Patronizing defense of the ladies

In case you didn't notice--which I assume you haven't unless, like me, you have a raging lesbian fetish--the WNBA season begins this afternoon.

Sadly, I suspect that this could be one of the last WNBA opening days, if not the last. Without knowing the details of the league's financial troubles, the signals are plentiful. Consider:

1. More so than NBA players, many women's basketball players have been looking to Europe (I recall an ESPN feature a year or so ago about Diana Taurasi and Sue Bird making big bucks in Russia) for larger paychecks in recent years.

2. The league trimmed its roster size from 13 to 11 coming into this season.

3. The Phoenix Mercury will have the name of their primary corporate sponsor, LifeLock, an identity theft prevention service, emblazoned on their uniforms this year.

4. Although today's Detroit Shock-L.A. Sparks game will be broadcast on ABC, there is absolutely no mention of it currently on ESPN.com's homepage, and we all know that ESPN hypes the mother-loving shit out of every sport (and non-sport) that it broadcasts, even ones that generate little interest outside of a tiny niche market.

5. As I've just discovered, ESPN.com does not have a WNBA page. Although the dropdown "ALL SPORTS" button at the top of the homepage has a link for WNBA, it actually takes you to the general "Women's Basketball" page that covers both college and pro women's hoops. 

Speaking of said page, check out the "girly" color scheme they use for it:

So who's doing the patronizing now?

Of course, that perfectly represents the way that ESPN's marketing of the WNBA--not to mention the league's marketing of itself (see: pretty much every team nickname in the league)--has, in my opinion, gone great lengths to undermine the credibility of the league. Year-in and year-out, ESPN promotes the WNBA (and the NCAA Women's Tournament for that matter) with some trite "feminist anthem" to play up the image of WNBA players as selfless, wholesome role models and not--just like the menfolk--the highly competitive animals they are. (Last year, I believe the promotional tune was Liz Phair's "Extraordinary," which--as a huge fan of Exile in Guyville--I find cruelly appropriate. Oh, Liz... Once so gritty; how you cheapened yourself!) God forbid ESPN would use a song sung by a man or that actual WNBA players might, you know, listen to. 

To size up this effect, look no further than the dual "Oh, heavens, no! The ladies are fighting!" / "Ooh, catfight!" reaction that last year's Detroit-L.A. in-game brawl mainly received. It was one out of the roughly two instances--the title clincher possibly being the other, though I wouldn't be so confident--that an out-of-market WNBA game was covered by local news outlets, and ESPN, of course, milked the "controversy" of it. I remember Jamele Hill wrote a great commentary on the incident, which I think may have been the only occasion where Jamele Hill trumped Bill Simmons's assorted ramblings and Rick Reilly's hacktastic drivel on ESPN.com's home page.

While I do credit ESPN for bringing women's sports to their market--without which, they'd hold even lower status--the fact that the network has simultaneously undermined the WNBA's credibility for the vast majority of that viewer market has, I think, cut significantly into their efforts to promote women's basketball. And as a man with a raging lesbian fetish, I think that's a damned shame.

So who's doing the undermining now?

Read more...