Not to be dull and unromantic, but if Jack in Titanic had found out Rose wasn't packing a hairy vajingo for a front bottom you can be sure the two love birds would've taken turns aboard the wood plank — such is the power of the vajayjay. Car doors will be opened before you, handkerchiefs retrieved, and like a first-class ticket it will get you out of burning buildings and hostage situations with priority check-out.
Does this dress make me look f—no. No it doesn't.
But all these perks, however, come at a cost. A penis may not have enough wiggle room to smuggle foreign objects but it does make a man a better prospect for selling sports jerseys and sneakers.
So what if you don't have one? Can you be on twin chromosomes and still reliably make it in the sports industry? Well, I don’t think so. Not with the kind of marketing I've seen women use.
The message is always the same. Support women, inspire little girls, strive for equality, break stigmas, fight the patriarchy... Funnily enough, it's never about the sport itself and how exciting it might be to watch it.
Essentially, this "support women's sports" rhetoric tries to appeal to that corner of our minds that begrudgingly takes pamphlets from activists. That charitable urge to feel like we're good people. Did you know that women's sports get a minuscule share of funding, prestige, and media attention compared to men's? Fuck the bees, we should save the women!
Don't get me wrong, I'm rooting for them gals. I want them in the halls of fame, making The Simpsons cameos and getting away with murder, but I feel you should either be endangered, incurable or narrated by David Attenborough before you try to guilt people into funding a solution for your problem.
In a way though, I get the philanthropic take. It's an attempt at positioning themselves away from men's sports. Boys are trying to have fun; gals are trying to make a point. The two cannot be compared at face value because then, men become the obviously superior alternative, don't they? Women's sports would be doomed to be the half-assed, cash-grab female reboot that always gets review bombed on Rotten Tomatoes.
Or would they?
Yes, men are stronger and that’s a fact. You won't find a mention of this in the Book of Genesis, but looking at their higher muscle mass, bone density, lung capacity and blood cell count, you could say men were biologically designed to put their balls into other men's holes.
I'm talking goals and hoops.
Girls do have their physical edges, but no one's scoring points for having insane pain thresholds or longer lifespans. After all, most popular sports were invented back when women's only career choice was to become a housewife, so you win by pushing, grabbing, kicking, running or throwing — invented by men, for men, to highlight men's strengths.
However.
Saying that this performance gap is the only explanation for the lack of hype around women's sports is like saying Mark Zuckerberg's company is tanking because he looks like he's been holding a fart since the MySpace era. There's definitely some truth to it, but it's a shallow conclusion, based on surface details.
Proof of this is the massive performance gap among men in martial arts. You won't see fans making dumbass comparisons like "Floyd Mayweather Vs Anthony Joshua" because physics is a thing and the tiny "m" in the Force formula states that the more mass you have, the greater the chance of making American pudding with the insides of your featherweight opponent's skull.
And that’s why martial arts are like Walmart's clothing line. There are belts for every size.
I feel like more people should've stolen this idea by now. Why not create height divisions in basketball? Weight divisions in football? Why not segregate athletes based on bone density, testosterone levels, or lung capacity? Level the playing field and no one is gonna need to be empowered with hashtags and performative activism.
Besides, gender is too reductive a framework to reasonably classify physiology. Ask transgender and Paralympic athletes. Or look at Kenyan runners — if Earth wasn't round I’m sure these guys would reach the edge before they break a sweat.
Give the white male runners a chance, you know?
Hell, if it was up to me I'd go ahead and create a division for people on steroids, call it "The Dope Division," and give Lance Armstrong a shot at getting back those Tour de France wins. A record is a record.
In the end, the performance gap is only a problem if you make it obvious. Ever seen a female tennis player trying to catch a man’s serve? I’ve seen kids on the spectrum catch a joke with less difficulty. But then watch women’s tennis and it has nothing to envy from its male counterpart. Women's volleyball? More popular than men's. Men's gymnastics? No one gives a shit. And I bet we'll see a thousand more inspirational think pieces about Simone Biles before anyone does.
Would more divisions render the penis advantage obsolete? No, of course not. Athletes will keep scoring higher by virtue of having a nutsack. No one said this was a fair industry. Serena Williams will also keep making a whole lot more bread than the strongest, manliest MMA fighters simply because tennis brings more money.
Should we close than gender pay gap?
Don't forget why people watch sports in the first place. It's not to witness peak human performance, but to watch equally-skilled opponents compete against each other. It's the suspense that fuels our drive to pay attention, the expectation of uncertain outcomes, meaningful challenges and dramatic comebacks. Any game with a clear winner will have to be as boring as a Superman comic without the Kryptonite.
We watch sports not to see who's best, but to see who's better.
No one really cares about the contents of their crotch.