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Boys to Men
I logged in tonight because I wanted to write a post about boys and men. Then I saw this extraordinary post by Ole Summers, and I realized that nothing I had to say needed to be said.
But I’ll say it anyway, because I thought it and wanted to say it and the mood to write so rarely strikes anymore in the hurly-burly of life as it has been this past year or two.
My youngest three played sports in high school. They didn’t play in college; they weren’t of that caliber. (We have at least one member here whose daughters are of that caliber. Doc, you know of whom I speak.) But mine played all the sports offered to them, basketball and softball and football and baseball and soccer and tennis and track, and they played well and hard.
My kids are grown now, but I still watch my little Catholic high school take on the local public school giants. Tonight I cheered as our varsity boys’ basketball team defeated a previously undefeated team in a stunning 54-39 victory. It was glorious.
It was also fierce and brutal and a testament to the power of young men bent on a single task and consumed with its execution.
I’m stronger than any boy on that court tonight. I’m an ox. But at my best, I never had the skill and reflexes of these young men, nothing like it. And I probably never had the passion. They were animals, lightning-quick and absolutely relentless. Our boys, the five starters who played the whole game, rallied from a ten-point deficit to win a spectacular victory through sheer will and guts and determination.
We rarely see this anymore, this potential. So many boys today are lame. They waste their time on screens, they go to college and become oversensitive crybabies — or decide they’re girls and do that poorly as well. We almost never see the power and drive and utter single-minded commitment of young men in battle.
As I said, it’s glorious.
Elsewhere on this site, there’s a brief conversation about college athletics. I’m agnostic about college athletics because I’m generally agnostic about college; it just isn’t something I care about, and I’m not sure it’s a good thing. But, though I spent my youth resenting the athletes and the time wasted in high school sports, I’ve come to wonder if the experience on the field and on the court wasn’t, for many and for mine, the most valuable part of their high school educations.
But back to the boys. What I saw tonight reminded me of the astounding potential of highly motivated, dedicated, trained, and fiercely determined young men. (I had a girl as well, and she was a tiger. But this post is about boys becoming men.)
I’m not saying that sports really matter, in and of themselves. I’m saying that Sparta wasn’t without its wisdom, and that we should stand a little bit in awe of the capacity of disciplined and passionate young men to perform at an extraordinarily high level, whatever the goal placed before them.
And we should celebrate every opportunity we have to see humans at their best.
Published in General
That response seems to make sense at first glance, KE, and I commend you for it. But it doesn’t actually respond to my point that we grow up fighting small, often symbolic battles with our peers, so that we can develop the skill required to engage more serious adversaries later in life.
Boys and girls and men and women are different, of course, and not all skills girls learn on the court will be transferrable to the office. The same is true of boys.
Anyway, you and I seem to disagree about whether or not girls who wish to play competitive sports generally benefit from the experience. That’s okay; we can disagree.
I don’t claim or pretend to have some kind of Grand Unified Theory of Gender or whatever, but I remain confident that my interpretation – such as it is – bears more resemblance to reality than yours.
Here’s another data point, which I saw someone mention the other day:
The women of the WNBA claim they don’t want to be paid “the same” as NBA players, they just want the same “profit participation share” or whatever.
Someone ran the numbers. There are something like 144 total players in the WNBA. And the WNBA loses something like $12 million per year. Therefore each of those women players owes the league somewhere over $80,000 from their own pockets, for the “privilege” of playing in the WNBA.
But in school, all students, whether boys or girls, only complete with people in their own peer group, based on age, sex, and sometimes weight-class, and sometimes even disabilities (as in the para-olympics). That doesn’t mean that they all are going to grow up with an inflated sense of their own abilities. Only the dimmest-witted person doesn’t recognize the difference between adult abilities and accomplishments and teenager abilities and accomplishments (meaning the entire set of people who believe in Greta Thunberg!).
I’m sorry, but I guess I’m missing your point. Do you mean to say that people would stop making unreasonable salary demands and prattling on about “equity” if we cancelled high school girls basketball?
What, exactly, are you suggesting is, on balance, harmful, as regards the things young ladies are allowed to do?
Adult differences tend to be less significant than childhood differences. Another part of the problem, of course, is the left crowing about Equity etc, but the way they treat school sports and other aspects seems like an enabler.
It might be that just getting the left to stop yelling about “Equity!” would eliminate most of the problems. Without that, girls/women especially in school might not be tempted to believe they’re more equal than they really are. I suspect that kind of thinking doesn’t come naturally.
Don’t confuse IQ and education. There’s a correlation, sure, but’s not (even close to) 1:1.
I absolutely agree that exposing the foolishness of the so-called “equity” movement would be good. You and I are on the same page there.
But let me suggest that those who think girls-only high school sports give girls a mistaken sense of physical parity with boys have it exactly backwards. The reason girls-only sports exist is because girls understand that, no, they don’t have physical parity with boys. Girls know that the only way the majority of them can have a satisfying and enjoyable athletic experience is by competing against other girls.
In my years of involvement with high school athletics as a parent and supporter of our school, I have never seen any evidence that the girls imagine that they can keep up with the boys. Girls who participate in sports probably understand this better than anyone. In fact, I suspect that girls-only sports teams probably do more to educate people about the reality of boy/girl performance differences than anything else.
