FlyOnTheWall
20d ago
To quote the video (in the video Trump says this in a joking way, breaking into a chuckle as he mentions the women's team):
President Trump: We'll do it at the White House... we'll just have some fun, we have medals for you guys. And we have to, I must tell you, we're going to have to bring the women's team, you do know that?
United States men's hockey team: [Laughter and cheers]
Trump: I do believe I probably would be impeached, okay?
Team: [More laughter]
To steelman:
- The joke implicitly undermines the idea that women's sports is equal to men's sports - and they're instead a kind of annoying dysfunctional burden parasiting on the men's team's success ("sorry Timmy, but you have to bring your little brother along!")
- They were engaging positively with Trump and Kash, who are both Republicans, and who likely (certainly in Trump's case) hold anti-feminist views. So the team was normalising them, and Republicans in general, in the hockey fandom ("if there's one Nazi at a table of 10 people, it's table of 10 Nazis", "neutrality in the face of oppression", etc)
- The whole video shows the locker room dynamic for this team is very "bro"ish, so this kind of attitude will discourage some marginal women from going into hockey.
I get that you see nothing wrong with it (and I think it is fine too), but that is why some people (like Clarke) find it offensive - and there is an actual conflict between worldviews here, the feminists aren't just mistaken.
As stated, this is a fine and consistent view (professional sports is ultimately about entertaining the fans, so it is up to the fans to decide what is entertaining), and the standard one I hear in defence of women's sports.
But do you actually believe this as stated? If we look at Olympic medalists in the men's 100m sprint, all 33 of the Gold/Silver/Bronzes since 1984 have been Black (the closest exception being Marcell Jacobs, who is Black x White) And looking even further, the remainder have been White.
If the committee were to split the 100m into a Black, White, and Other Race category (with the Black category in practice being the open category, and the White category open to any non-Black), would you consider a winner worthy of celebration? It is still true that an exceptional (amongst non-(Black/White)s) runner is exceptional.
And even more generally - many people's physical peaks will vary based on genetics (but in ways that don't count as an actual disability, e.g. a healthy man who cannot put on muscle very well) - would you also consider them reaching their respective peaks as not only worthy of celebration (I'm happy with celebrating it) but of deserving a special segregated category (that is treated as equal to the open category) with its own parallel medals?
I'm guessing that you don't (certainly, this is an unpopular view amongst women's sports defenders as a whole) - so I'm not sure how to defend women's sports (and disabled sports) without somehow privileging the genetic shortcoming (vis-a-vis physical sports) of XX chromosomes (and the various genetic defects that count as medical disabilities) over any other kind of shortcoming.
And I don't think it is a bad thing to privilege XX-having (women really are special in the big picture of society) - but I don't think it makes sense in the generalised abstract "everyone should be celebrated for reaching their full potential" way you seem to be gesturing towards.
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