Well this is just amazingly, self-defeatingly dumb! While thoroughly shredding the International Olympic Committee’s determined resistance to letting women ski-jumpers compete (current record-holder on the main ski jump in Vancouver? Lindsey Van) Angry Mouse of Daily Kos unearths the following rationalization from David Whitley at a website called Fanhouse. Here’s Angry Mouse’s quote of Whitley

...once girls start performing as well as boys — or better — it’s not even a sport anymore. Just look at what women have done to bowling!

[Fred] Barnes was beaten by a woman, giving him immediate entry into history’s Male Ridicule Club.

How could a guy lose to a girl in an athletic event?

Simple, really.

Bowling isn’t an athletic event.

Rule No. 1 in determining whether an activity is a sport: If the best female in the world can beat the best male in the world, it doesn’t qualify.

Read Angry Mouse’s post here.

We’ll leave aside the whole daring provocateur trope so common in “journalism” (remember, all publicity = good publicity, thus no direct link to Whitley’s post from here.) Instead let’s examine the question in the context of other, similar “last stand” sort of claims.

If you ever had to read Karl Marx (along with Paul Samuelson and Milton Friedman in a freshman survey course, as I did) then you may dimly recall (as I do) the story of a skilled laborer bragging to an industrialist that while he might be able to invent a machine for turning axe-handles on a lathe he’d never invent one that could turn rifle stocks as quickly or accurately as a skilled human. The industrialist quickly rose to the challenge and the lathe operator lost his job… as did, no doubt, every other lathe operator in the factory. This version of the “man can not be beaten by…” wasn’t very durable.

If you ever had to take a combined computability and cognition in the 1980s, as I did, you may dimly recall (as I do) the informed assertions and alleged proofs that a computer could never beat a human grandmaster at chess. That took a little longer to build Deep Blue, which beat Gary Kasparov in the 20th Century than it took the industrialist to beat the lathe operator in the 19th, but down Kasparov went. This version of the “man can not be beaten by…” was only slightly more durable.

If you had to read a newspaper almost any time in the 19th, 20th, or 21st Centuries you may vividly recall the assertion that not only are humans not a product of evolution but evolution itself never happens and indeed isn’t possible. This latter one seems like a pretty durable argument, but more because it’s pretty passionately held than because the accumulation of evidence hasn’t been drawing the circle of denial tighter, and tighter, and tighter. (Same, by the way, for the even loopier notion that the earth is only 6,000 to 10,000 years old.)

And now this “It’s not a sport of a woman can beat a man at it” business.

The problem with each of these assertions is that they diminish those who resist far more than they do their challengers.

Care to go on? Speaking of the Olympics, Adolph Hitler and his minions were diminished when Cornelius Cooper Johnson one the gold medal for the high jump in Munich. And goodness knows the tobacco companies were diminished (to the tune of half a trillion $!#%!@#% dollars) when their efforts to “prove” cigarettes are harmless finally failed. (Surely a fraction of that money would have been better spent developing a variety that was either not addictive or else not carcinogenic or preferably both.) And don’t forget the loopy, and sometimes still-prevalent notion that women are “naturally nurturing” and therefore ought to be consigned to all child-rearing duties during, and in the event of divorce, after marriage.

As far as I can tell (weather conditions — heat, snow, wind seem to alter where people start their jumps) the actual Olympic contenders this week mostly handily beat Lindsay Van’s earlier record on the hill. But many did not. For instance she finished ahead of most or all the men on the American team. Which, I guess, in David Whitley’s interesting logic means that ski-jumping is a sport for some men… but not the American ones who’s best wasn’t as good as Van’s.

Which is of course stupid. Again, the false premise driving his logic demeans and diminishes everyone.