If you want to see the future
of feminism, throw out the tired tracts and rants by Gloria Steinem and
Susan Faludi. Instead plant your butt in front of the television on Saturday
as the Women’s National Basketball Association starts its inaugural season.
There are certainly a lot
of highly talented women playing on the eight initial teams, but none
is a better role model and all around player than New York Liberty center
Rebecca Lobo. Not only does Lobo play for a team that easily has the best
name in the history of sports teams, but she has achieved the sort of
success that anyone, male or female, would envy.
Lobo was the star of the
University of Connecticut team that went undefeated in 1995, spurring
interest in women’s basketball to new heights. Last summer she won an
Olympic gold medal as part of the USA Women’s Olympic Team in Atlanta.
During the brief WNBA season she is likely to be the dominant player in
the league.
Lobo and her fellow WNBA players
have done all of this without the help of the sort of government intervention
in the marketplace which feminists at organizations such as the National
Organization for Women constantly claim are needed in order for women
to succeed.
To be sure, Lobo and other
women athletes have benefited from Title IX, but Title IX is the sort
of legislation that even diehard free market types love. After all, the
crux of Title IX is merely that the government shouldn’t be handing out
money to schools and programs which discriminate against women. The success
of women athletes under Title IX in fact goes a long way to proving the
point that feminists seem to have forgotten — it is largely the government,
and not the market, which is the major cause of discrimination.
Somehow, for example, a woman’s
basketball league was created without resorting to the host of discriminatory
affirmative action programs which groups such as NOW constantly whine
for. Players like Lobo or Sheryl Swoopes never sued the National Basketball
Association for sex discrimination even though that league hasn’t had
a single female player in its entire history. Women didn’t ask the NBA
to lower its extraordinarily high standards for both athleticism and skill
to allow women into its ranks.
In fact, as Lobo all but
concedes, it is extremely unlikely that a woman will ever play in the
NBA. Despite her abundant talents, for example, Lobo wouldn’t stand a
chance of making an NBA squad. But as she puts it, “We don’t need to [worry
about the NBA] anymore, we have our own league, and we shouldn’t have
to compare ourselves to the men.”
And that league exists for
one reason and one reason only — pure, unbridled capitalism. The NBA
thinks interest in women’s basketball is finally at a point where it can
generate enough advertising revenues to support the costs and perhaps
even turn a profit eventually.
Competition and capitalism,
freed from onerous government regulations such as those which promoted
sexual discrimination, are the key to improving the lives of women. Already
8 million women own their own businesses, employing almost 16 million
people according to the Independent Women’s Forum.
As Lobo sums it up, “…all
we’re asking for is an opportunity to play.” Just give women an equal
opportunity to get the ball, and forget all of that nonsense about special
favors, affirmative action and similar efforts which only serve to perpetuate
women’s social inequality.