Some feminists at the time said that women were more irrational than men because they were trained that way. But establishing the right to vote, women would start to be trained to become more logical. It didn’t work that way. I suggest that before giving women the right to vote we have everyone take a basic logic test as a prerequisite for voting.
My point was that keeping the girls’ sports separated from the boys’ sports, makes it possible for coaches, activists, etc to claim that girls’ sports are at least more equal than they really are. Because there’s never a direct “confrontation” to prove otherwise.
And it’s not the female swimmers who are claiming that “Lia Thomas” is another female.
What if women can pass a logic test but still vote by feels rather than thinks?
And not allowing infants to operate heavy equipment makes it possible for parents, activists, etc. to claim that infants are at least as capable as adults at operating heavy equipment.
(The point being, in case it isn’t obvious: people who participate in or watch both girls’ and boys’ sports know that there is a stark performance difference. These are not the people who are prattling on about a false equivalence. In fact, I don’t know that anyone, outside of the bankrupt “trans” movement, is trying to suggest that women should compete against men .)
then maybe the problem is that the girl athletes know it directly, but most other girls don’t because they’re not involved with the athletics. so it’s easier to “program” them.
The whole thing about who is better at sports is getting kind of blown out of proportion. Pretty much every single sport is arranged so that relatively equal participants will compete against each other. Even in the case of men. You don’t see them letting horses, cheetahs and tigers complete in track and field events. The men would get creamed. Or gorillas participating in weight lifting. But even in the case of men you’ve got elementary school level, high school level, college level, and professional level. And none of them are ever asked to complete against the different levels.
And even in the case of grown men you’ve got what they call “masters events” where men are grouped by age. You’ve got competitions between amateur groups, between companies, between clubs, etc…. Probably 99.99% of all sporting events are played by people who are not in the top tier of world-class ability, or even expert ability. It is a game. It is not real life, even though one may garner desirable real-life qualities by participating. The whole point is to get players who are relatively evenly matched so that the participants and fans can build a sense of drama as to who will win. That’s what makes for excitement. A predictable lopsided event is not interesting.
And I don’t think women playing women’s-only sports at any level would have any more false sense of achievement than men playing pickup basketball games at the local rec center. If anything, I think women are more level-headed about that kind of stuff because they don’t have as great of an instinctual competitive drive to win.
That will happen alot. The logic test isn’t a silver bullet but it would improve things.
The unintended consequence of eliminating women’s sports would be this: women would be eliminated from sports. Few women can compete with men, so most teams would contain no women. Few people would see women compete, and so few would come to appreciate the difference between male and female performance.
In other words, it would achieve exactly the opposite effect as that desired.
One outcome of Title IX is the elimination of numerous “minor collegiate sports teams” for men.
That goes along with my previous comment about those actually involved, and more or less the “spectators.” It’s the “spectators” who seem to claim that Venus/Serena Williams are world-class tennis players, even though at least one of them if not both have acknowledged publicly that any of the top 100 or so male players could easily beat them.
Not necessarily. What if not having organized competitive sports for women resulted in women becoming better mothers, etc? That would be a huge benefit to society and civilization. Especially compared with where we seem to be heading now.
Note: I said ORGANIZED COMPETITIVE sports.
I was referring specifically to the assertion that eliminating women’s sports would somehow increase awareness of the performance disparity between men and women. I wasn’t commenting on the assertion that it might have some significant impact Western Civilization (though I think the idea is pretty nonsensical).
Considering actual known history, I don’t know how you could claim that. It seems to be at least partly leftism that pushed for things like Title IX and getting women into competitive sports (some might claim “whether they really wanted to or not”) and in past generations women weren’t playing competitive tennis etc even just against other women, women didn’t participate in the Olympics until 1900, and cultures with higher rates of childbirth still don’t encourage women to be athletes…
So it seems to be the same kind of question: do you want to have women being athletes, even professional athletes, if it tends to lead toward the end of Western Civilization? Maybe you don’t care about humanity in coming generations as long as women you know feel good (or are told they should feel good, anyway) but many people do.
I think you are capable of politely disagreeing with Mr. Racette without implying that he doesn’t care about future generations. If not, you should be.
Yes, you have it exactly right. While I consider girls’ varsity high school basketball to be a veritable death sentence for all I consider sacred, I just can’t put the personal freedom, security, and prosperity of myself and my numerous descendants above the looming threat of chicks shooting hoops in a high school gymnasium.
You have found me out.
Ideas have implications and consequences.
Ibid.
I can easily believe you don’t see it that way, but that doesn’t mean it’s NOT that way, even if it takes 50 or 100 years to get there, as it’s taken 50 or 100 years to get where we are now.
As it’s been put in other posts and about other situations, civilizational collapse can happen slowly, and then quickly.
I think you are crediting women’s sports with too big a role in the eventual collapse of civilization.
I mean, why not say it’s the microwave oven that freed women from the drudgery of the kitchen and started them on this tragic road to civilization-destroying independence? That seems as plausible to me.
I had a friend years ago who believed in astrology. When I asked him what could possibly make him think that the position of the planets had an effect on his life, he pointed out that every point on Earth is attracted to every mass in the universe, and so it was possible that those masses influenced us.
Your girls’ sports argument strikes me as similarly weak.
More like one more of the symptoms, rather than one of the direct causes.