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Men, Women, Soccer, and Feminism

Men, Women, Soccer, and Feminism

Last month, a men’s soccer team and a women’s soccer team played in The Soccer Tournament, a 32-team tournament that welcomes teams of both genders. The teams are largely made up of current and former players from professional and national teams.

A team made up of current and former players from the American women’s Olympic squad participated this year. One of their matches was between them and current and former players from a Welsh professional men’s club.

The outcome, an absolutely brutal 12–0, was a shock to no one who understands the physical differences between men and women.

The women’s Olympic team played three opponents in the tournament and lost three times. Across their three losses, they gave up a total of 24 goals, and they scored one. That one goal came in the final seconds of the third match after the opposition squad had essentially stopped playing. The women, and the crowd, cheered that goal as if they had won the tournament.

I do not point all of this out to be mean-spirited. The large-margin losses of a women’s soccer team against a men’s team are facts that are unremarkable expectations for any person who knows about sex differences and their contours. It’s not shameful for women to lose to men in a sporting competition like this.

Each sex has its part in the human division of labor, and each relies on the other for those things the other sex does better. In a game like soccer—where speed, stamina, fitness, spatial awareness and positioning, kicking power, and dribbling skills are the requisite abilities—men can be counted on to be better on average because they are on average bigger, stronger, and faster. Teams made up of men are going to easily beat teams made up of women.

Again, the result is unremarkable—and certainly not a cause for haughtiness on the part of men. It’s just the way of sex differences.

The same can be said of the ways that women excel compared to men. For instance:

Study after study has revealed that, on average, women display more empathy than men. Women are also typically more interested in people, whereas men show more of an interest in things. This people-things difference is even noticeable in infants, disproving the claim that it’s merely the result of cultural conditioning.

The problem begins when the message is seriously preached by cultural elites that there are not real sex differences and that we should stop pretending they exist. Men and women are not differentially talented for this sport by biology, so goes this line of propaganda. Only discrimination has kept women from attaining the heights of male play. And, more, we can anticipate the day when women and men will compete at soccer and other such physical endeavors at an equal level, if only we will do what is necessary to make that happen. Which means, of course, revolutionizing society.

Here’s the message feminism wants women to take home from this news event:

‘We’re super proud,’ O’Reilly told NBC Sports after the game despite the harsh box score. ‘Hopefully we’ve proved to anybody just go for it, just live. What’s the worst that could happen? We lose 16-0 to Wrexham? We don’t care because we’re living, we’re being bold and we’re being brave. Here we have two amazing products that American soccer fans are getting behind. It’s just a ton of fun and it’s brought all of us together.’

We’re being bold.” Let’s be honest. The worst of the likely outcomes from this match was that the women’s team would lose. Soccer is a sport with relatively little contact compared to many others, and the chances of serious injury through that contact are minimal. “Bold” and “brave” seem like a stretch.

O’Reilly wouldn’t be talking like this if this had been an American football game or a series of boxing matches instead of a soccer match because many members of her team would likely have been hospitalized or worse. And what if this were not a sporting event but, say, a competition to determine who will police our streets, handle fires, or engage in military encounters with other militaries? How “bold” is it to believe in and pursue the phantasm of equity in situations like those?

The fact that the mainstream media was relatively quiet about the women’s team’s fortunes in The Soccer Tournament (ESPN, for example, had a warm introduction to the women’s team at the start of the tournament, but I found no reports of the results of their games on their site) speaks volumes. Our cultural elites are in a fantasy world with respect to sex differences, and nothing good can come of that.

Image credit: Twitter

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Alexander Riley
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  • Avatar
    DS
    July 3, 2023, 4:50 pm

    Women are far more likely to injure themselves in soccer than men, especially the ACL. These injuries and many more are so common in female soccer players it should call into question whether the sport is conducive to good health in women, especially long term.

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  • Avatar
    Francis Bagbey
    July 3, 2023, 6:53 pm

    Makes sense to me. Don't know if Serena Williams, the most powerful women's tennis player ever, has ever played a for-real match against a man, but I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that the 50th ranked or perhaps even the 100th ranked men's pro tennis player would beat her. Might not be 6-0, 6-0, 6-0 (yes, best of 5 sets, not the wussy best of 3 sets as women play in, I believe, all their tournaments), but it would be a decisive loss.

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    • Avatar
      Steven Manus@Francis Bagbey
      July 3, 2023, 8:57 pm

      One man, ranked 203rd in the world, beat the two sisters, back to back, after drinking beer and smoking between sets. https://www.tennisnow.com/Blogs/NET-POSTS/November-2017-(1)/The-Man-Who-Beat-Venus-and-Serena-Back-to-Back.aspx

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    • Avatar
      DRL@Francis Bagbey
      July 3, 2023, 10:42 pm

      This is why fake women should not be allowed to compete with biological women! Idk about Serena, but when Chris Evert was ranked no. 1 in the world, she said that when practicing against her brother, who wasn't even in the men's top 500, it wasn't even a match. He could literally beat her without having to try.

      BTW, for all of the Billie Jean King fembots, Bobby Riggs admitted in later years that he tanked that match to pay off gambling debts that he owed to the Mafia.

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  • Avatar
    Paul Schleifer
    July 3, 2023, 7:39 pm

    When my son was 13, his U14 coach (premier level) set up a scrimmage against a D1, top 25 women’s soccer team. The parents wondered what he was thinking; 13-year-old boys against young women. The boys won 6-4.
    In the 90s, Mia Hamm was once asked how our US women would fare against the USMNT. Her response was something like, “We couldn’t beat the U17s.
    Don’t get me wrong: I will be watching and cheering for our women in this summer’s World Cup. But the game is not the same.

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  • Avatar
    Robert True Myers, Jr.
    July 4, 2023, 7:39 am

    Leave the women alone. No need to compare. Bo

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    • Avatar
      Peter@Robert True Myers, Jr.
      July 14, 2023, 11:00 am

      We have lost sight of the idea of sportsmanship and competition. Watching a match where one side wins all the time would become tedious and boring. When the two sides are more evenly matched then the competition becomes interesting. I have watched the Canadian and American women's hockey teams fight it out on the ice and I would call it good hockey. The winner can always hold their head high and say we fought well. Men and women are in leagues of their own. Don't mix apples and oranges.

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  • Avatar
    Jim
    July 4, 2023, 7:55 pm

    nice

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