The Caitlin Conundrum

From my new column in Taki’s Magazine on women’s basketball player Caitlin Clark:

… Women’s spectator sports tend to have few but upscale viewers because most women athletes tend to be the product of two-parent homes who have strong relationships with their jockish fathers. In contrast, the daughters of single moms tend to obsess over how to catch a man, and often take unfortunate lessons. As Chris Rock said:

As a father, you have only one job to do: Keep your daughter off the pole!

The daughters of wealthy dads who have stay married to their moms often want to please their fathers by excelling at his interest, which is frequently sports.

For example, women pole vaulters are often exceptionally beautiful; they tend to be girls who would normally be cheerleaders (the acrobatic demands are similar), except that their dads make so much money that they can afford sizable pole vaulting runways in their backyards.

A striking exception to this pattern is the WNBA, which has a downscale athletic base that tends to be macho black women who like sports for its own sake, not because they want to please their dads (whom they usually haven’t seen much of).

Not surprisingly, the WNBA is the small time because basketball has evolved to be one of the leading showcases for masculinity. The WNBA brings in only 2 percent as much revenue as the NBA, and rookies like Caitlin Clark are capped at a salary of under $77,000 per year. (Don’t worry about her lifestyle, though: She signed huge endorsement deals.)

In contrast, Clark is a typical upper-middle-class white woman athlete (with a 6’6″ boyfriend) of the type that predominate at the Winter Olympics: her father is a corporate executive, as was her mother before she became a stay-at-home mom because her husband was making enough for the whole family.

Not surprisingly, other WNBA players tend to hate Clark and try to brutalize her.

More surprisingly, NBA executives haven’t come to their meal ticket’s aid.

Read the whole thing at Taki’s Magazine.