The way some of ya'll talk about the money that pro athletes make betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how any of this works. Absolutely they're not living in poverty or paycheck to paycheck. But they are still people who exchange labour for capital, the vast majority of them are closer to being just like us than they are to being like the billionaires who pay them.
They spend their entire lives being very good at one thing at the sacrifice of education or a backup plan. They exchange their health and physical well-being for that paycheck. If their careers ended tomorrow, most of them would NOT "be fine". The ones on short term (comparatively to their peers) lower paying contracts do NOT have financial or job security.
This is a labour rights issue!! If you watch sports and are entertained by the labour these people provide it's actually insane to dismiss people who point out the relative lack of security that some of these people have! You're not being smart and you're not being progressive
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"Lia Thomas is not banned from swimming. Lia Thomas is banned from a category Lia Thomas doesn't qualify for. I'm banned from swimming in the under 12's, because I'm not under 12. You know, we have heavyweight boxers that are banned from the bantamweight category. We have numerous categories in the Paralympics to create fair opportunity across society. That is the whole point of categories. Nobody is banned [from competing], you're just banned from a category you don't qualify for." - Sharron Davies
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women's sports is one of the loudest and most successful anti-patriarchy campaigns in human history. what women's sports did and does is prove, over and over again, the excellence, the raw power and strength of the human woman. it completely disrupts ideas on gender.
you have big, powerful women in rugby. fast, endurable women runners. impeccably strong gymnasts. women with strong, large bodies that take up space. that are HEALTHY. they are not RESTRICTED or ladylike. they are free of the stillness/deadness that femininity demands. no corsets. no (aesthetic) thinness. no hourglass bodies for gawking. women's sports screams to society "we are fully human, not objects, not small men. we are not domestic dolls. we are hunters and foragers. fighters."
why do you think men are so vitriolic about it? why don't they want women in football? why don't they want it televized? why do they keep harassing female basketball players? why do they insist on dressing women in sexualized uniforms? why do they now make it taboo to exculde men from women's sports?
i firmly believe it's because women's sports tears patriarchal gender ideology apart so effortlessly. it completely spits in the face of patriarchal political propaganda and shows how null it is. it forces all of us to view women as full, as the beginning of human excellence, as central to human history. not as decorative sexual objects, no matter how men want us to be.
that's why there's so much aggression and derision when it comes to women's sports from men. because women's sports destroys the idea of femininity and depicts women as non-derivative. women must be monsters and cannot afford to play into the childlikeness that femininity demands. the arena of sports forces us to focus on women's physical performance rather than appearance. their strength rather than how attractive they are. their skill and strategy. their humanity. it is a form of entertainment where all female roles are agentive and active rather than passive.
women's sports events are also hotbeds for female and lgb solidarity like you have no idea!
y'all need to start watching women's sports. not only because it is exciting, but it deprograms the patriarchal bullshit out of you so fast. you realize how much is possible. how much we can all achieve right now.
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