can someone explain to me why some people who I'm friends with on facebook think this article is stupid?

If women’s sport struggles for coverage it’s not because of sexism - it’s because you can’t make people care

(I know almost nothing about sport, and won't be watching anyone of any sex playing anything anytime soon, so there may be sports-specific shit you'll need to explain to me too)
 
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Can someone explain to me why some people who I'm friends with on facebook think this article is stupid?

They think it's stupid because women's sporting events are super well-attended?

Women's sport is great and girls should be encouraged to play whatever they like.
But sport is generally pretty fucking stupid, that is why men generally like it and women generally don't.
It's a big dumb soap opera.
 
that article seems pretty much spot on to me. Its probably worded a little clumsily with too much emphasis on the lack of coverage of 'women's sport' being down to people not caring, as opposed to the point he makes about this holding true for any sport. And it doesn't just hold true for sport. It holds true for pretty much everything in life.

I've coached women's sport at a pretty high level. The team was not well supported. It wasn't an issue for anyone involved with the team though. You knew pretty much everyone who would be at a game, and this is more or less true across the board.

He mentions league of Ireland soccer, and this is a great example. Personally I don't like soccer too much but I have more time for LOI than for english premiership which, to me, is completely anathema to what sport, and supporting a team should be. 80,000 people turn up to watch liverpool reserves play in landsdown road. Top LOI sides probably struggle to get a couple of thousand for a home game. Of course the media are going to give the coverage to liverpool. Their job is not to promote sport. Their job is to sell papers.

I'm not sure specifically what the issue is for people, or what specific points they're coming out with when criticising what he says in that article (Malachy Clerkin is a GAA journalist mostly, and a damn fine one too). But hes right. You have die-hard fans of particular sports, very small in number. You have casual, go-with-the-flow, sportsfans who are very large in number. Unfortunately its whatever the current whim of that latter group is that will dictate who or what newspapers will give the bulk of their coverage to.
 
He mentions league of Ireland soccer, and this is a great example. Personally I don't like soccer too much but I have more time for LOI than for english premiership which, to me, is completely anathema to what sport, and supporting a team should be. 80,000 people turn up to watch liverpool reserves play in landsdown road. Top LOI sides probably struggle to get a couple of thousand for a home game. Of course the media are going to give the coverage to liverpool. Their job is not to promote sport. Their job is to sell papers.

LOI is the elephant in the room.
Irish armchair soccer supporters crack me up at times.
The idea that you're from Stillorgan but are a fucking diehard Aston Villa or Chelsea fan is laughable on every level. How do you even make sense of that?
I have to think that it's this type of idiocy that contributes to women thinking the whole fucking thing is daft.
 
LOI is the elephant in the room.
Irish armchair soccer supporters crack me up at times.
The idea that you're from Stillorgan but are a fucking diehard Aston Villa or Chelsea fan is laughable on every level. How do you even make sense of that?
I have to think that it's this type of idiocy that contributes to women thinking the whole fucking thing is daft.

But me Da supported Aston Villa and Steve Staunton played for them for a while so, you know, they're more Irish than the Irish themselves.

Going back to Liverpool fans filling Landsdowne Road- I know a lad who supports Liverpool and asked him was he going to it, the reply? "Nah, I'll watch it on the telly". Left me stumped.
 
I think it's a very clumsily written article that leaves himself open to attack from the kind of people who actively seek out gender-issue fights on the internet. And, in fairness, that's probably an amount of the point.
I agree with his League of Ireland comparison, having given up on ideas that people will ever get interested in it without some magical transformation engineered by a deranged Qatari billionaire.

It's part of a bewilderingly complex societal/psychological/whatever reality whereby girls don't grow up with the obsessive interest in sport that boys do. And the circular nature of things means that girls that are really into sport are most likely to be really into men's sport (from a fan perspective). Girls don't participate in sport in the same numbers either, which is the most pressing and fixable issue here - this is something that can be addressed by schools, parents, clubs, governments.

Inevitably, due to the smaller pool of talent, the standard of top-level women's sport is mostly lower than that of men's, regardless of physical differences and so on. Which is not to say that women's sport isn't completely worthy and often really enjoyable for the spectator, but it's going to exist in a niche in the foreseeable future, and the mainstream media will treat it accordingly.

The thing is that women's rugby is obviously on the rise from an extremely low base, and it's media coverage is way more extensive than it has ever been. It seems strange that the issue becomes why it isn't covered more extensively.
 
But me Da supported Aston Villa and Steve Staunton played for them for a while so, you know, they're more Irish than the Irish themselves.

Going back to Liverpool fans filling Landsdowne Road- I know a lad who supports Liverpool and asked him was he going to it, the reply? "Nah, I'll watch it on the telly". Left me stumped.

That's the attitude alright.

I'm trying to remember the team last year in England, maybe a Championship team, that tweeted out something along the lines of "Don't forget we're live on Sky Sports 3 on Sunday at noon. Tune in and watch us."

To which a supporter replied "Or you could come and watch the game in our own fucking ground"
 
Girls don't participate in sport in the same numbers either, which is the most pressing and fixable issue here - this is something that can be addressed by schools, parents, clubs, governments.

girls are mad into sports in school
we had that whole jock culture in our all-girls school where the cool girls were the ones that were good at sport

edit: obviously 'cool' should be in inverted commas there as they were largely of course total dickheads
 
girls are mad into sports in school
we had that whole jock culture in our all-girls school where the cool girls were the ones that were good at sport

Of course they are and of course there is. But not to the same extent that boys are. Playing numbers in all the major sports attest to this. To take the example I'm most familiar with, there are generally only a couple of divisions (if even that) of girls teams in Dublin at underage level in soccer, while there can be like 10 or 12 divisions of boys' teams.

I don't know if you school is one of these, but schools where you are forced to play a particular sport (rugby schools or hockey schools or whatever) engineer a jock culture come hell or high water.
 
They have a thing called Title IX here where colleges and schools that receive federal funding have to spend equal amounts on male and female sports programs. It is discrimination not to.

As far as I can tell it has been massively successful as far as participation goes, lots more girls playing sports. But there is still no successful female sports league.

The US women's soccer team is pretty popular, I suppose.
 
LOI is the elephant in the room.
Irish armchair soccer supporters crack me up at times.
The idea that you're from Stillorgan but are a fucking diehard Aston Villa or Chelsea fan is laughable on every level. How do you even make sense of that?
I have to think that it's this type of idiocy that contributes to women thinking the whole fucking thing is daft.
Stillorgan’s getting a bad fucking rap on here these days. What’s the story?
 
I don't know if you school is one of these, but schools where you are forced to play a particular sport (rugby schools or hockey schools or whatever) engineer a jock culture come hell or high water.
no
the jock types did pretty much every sport going - basketball, hockey, handball, running, football
 
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