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Women's Sports Are Great and Worth Watching and I Love Them

USWNT star Alex Morgan / AP
June 23, 2015

The clip below (sans the silly commentary after) is one of my all-time favorite Futurama sequences:

If you can't watch the video, it's from the episode where Fry and company land on a planet of giant women. They are shown the giant women's giant basketball court and informed that the giant women's inability to dunk is made up for by their awesome fundamentals. Despite facing certain doom if they disrespect their giantess captors, the guys in the party can't help but laugh at the utter absurdity of the notion. They are later sentenced to death for the crime of laughing at the idea that solid fundamentals are more exciting to watch than dunking.

Last night, a writer for SI committed a similarly unpardonable heresy. He said that, mein gott, he doesn't like watching women's sports. Here's the unfortunate heterodoxy, as captured by me before it was memory-holed:

Needless to say, the rage mob was swift in descending upon Benoit for his blasphemy:

Because, after all, it would be terrible for someone to express a personal preference online that doesn't hew to the orthodoxy of the day. And today's orthodoxy, obviously, is that women's and men's sports are, clearly, equally fun to watch and everyone should enjoy them the same.

I thought about going on for a bit here about how it's silly to pretend that watching slower, smaller, weaker athletes play a game is as much fun as watching faster, bigger, stronger athletes play the same game. Or noting that I agree with Benoit about women's soccer for the same reason I agree with partisans of European soccer who don't bother keeping up with the MLS: watching inferior talent muck around the pitch is not only less fun, it's actively frustrating. I could talk about ratings disparities and the such, noting that roughly nine times as many people watched the men's NCAA basketball final as opposed to the women's or that the women's World Cup isn't even close to as popular as the men's.*

None of that really matters, though. All that really matters is that, unless you're being hyper-literal, Andy Benoit was stating a personal preference. He wasn't calling for the dismantling of Title IX or for the outlawing of women's sports. He didn't say that women's sports shouldn't be broadcast on television. He said that women's sports are not worth watching. Lots of people seem to agree with that sentiment. Benoit was just silly enough to say it in public. And, as his colleague helpfully reminded him, some opinions are verboten in this day and age:

As Ace has noted in a different context, the goal of the censor is to change not only what you say but what you enjoy:

That's not a criticism of a violent game -- that's a demand that people change that which they derive pleasure and fun from.

The censor is a subtype of the authoritarian. But the censor is at once both more trivial than the bog-standard authoritarian, and more frightening.

The authoritarian wants to ban this behavior or that. The censor, on the other hand, goes about censoring mere images and words -- not real things. Just ideas.

The mob has descended upon Benoit because he has had A Bad Idea about women's sports. He has confessed that he does not find them as entertaining as men's sports. And for his heresy—for admitting that he derives pleasure and fun from one thing and not another—he must be punished. Break his spirit. Make him confess. Let him serve as an example to the other Bad Thinkers out there.

*The standard counter here is to say "But women's tennis! But women's gymnastics!" And it's a good counter, to an extent! But when you have to highlight a sport watched by less than two percent of the population that hasn't had an American man top the rankings in more than a decade and an event held once every four years that doubles as one of the only acceptable outlets of nationalist fervor, well, the exceptions probably prove the rule.