Day: September 11, 2000

John McEnroe stepped into yet another controversy at then end of August after The New Yorker published an interview in which he said that the best women’s tennis players in the world wouldn’t stand a chance against a middling male tennis player. Asked specifically what he thought of the rise of Serena and Venus Williams, McEnroe told the magazine that “any good male college tennis player could beat the Williams sisters and so could any men on the senior tour.”

That might have been a bit of an overstatement, but the underlying sentiment is certainly correct — competing against women, the Williams women are fascinating to watch. Mix them in with the male circuit and they’d be very lucky to get past the opening round of a tournament. This is largely a matter of biology — the additional upper body strength that the male players have would totally overwhelm the women players.

This can be seen just by watching men’s and women’s tennis, and actually benefits the women to a large degree in that the women’s game is more interesting to watch. The men’s game is all about power, power, power. As in other sports the physical training has advanced so quickly that men are now hitting serves at 130 miles an hour. Much the same occurs in the Women’s National Basketball Association. The best WNBA team would get demolished by a middling NBA team, but in some ways the women’s game is more exciting since the men’s game as devolved to feats of physical prowess over skill. In many ways, in both sports revolutions in training as well as the huge sums of money have led to men’s teams who are able to play well above the game.

It was fascinating to watch the politics of gender in sports play out at a national event held in my home of Kalamazoo this August — the Little League Softball World Series. Until the early 1970s, Little League teams were strictly sex segregated; boys played baseball and girls played softball. Under threat of lawsuit, the Little League organization allowed girls to play on baseball teams and in the early 1980s a girl played for the first time in the Little League Baseball World Series. Of course there were all-male teams who at first didn’t want to play with girls — some claimed the girls would get hurt — but the sex barrier eventually fell.

At some point in the 1990s, however, the Little Leagues realized they still barred boys from playing softball and, fearing a lawsuit, they removed the sex requirement for softball. Which brings us to this controversy. When the only baseball league in their town folded up, several boys decided to join the local Little League softball team and their team made it to the world series held here in Kalamazoo, Michigan. And a firestorm ensued.

Parents of all-girl teams were extremely irate that young boys were playing baseball. Many told reporters they were afraid that the boys, with that extra upper body strength, would end up hurting the allegedly fragile girls. Other said it was simply unfair for boys to be competing with girls. Paralleling the protests when girls tried to play baseball, one team chose to forfeit its game rather than play on the same filed as boys.

Although the team the boys played on didn’t have a perfect record in the tournament, they did walk away with the championship. The person who oversaw the tournament responded by vowing to do everything in his power to make sure no boys were involved in next year’s World Series.

Which brings us to the main point of contention — do women always have to compete in separate but equal sporting contests? Writing about McEnroe’s comments, The Sporting News’ David Kindred summarized the view that women will always have to compete separately,

Men’s and women’s tennis are different games, just as women’s soccer, basketball and track and field are different from the men’s games. Women’s sports are to be appreciated for what they are, not denigrated for what they’re not.

On the other hand, both athletes as well as feminists don’t seem content for Venus Williams to be simply one of the best women’s tennis players, in large measure because of the fear that it sends a bad social message — if Serena Williams is simply a good woman’s tennis player who would get blown away in a direct competition with professional male athletes, does that mean that women who are successful in other areas of life don’t truly compare with men? That is an absurd idea, but it is also one that both anti-feminists as well as some feminists both lend support. The anti-feminists, of course, are always prepared to pounce on something such as the biological advantage men have in upper body strength to argue that this applies to every other attribute as well. On the other hand, some feminists are so committed to the principle that there are no fundamental differences between men and women that the obvious counter-examples threaten to bring down the entire edifice of sexual equality.

The confusion over exactly what women’s sports is simply mirrors the confusion that still remains in the larger society over the role of women and what genuine equality entails.

Source:

McEnroe reverts to childish blather – or does he? Dave Kindred, The Sporting News, August 31, 2000.

The record companies have unbelievably put up a site at HackSDMI.Org that offers a $10,000 reward to anyone who can hack the latest SDMI scheme — the contest runs from Sept. 15 to October 7. For those who do not know what SDMI is, it stands for Secure Digital Music Initiative and it is the anti-piracy, anti-user encryption scheme that the recording industry wants to use to stop the MP3 juggernaut. The problem being that say you have an electronic music player in your computer, your home stereo, your car and say a portable player for jogging, SDMI effectively means that you are going to have to pay a per device fee for songs (so, basically, if you have four devices and it costs $1 per song, you will wind up paying $4 per song to play it in all devices without enduring mind numbing secure transfer processes).

It will be interesting if anyone takes them up on the challenge since most hackers hate the whole SDMI proposal. The folks at ArsTechnica suggested a better plan would be to hack SDMI in as many ways as possible, but wait until after the standard is finalized before publishing the results. Personally, I think it is more likely the web site will get hacked and changed to some pro-Napster message than that a lot of folks will take their time hacking SDMI and then reveal the holes in the process to record company lackeys.

Besides, any encryption scheme which requires the encrypted text to be decrypted on literally millions of machines is inherently defective. Especially given the power of current computers, as soon as a song is decrypted into a digital stream of CD or better sound within my computer, which it has to be to be played back, the encryption is pointless since all I have to do is find a way to capture that stream and write it to a file (and there are plenty of those sorts of utilities floating around).

Professor of rhetoric, Thomas Lessl, has a very good piece in the latest issue of the New Oxford Review concerning The Galileo Legend. Lessl points out that the story of the suppression of Galileo’s findings by the Catholic Church, often told in introductory science texts and elsewhere, has a number of components that are simply erroneous. Not a surprising view considering New Oxford Review bills itself as “An Orthodox Catholic Magazine,” but Lessl is correct about the almost urban legend-like errors that have crept into the Galileo story.

While certainly part of the reason for the errors is the general over-simplified view of the Catholic Church as anti-science, more broadly a bigger problem science history in general. Most people would be surprised if a general introductory course on American society covered only events of the last 10 years — surely events that happened in the 1780s, not to mentioned the 1880s and 1980s, are necessary to understand current American culture.

With science, though, almost all that is ever taught to students is the latest theory about how the world works with little background on how we arrived at the current state of knowledge about the world. Just like American culture, however, it is very difficult to understand and put science into context without the historical background.

An interesting example I see of this is among animal rights activists who claim that experiments on animals have never yielded any knowledge about disease applicable to human beings. They can get away with saying this in part because very few people alive today know about how the fundamental theories of disease were first formed and tested in the 19th century. Most people might know that Louis Pasteur has something to do with bacteria thanks to the widespread pasteurization of milk today, but I’d be surprised if more than 5 tenths of a percent of laymen know about the critical importance of his experiments with rabies and dogs that first demonstrated not only that rabies was a communicable disease but also resulted in the first treatment regimen for humans bitten by rabid animals.

And biology is just one small area. You would no doubt find similar ignorance for key discoveries in other areas of the sciences. It is a shame that the history of science gets so little attention.