Steve Sailer ponders how to invent a sport women would like:
In the name of gender equity, the Summer Olympics are debuting women’s boxing at the London games. Women’s wrestling was added at the 2004 Athens games.
The problem, of course, is that very few women are interested these highly masculine sports. Yet, as part of Chris Rock’s Keep Your Daughter Off the Pole movement, it would be good to invent some sports that would appeal to normal girls and young women. The idea would be to come up with something less crudely sexualized than pole dancing but less unfeminine than wrestling.
As he said elsewhere:
Why is women’s wrestling now part of the Olympics? What percentage of the U.S. women’s wrestling team is made up of lesbians whose dads were high school wrestlers who didn’t have any sons to push onto the mat? And what percentage of the female population is that? O.2%?
By contrast, many women enjoy Winter Olympics sports, where, he notes, they can do things they like — “such as, go fast elegantly and show off, all while wearing this winter’s most fashionable sports attire.”
More seriously, he suggests emphasizing freedom from gravity:
Figure skaters glide endlessly and then leap and twirl. Gymnasts fly through the air. The final night of women’s figure skating in the Winter Olympics is to crown the World’s Greatest Princess and the all-around night of women’s gymnastics in the Summer Olympics is to crown the World’s Greatest Pixie.
The problem with this is that nobody really is free from gravity. Competitive cheerleading, for example, is a feminine sport that has evolved toward ever more high-flying death-defying stunts, which is great, except for the cheerleaders who end up in wheelchairs for life.
Trampolining was recently added to the Olympics and it’s very exciting because it’s amazingly high-flying. But it’s also terrifying to watch. I don’t think the dads and moms of America are going to get too excited about their daughters taking up trampolining. When I was a little kid in the 1960s, trampolines were a popular backyard amenity. But then they stopped being common because so many kids got hurt on them.
This aside, by the way, made me think of J.K. Rowling’s byzantine quidditch rules:
One problem is that the kind of sports-minded nerds who would be good at inventing the rules for sports generally don’t understand women well, and conventional female minds aren’t tuned to inventing universal rules for sports. There have been a lot of studies of little boys and little girls making up games with balls. The boys argue a lot, but from their arguments actually do evolve better rules that deal fairly with an ever-larger percentage of future situations. The girls, in contrast, tend to devolve the rules to make participants feel better in the present by making ad hoc exceptions when feelings get hurt.
Anyway, the first “sport” to come to mind, besides dancing and pageant-like fitness competitions, was Kunoichi, or Women of Ninja Warrior, the all-female counterpart to the cult-hit obstacle-course show, where the obstacles do not require amazing power-to-weight ratios but grace and balance.
As a rule, most sports favor manly men over less-manly men, and they thus favor manly women over less-manly women, too. That’s why artificial male hormones are performance-enhancing drugs, after all.
This is a very interesting topic since three of my four children are daughters.
Fencing seems to work well for my 9yo girl, as motivated by Xena, Barbie and the Three Musketeers and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Chick sword fighters seem to be common enough in the media.
Fencing needs speed rather than bulk and in France the only fencer I’ve heard of is female (Laura Flessel). She’s carrying the French flag at the olympic opening ceremony.
Daughter 2 is built like a 5-year-old Serena Williams and will do fine at the boyish sports. We’ll see what she wants to do though. Daughter 3 is too young to tell.
That Ninja Warrior show looks interesting. I’ll see how it works on them, though reading subtitles is asking a lot. They do like the assault courses they have seen on things like Chris Terrill’s Commando: on the front line so maybe we can build something challenging outside.