I went to the first women’s Super Rugby game this weekend and it was epic. I went with friends who didn’t know much about rugby so it felt like my stream of consciousness/commentary was actually useful, which was nice, and my team lost, which was not nice, but the other team played better. It seems so ridiculous to say that we’re still getting a lot of “firsts” in women’s sports in this millennium, but it is exciting to see this change and be able to hope for more.
I love a good underdog story. I love a good transformation story. I love well-written articles. I think this is one of the more interesting sports reads I’ve read in a long time, partly because a lot of the information is new, and partly because this is a different kind of challenge than the same story we see in sports. Most of the time, the feel good story is about how sports saves someone’s life, gives them meaning when they didn’t think they had it, gives them a sense of purpose. The end point is about sport for sport’s sake.
But with women’s sports, it isn’t natural or normal to assume that there will always be the option of playing. People don’t see the inherent value in it. Women’s sports weirdly has to justify itself in different ways: The Transformation of a Soccer Club, and the Ways We Value Women’s Sports
The standard line was that Americans just didn’t want to watch women play professional sports. That narrative had become self-reinforcing. Rachel Allison, a professor of sociology who researches women’s soccer, sat in on meetings between W.P.S. execs and potential corporate sponsors. Attendance was low, media coverage rare, and the sponsors suggested that there wasn’t enough interest to sustain a league. “It wasn’t so much that they, as individuals or even groups, espoused overtly sexist ideas,” Allison told me. But, though framing their choices as business decisions, they seemed to share a fear “that other people” — consumers, the marketplace — “were sexist.”
What got overlooked again and again was that the major men’s leagues did not begin minting money overnight — they took the long runway of the twentieth century to establish themselves.
In the past, the narrative that Americans didn’t want to watch women’s sports was self-reinforcing. The bet that Gotham F.C. and the N.W.S.L. — and, increasingly, people across the sports landscape — are making is that what was true for men is true for women: the feedback loop can work the other way, too.
But there is a problem with trying to prove something’s worth or value by pointing to how much money you can make from it. It becomes a matter of dollars and cents rather than doing something that brings people together or means something else. Men’s sport is naturalised in a way that stops anyone from questioning why it is a thing. Even when it’s not making money, it just seems normal for it to happen. When it becomes all about money, people riot. The world turns, mens sports exist. But sure, let’s just suggest that if women’s sports was on tv, it’d make money as well. Definitely not as much money as men’s, but still, you’re making profit.
Then we get to critique these developments from other angles:
The Era Of Lady Boss Sports Team Owners Is Upon Us
That’s how this news is usually framed, anyway: Team ownership represents a kind of solidarity with women athletes. Where we might chuckle at the idea of, say, purchasing the Utah Jazz as a nod to the inspirational power of Donovan Mitchell, here we’re meant to swoon. The framing doesn’t exactly stand up, though. If the last five years in women’s sports are notable for athletes’ high-profile battles to make demands of their leagues — for better salaries, fairer revenue splits, benefits like maternity leave and family planning allowances — it’s worth remembering who their opponents were. Ownership necessarily involves being on the other side of the bargaining table.
So does it matter if women are on the other side? In any case, it certainly looks better. The best person to answer the question might be former Atlanta Dream player Renee Montgomery, who announced last week that she was one of three people purchasing her old WNBA team from vanquished senator and erstwhile lady boss owner Kelly Loeffler. In sports media, Montgomery’s membership in the ownership group was a kind of triumphant coda to the team’s season-long campaign against Loeffler. The attention to Montgomery, though, helped obscure the man putting up most of the money in the deal: the Dream’s new majority owner Larry Gottesdiener, a businessman the Hartford Business Journal called “Hartford’s most prolific landlord.”
As per usual, this deep and academic discussion reminds me of a good meme: ‘Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss’ Is The New Life Philosophy No One Asked For. The point of the meme is to mock and deride people who try to suggest they’re uplifting underrepresented voices by doing something that ends up exploiting those people in a more systemic way. What help is it to sportswomen for Renee Montgomery to own a small piece of a team while Gottesdiener makes decisions that disadvantage female athletes in the long run?
It ties into sillier phrases like “Live Laugh Love” which is one of those cutesy things that didn’t mean much but has resulted in a lot of ridicule — maybe because it is vacuous and cringey, and maybe because people in general dismiss things that women tend to do more than men as being basic. I like the meme because it ties into larger issues surrounding feminism, in particular, the ways people can avoid critique by claiming a certain underrepresented status while also playing on dynamics and intersections of power that they don’t recognise (white women tend to be accused of white feminism: promoting a certain right that would only help or only recognises the struggles of white women, while continuing to enforce other structures of power like racism). For those not in the know, here’s the definition of gaslight and the definition of gatekeep.
To the uninitiated, these may sound like a combination of meaningless buzzwords — and that’s exactly the point. Weaponizing the cringey positivity of “Live Laugh Love”, Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss is the product of years of distilled internet philosophy.
The format reflects how in its short lifespan, the Girlboss has managed to take on some very unfavorable meanings. Popularized in 2014 by Nasty Gal founder Sophia Amoruso, the term was stylized with a hashtag. It was designed as a descriptor for entrepreneurial women everywhere who wanted to be a part of feminism’s aesthetic, individualized rebrand. It didn’t hurt that it promoted her autobiography too. While it was denounced for its infantilized approach (couldn’t she be a boss without the prefix?), its vision of empowered success remained seductive to a generation of young female professionals.
Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss showcases an alternative voice by translating exaggeratedly normie traits into a language that manages to be absurd and hypercritical all at once. The lighthearted namecheck of abusive behaviors confirms a low opinion of its centerpiece that at the same time embraces its toxicity.
I get the feeling that if I voiced these opinions more loudly, I’d be asked why I can’t just be happy about any development we get in women’s sport, and why I feel like I have to critique it.
Well, critique is my sport, and I’m winning.
Just kidding — critique is like a cricket test match where you can play for 5 days and still not have a result. I am happy about these developments, and when I can, I want to support them. But I’m always going to wonder about why things happen, and that involves analysing them like this. I’m always trying to get better at my sport. I recognise that if I want women’s sport to succeed, it has to make money, because that’s how we measure value on large scales right now. But I can hope that it doesn’t always have to be this way.
