Sendraks wrote: And how are you quantifying different performance? How hard they hit the ball? How much they run around the court? The number of calories they burn up?
By the results. The game is designed pretty much the same for everyone to employ a range of skills within defined rules, to produce a winner. It is irrelevant how hard they hit the ball if they do not win. We know that women are protected from playing with men because in the main women would lose to men at every level of the sport. Clearly you are not someone who understand sport either in theory or from experience, based upon the questions you are asking.
Sendraks wrote: And again you're just evading the issue.
Basically you think it is ok for people of the same sex to be segregated for the sake of their physiological differences, but not ok for people of different sexes.
The difference is choice. People are free to enter any type of event and the game will select through its rules and type, who is the best. Whereas in the case of segregation by sex, men at least have no choice, and women are given both choices . Compete with men, and never have an opportunity to rise to elite level risk in all bar a few sports, or compete only with women and have an opportunity to be considered elite. This very thing is one of the major issues that feminism has – ie. Women should not be barred from competing with men – here is their chance to do just that.
Sendraks wrote: The time is irrelevant, it is merely who crosses the line first who determines the winner of the competition. If you just wanted to run a time trial, you wouldn't need to get 10 or more competitors on the track. You could time them running 100m wherever they were in the world.
The issue of time only comes into it when determining who, historically, has crossed that line quickest out of all the competitors in history. Now when someone looks likely to break that record, that does tend to draw a crowd.
You are dodging the point, and you now appear to recognise that the outcome is the way that performance is measured, when initially you were throwing out a bunch of irrelevant metrics as if these might be used to measure performance. If you realise it is the result of winning that determines performance why do you keep asking how we know if someone has ‘less or lesser’ performance and why this seems to have such a stigma? Time is relevant because it usually by comparing, at least in qualifying heats, who is performing better. In the finals of things like sprints, the entertainment value is seeing the performance in absolute terms of first, second third etc. However metrics like time are used in qualifying rounds because first, second third etc might not show who is quickest. In events like high jump etc, once again the metric itself is used to decide placing simply because its not possible to have everyone jumping the bar at the same time. The metrics in a sport like tennis are different, each match decides winner/loser independent of metrics as long as they play within the rules.
Have you never watched or played any sport or athletics, or if you have how did you miss all this?
Sendraks wrote: The entertainment value comes from seeing who, out of those 10 competitors, will cross the line fastest. Now as to which is more entertaining, men or women, well a rough measure I suppose would be to see how many people (globally) tuned in to watch each event. It would be very rough measure though, given you'd have to take into account the gender biases of the viewing public on a nation by nation basis.
Its possible to measure these, as they have done with mens and womens singles finals. There is more interest in the mens events, than womens, simply because the net ability to win is greater in men than it is in women. This is evident in the fact that they provide women a protected events so that they can avoid being beaten by male competitors. But the way success/failure, better/worse. Lesser/greater is measured the same in both male and female events. Since this is the case it is not hard to that in the main the best men are better than the best women for almost every discipline – ie. They men would win, and women would lose in almost every case.
Sendraks wrote:Also in terms of speed, considering the 100m race, consider the that the male world record is 9.58secs and the female is 10.49secs.
That is less than a second's difference.
So what, the top 7 men in the final at London 2012 were within 0.35 of a second of each other. The qualifying time for mens 100m is 10.18/10.24 secs for the different categories. A difference of a 0.9 of a second only looks small when there is a womens event, but when you realise that in both events a difference of less than a second also means the difference between not being an Olympian and being a multi millionaire based upon your running time – what a pointless and useless comment that was for to make – how did you possibly imagine it had an relevance to the discussion?
Sendraks wrote:In terms of a viewing experience, it doesn't really stack up that either race should be more "entertaining" than the other.
That is not what is observed even if that is your personal bias. You find a consistent greater entertainment value between mens and womens sports that favors men as a spectator sport, including tennis and athletics.
Sendraks wrote:No, his point is that the sole purpose of sport/athletics is based around some spurious notion of "better" or "lesser" athletes.
It is not spurious, the consistent definition is that the winner is better than the loser in each instant. If you do NOT describe the winner as being better than the loser in the sport that is being played, there is a total breakdown in the way these terms are understood by most – and that pretty much summarises why your arguments make no sense.
Sendraks wrote:No one is denying that we have separate men and women's competitions for a reason, one of the principles being to avoid the sexist notion that women should not be allowed to compete and the a secondary principle being that the competition should be "fair."
