Duke4life831 wrote:Frank Dux wrote: Not only do women get paid like **** in sports, but they also have to constantly deal with these type of comments. I don’t get what your deal is, but your vibe just sucks.
I agree with the idea of this guy's post being pointless and dumb. But lets not go overboard though. Lets not act like female athletes have it harder than male athletes when it comes to the kind of comments they have to deal with from the public. I mean its not rare for male athletes to get bombarded with death threats.
True but let me offer to reframe that, since this discussion is evidence of why the situation is often different. Male athletes definitely sometimes have to deal with wild and irrational responses to mundane things and have to live with crazy interactions with fans, and being any kind of celebrity in this day and age is of course harder than ever because of social media. But men usually have to actually do something to get that reaction--not anything wrong or bad but they have to piss off a fanbase by leaving in FA, or mess up a crucial play, or saying something that might be taken as offensive, etc. Definitely not saying they deserve it but it's usually context dependent, and the problematic fan response is more of a crazy over-reaction, taking their fandom and anger too seriously and deciding they just fully hate someone.
On the other hand, women athletes kind of just have to
exist to be subjected to 'I don't know, should they exist?' type comments from people. I'm exaggerating but not that much--as this example shows, a woman sets a record (and against a better team whom she singlehandedly outscores) and gets a small thread on a basketball forum, and there's automatic chippy commentary. 'I dunno, just my opinion that we shouldn't talk about.' 'Wtf thought it was a dude, not interested in this.' We all know that women's bball isn't going to get a lot of attention here and this is a rare time when we'll watch a 2-minute video and give two sentences of commentary, and we still have dudes saying 'no way, this deserves zero attention, men are superior athletes and it's imperative we focus fully on their competing.' (And we haven't even gotten to the 'she's kinda hot but could be hotter' or 'they're all gay so who cares' type commentary). Lots of people are invested in there being one order of things and men (in this case men's competition) being at the top of it.
