Tennis: A clear case of sexism?
Serena Williams claimed she was the victim of sexism. Apparently not:
Look at the prison population. It’s less than 10% women. Does that mean men are held to a high standard of behavior? I think we’re comfortable with the extreme gender disproportion because we feel awfully sure that men commit many more crimes, especially the kind of crimes that deserve a substantial prison sentence. We like thinking that the prisons are confining individuals who pose a danger to the rest of us, and we think of those people as overwhelmingly male. Maybe we’re wrong, but you can see we’re pretty resistant to the idea that there’s a “double standard” that’s unfair to men. …
The NYT article doesn’t talk about that, but it does discuss another reason to discount the higher numbers in the “men” column on that chart: The men play longer games. There are 5 sets in men’s tennis and 3 sets in women’s. Now, there’s a double standard.
Female privilege? Or are the sexes really different?
One hardly needs to note the aptness of Chelsea Clinton coming to the defense of a wretchedly bad loser. First, you assume you’ll win; then you figure you should have won; and from there it’s a small step to figuring you did win and someone – a Portuguese umpire, the Macedonian “content farmers” – stole it from you. And so sport – in which points are won according to objective measures such as balls clearing nets and falling within painted lines – is now just another outpost of the great festering grievance culture:
No, this wasn’t just about a code violation. Rules derive, essentially, from a system, an implicit covenant that all shall be treated equally, and all shall have the same opportunities. But what happens when the covenant is broken? What happens when the system doesn’t work for you? Perhaps then, your norms diverge from mine. Perhaps neither of us has the monopoly on morality…
Indeed. Perhaps neither of us won, or lost, or played at all. Perhaps, as I had cause to remark many years ago, your ace is just a social construct.