We do not have a womens event to show they should be allowed to compete, we have a womens event so they can be seen to excel, and that can only happen if they are not competing against men of a like level relative to members of each gender. Competition is never ‘fair’ despite the existence of rules that define these. The bottom line of competitive sport is to find who does that discipline the best. Fairness exists around specific things like cheating on the rules or using drugs et al, however other aspects like being faster, stronger, taller, better training methods, better genetics etc have no basis in fairness. Since we consider that discrimination between people on the basis of their gender is not considered either fair or politically correct, it should be applied in every case. In the case of sports and athletics this is clearly not the case. As is also clear this is for a good reason, women would never be elite. The issue I have is that different $ purses is regarded as sexist for men and women, and ignoring the fact that the only reason women have an opportunity to win a title is because of sexism. Its adding insult to injury insisting they deserve the same reward.
Sendraks wrote:No, you're missing the point. The point being that in TMB's world people of different physiologies are allowed to be segregated into different sports, providing they are of the same sex. This is clearly a nonsense in the face of him thinking that it is somehow incorrect for men and women (who have differing phsyiologies) to be segregated.
This is logically invalid for
The fact that different events exist does measure relevant attributes. Sheer speed works for the 100m, endurance and usually a tactical brain works in longer races. Strength works in weight lifting, teamwork in doubles tennis and so it goes on. The cheetah is an effective predator if he can catch the prey in a short distance, while wild dogs employ teamwork and endurance running and in many ways are seen as ‘better’ predators. Sports arise and if they capture the audiences imagination and money they survive and thrive.
The big difference between segregation of different events on the basis of different objectives for the event, is that everyone is free to compete or not. They will be judged totally on their merit at that discipline. Segregation by sex, age, weight is done to protect less capable athletes and sportspeople, and males, bigger people and adults and prevented from competing because of these. This makes your comparison invalid as an argument, and since men are barred from entry in this way and it is considered OK, why is it OK to bar people from other spheres of endeavour like business, mens only clubs etc on the basis of their gender?
Sendraks wrote:There is no logical grounds for accepting the segregation of male athletes of different specialities whilst claiming that the segregation of female athletes somehow reflects on them being "lesser" in some way.
Except that the same ‘discipline segregation’ also applies to womens events, and aside from other attributes like age and size, the segregation only exists to protect the children, the smaller people and women, because by the definition of what makes a competitor ‘greater/lesser’ in these events, these groups need protection in order to be seen as elite. The next question is that since the very reason for segregation is based upon the different in standard/merit/ability, however you want to describe the value judgements being made, what give equal pay when performance is not equal.
Sendraks wrote:Yes, precisely. But there is no universal form of better, in that no one individual (of any sex) can excel in all athletic events. Differences in physiology and chosen specialism preclude against that.
The universal measure of better is winning, and as long as this is done within the rules of the discipline, speed, power, flexibility, mental toughness, fitness, VO2 max capacity, high altitude training, reaction time, hand/eye coordination, all these things in a complex mixture contribute to ‘winning’. We know what ‘better’ is because winners demonstrate it over losers who do less ‘better’. Your dancing around the words does not change the facts.
Sendraks wrote:So, given that it is accept as being perfectly ok for men of differing physiologies which means they excel in different specialities, to be segregated into different sporting events. It must logically follow that it also perfectly ok to segregate women into their own sporting events, on the basis of differing physiology.
I disagree, they are different and the motives are also different, in addition to this one is voluntary segregation, while the other is not. However if you think your argument stands, lets see why in many nations we segregate toilet facilities between men and women. While there are physiology differences in how we utilise toilets this alone does not mean the facilities should be segregated. In fact we segregate toilets on the basis of psychology rather than physiology. Since this is the case and implies that there are enough psychological differences between the genders to commonly segregate toilet facilities, could we also argue that it is OK to segregate men and women in business on the basis of psychological differences?
Sendraks wrote:I agree, use of the word 'lesser' is not helpful, but TMB seems to insist on using such loading wording in this debate.
I also agree that differences in absolute performance are not relevant for the purposes of determining prize funding. The some individuals, such as TMB, want to perceive the women's Wimbledon trophy as a "lesser" prize and therefore worthy only of a "lesser" award, is only indicative of their biases.
Actually ‘lesser’ is not a loaded word at all, the loading happens in peoples brains, just use the word as its defined, or find another one that fits the description, it makes no difference what word we use, but the meaning is still the same. Women do not perform to the same standards as men do in sport and athletics. Less, greater who gives a shit what we call it.
In a capitalist system rewards are intended in principle to be based upon merit, and as I have noted often the battle cry for feminism is equal pay for equal work, and thats all it means when you offer lower rewards for lower performance.
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