Category: Uncategorized

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.

Now that my server has been upgraded and seems to be running faster than Superman when he turned back time to save Lois Lane (plus no crashes), I am really starting to get back into the flow of things and get to writing and updating the site like I envisioned. This week I wrote close to 20,000 words (the equivalent of about 80 double-spaced pages) and updated most of the 5 or 6 main sites on a daily basis.

I only give myself a B+ because there were still some things I wanted to write about but didn’t get the chance to because I was being lazy, plus due to some poor planning some of the articles I wrote were rushed out the door a bit faster than I would have liked.

Still, all in all, a very successful week.

I have been reading reviews the last few days just ripping apart the latest “Highlander” movie as being pretty much incomprehensible. On the other hand, a lot of people seem to have problems following science fiction movies (as I was leaving “The Matrix,” for example, the woman ahead of me was complaining that she “didn’t get it”), so I will withhold judgment.

While it might not really be the worst movie ever, if you want to see a very bad movie rent “Highlander 2: The Renegade Version”. Okay, even though I like the original “Highlander” film, I will admit that that movie was a bad film unless you are a sci-fi junkie, and the theatrical version of “Highlander 2” was even worse. The irony is the director of the film complained about how the American distributors of Highlander 2 cut it all up and ruined it, so they went out and re-edited the film, changed the narrative and did a bunch of other crap to make the movie they wanted to release. After watching it, you will understand why the American distributors cut it so heavily!

First, although the characters are the same, there is absolutely no narrative continuity between the first Highlander film and the Renegade 2 version. The Renegade 2 version starts on some alien world with an incomprehensible plot twist involving a rebellion led by Christopher Lambert’s character and goes downhill from there. There are special effects shots in the new film that look like they were rejected from that wretched “Spawn” film.

I do have a small caveat, in that this is one of the few films I found to be so bad that I had to stop before reaching the end — and I tried on 3 or 4 occasions to give the film a fair shot. Unfortunately, there is this ridiculous scene about 20 to 30 minutes into the movie where the evil alien overlord from the other planet sends a couple of his minions to kill Lambert and there’s this stupid action scene, complete with flying skateboard a la “Back to the Future,” which is the aforementioned reject from “Spawn” scene. After all this crashing and just ridiculous level of explosions, Lambert ends up pushing his female companion against a wall and they have sex. The first time through I just busted out laughing. The next few times through I get to this scene and I am verging on physically ill because its the culmination of the start of a movie that is so bad you have to wonder if it was not done intentionally as a way of highlighting the idiocy of some sci-fi films.

Spoiler Warning: Do not read this if you have not seen “The Matrix,” “Existenz”, and “The 13th Floor,” unless you want the endings of these movies spoiled.

Last night I was channel surfing and ended up watching the last half of “The 13th Floor” for about the 10th time. This is an excellent sci-fi film in the whole “is this real?” genre of films started by “The Matrix” (“Existenz” is a Cronenberg film in the same vein that is, like all of his films, bizarre beyond belief.)

I like these films, but it always bugs me how they chicken out at the end to please the moviegoers. Only “Existenz” comes close to really driving home the true problem — how do we know the characters at the end of these films are not themselves in yet another computer simulation.

In the “13th Floor,” for example, the main character has created this simulated world which people can jack into, only to discover that his world is also just a simulation. He meets people who have jacked-in from the outside, and at the end of the movie escapes his simulation back to the real world. But the film chickens out by never considering the obvious possibility — that this third and supposedly “real” world is also a simulation. The same thing goes for “The Matrix”. It is interesting that after being in the matrix for so long and finally getting out to the “real world” that nobody in the film seems to consider the possibility that the “real world” might also be a simulation. “Existenz” comes closest to this point with many layers of simulations so it is a lot more difficult to know if the final scene is really the final world (and the film is very difficult to follow as a result).

Of course we can just leave the whole computer simulation issue out of it since right now everyone who is reading this is running an extremely advanced simulation of the universe within their brain. Moreover this simulation is often wrong and needs to be constantly corrected. In the “13th Floor,” the main character learns he is in a simulation when he ends up driving to a part of the world that the programmers had not yet programmed and he literally sees where the world ends — a clear logical inconsistency. The simulation your brain runs of the world has similar problems. A good example that I learned from a philosophy professor is to take a book, a small one is preferable, and hold it to your nose. What shape is it? Most people reply that the book is rectangular in shape, but in fact the image you see is actually a trapezoid. There are also the many other more formal optical illusions where our brain can be fooled into thinking that lines of the same length are actually of different lengths, etc. (not to mention the complete weirdness of things like Godel’s proof that there are some things in formal systems that are true but unprovable, or the weird results of quantum mechanics which really stretches the ability of our brain’s simulation of the universe to comprehend).

It is this sort of speculation, by the way, which explains why my wife does not like to watch science fiction with me. Actually that has more to do with my theory that Star Trek is a revisionist historical look at the history of the Federation, but I do not even want to get started on that.

Slashdot posted a link to a column by Infoworld’s Nicholas Petreley, Information doesn’t want to be free — people want it to be, basically arguing if people want free information they need to go out and produce it themselves rather than stealing it from big record companies or pirating software, etc.

If you want the system to change, then change it the way Linux has changed the complexion of software. Change it by recording new music with musicians who buy in to your new way of distributing music and then give their music away.

That is a sentiment I definitely agree with, but to be fair Petreley should have also noted that a lot of companies that rely on intellectual property are trying to twist copyright and patent laws to try to make it more difficult for small content producers to compete.