Why Do Men Hate Women's Basketball?

We are rapidly approaching the annual NCAA Basketball Tournament.  Which means that once again ESPN will begin its annual quest to make Women's Basketball somehow culturally relevant.  It will prominently feature stories about the Women's Tournament.  It will broadcast the selection of teams for the Women's Tournament.  It might even televise some games from the Women's tournament - on ESPN2 of course.   Well, a few of them might be broadcast on ESPN in prime time.  ESPN does this every year, and every year it fails.  No one watches.  And yet it continues - year after year after dreary year.

Look I get it.  Basketball is the only major money-making sport in the US that women also play.  If a non-traditional Women's sport (i.e. not figure skating) is ever going to make the big time in terms of money and popularity, it will be Basketball.  But it just isn't going to happen.  And so once again, we will get the same dreary post-Women's Tournament analyses that ask the same dreary question.  Why won't men watch women's basketball?  Why do they in fact seem to hate it? 

Enlightened opinion will wrinkle its fevered brow and ponder this question.  "Basketball is basketball!  It's a different game but an exciting game.  It's pure.  The women exhibit fundamentally more sound skills!"   It will puzzle and puzzle until its puzzler is sore, and then ... once again conclude (year after year after dreary year) that men just have "gender issues."  It will conclude that men need to have their consciousness raised - that if only they are forced to watch it, they will learn to like it.  Cue ESPN to gather its lance and tilt once again at windmills.

You see, that is the source of the problem, and the answer to the question.  Women's basketball isn't a sport.  It's a cause.  Every display of women's basketball on the home page of ESPN is an accusation - a declaration that men are morally deficient for refusing to watch women play basketball.  Every broadcast is a declaration of the Evangel that men and women are inter-changeable parts.  It proceeds from the assumption that a basketball fan should not notice the gender of the players - that noticing the gender of the players is a moral fault and the source of the problem.  Men, who otherwise wouldn't care    one way or the other, feel that accusation and reject it.  In response they learn to despise the source of the accusation.  They wish evil upon it.  They take delight in its poor ratings, and mercilessly mock its failures.

Women's basketball can only become popular when it ceases to be a cause.  Men will not be harangued into watching women play a slower, smaller, less exciting version of the game.  Quit forcing the issue.  Let it earn its place in the sporting world instead of giving it a place it cannot achieve by its own efforts.  But, comes the response, "Men won't watch it. If they aren't trained to watch it, then it will never be able to achieve it's place."  Perhaps not.  But I don't want to be 'trained.'