I feel a change is coming
Im getting out, Im running
This time Ive got to win
You can call me anything, but
Dont call me, dont call me babe
Dont Call Me Babe – Shampoo
British pop-punk duo Shampoo found their way into multiple move soundtracks due to their energetic voices and upbeat tempos. This song was no different, appearing both in the movie Barb Wire” and in Jawbreaker.
Shampoos mission, according to founding member Jacqui Blake, was to show that women could be more than they were seen as in popular music at the time when Mariah Carey, Whitney Houston, and Madonna dominated the airwaves for female singers. In fact, one of their tunes, Dirty Old Love Song, lamented how songs by Houston and Carey portrayed women as needing a man.
The assumption that a woman needs a man to be happy has been present for a long time, and its an assumption thats been at the forefront of multiple states that took nearly 65 years to ratify a womans right to vote. Eight states voted against the amendment and five states declined to vote one way or the other. Once the 36 states needed for ratification were achieved in August 1920, states that had declined to decide or had voted against the amendment eventually did ratify the amendment, with four coming before the United States entered World War II in 1941.
A decade then passed before the next state would ratify in 1952. Five ratification votes took place at the end of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, with North Carolina the last of that group to ratify the amendment on May 6, 1971, nearly 52 years after the amendment was passed by the Senate. The final state to ratify was Mississippi, on March 22, 1984, three months shy of 65 years after the Senate passage.
The thing is, even in the states where women voting was already permitted by the state, frequently, there were active laws to disenfranchise non-white women. In some states, the laws were aimed at Black women, in some states, at women of Asian descent, and in South Dakota, the laws restricted the access to the ballot for Indigenous women.
This sort of support – but not really – is going on today in womens sports.
Executive orders have been signed and state laws have been passed across the country to protect womens sports by removing transgender women from sports through threats of loss of funding research dollars at the collegiate level and state funding dollars – you know, the taxes you and I pay to fund the schools? – threatened at the state level.
Of course, this is a non-issue. There are more transgender men playing college sports in this country than transgender women, but to date, there is not one single bill in any state that has specifically identified transgender men in sports as the target of the legislation. There have been 17 such bills proposed in the last two years just in Congress at the federal level that identify female transgender athletes, let alone all of the state bills that do the same across the country.
The actual number of transgender women playing makes the issue a complete non-issue. In 2023, at the middle school and high school level there werefive transgender athletes. Not 50 (thatd at least be one per state), 500, or even 5,000. Save Womens Sports, an activist group to ban transgender girls in sports could only find five athletes in the entire country who were actively playing. Thats from a group who wants to find those numbers.
Also, keep in mind thats five out of 3.4 million girls who participated in high school female athletics. For those who like percentages, that is 0.00015% of all athletes participating in girls sports.
If you really want to protect womens sports, watch them. Pay money for their merchandise. Make them viable, and not just for the pretty athletes. Yes, Livvy Dunne makes big money as a college gymnast with her NIL money and influencer status – being in a relationship with arguably the best pitcher in all of baseball also helps her, but shes the pretty white, blonde girl who does a sport where she wears form-fitting leotards as her regular competitive wear.
The final NCAA March Madness championship game last spring featuring Caitlyn Clark, a generational talent on the court, and Angel Reese, one of the most dominant college basketball players in recent memory, drew roughly 19 million viewers last year. The mens final drew 15 million viewers.
Thats a start, and certainly, the advertising dollars around womens basketball have picked up significantly. The Nebraska womens volleyball program drew a record crowd last year for a volleyball game in the United States.
However, getting back to Caitlyn Clark. As the top rookie coming into the WNBA last season, she made a $76,535 salary. Victor Wembanyama signed a four-year deal worth roughly $55 million as the top selection in the 2023 NBA draft. Thats just their contracts, without taking into consideration any sponsorship money.
In her college career, Clark made $3.1 million in NIL money, and her most notable sponsorship deal is an eight-year, $28 million deal with Nike. That sponsorship alone pays her three times per month more than her annual salary with the Indiana Fever.
Money flows into womens sports because we choose to watch, which pushes television contract prices to escalate, which brings in more revenue to the teams, and in turn, they are contractually obliged to return a certain portion to the players. Thats without telling sponsors that we want talented female athletes representing products by purchasing products that they represent.
The State B Girls Basketball Tournament is in town this weekend. Its heartening to see Huron Arena packed with people to support these young women as they pursue a dream, but that is how you support young women – not telling them that theyre not good enough to compete with one player or another, but by supporting them in every effort made to be the absolute best in what they do.
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