Current Events > Bill Burr calls out women for failing The WNBA and USWNT during standup special

(+) Yeah! (+)

Antifar posted...

This comparison doesn't work; Serena is every bit as overmatched by men as WNBA players.

The comparison works because she dominates her sport in a similar way that the men dominate their sport in basketball.

She plays an exciting style of powerful tennis that rivals her male counterparts in the same sport. Can she possibly compete head to head with the males? Maybe not. But she passes the "eye test" when it comes to what exciting tennis looks like.

There is NO female basketball player that can say that when you compare the WNBA to the NBA.

The women aren't dunking, scoring 120-130 points per game, routinely hitting 3 point shots from 5-10 feet beyond the 3-point line.

The NBA is just an exponentially more exciting game, whereas the entertainment factor between watching Serena vs watching Federer or Djokovic is A LOT closer.

https://youtu.be/w5xRHz8Su6E

I rather watch the Kardashians than the WNBA too tbh

bigblu89 posted...

The comparison works because she dominates her sport in a similar way that the men dominate their sport in basketball.

She plays an exciting style of powerful tennis that rivals her male counterparts in the same sport. Can she possibly compete head to head with the males? Maybe not. But she passes the "eye test" when it comes to what exciting tennis looks like.

There is NO female basketball player that can say that when you compare the WNBA to the NBA.

The women aren't dunking, scoring 120-130 points per game, routinely hitting 3 point shots from 5-10 feet beyond the 3-point line.

The NBA is just an exponentially more exciting game, whereas the entertainment factor between watching Serena vs watching Federer or Djokovic is A LOT closer.

great point and its also the reason why I really enjoy watching womens MMA.

Thug Rose is my favorite cause her fights can be just as exciting as the mens.

Bill Burr right again, glad I'm going to see him in November

Oh damn, he based!

just watched this last night on a whim when we had an hour to kill. he's a little obnoxious and i didn't care for his opening bits about the pandemic, nothing original there. but he was absolutely correct on this topic

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Competitive integrity vs. Complaining about wage differences

Theyre not the same. He isnt arguing the WNBA shouldnt exist.

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He didn't say he didn't care about women's sports, as he sites Serena Williams as one of the greatest athletes out there, male or female.

The point he was making is that it's hypocritical for women to complain that female athletes aren't getting paid the same as their male counterparts, without recognizing that their male counterparts generate 50x more money than the female sports do. WNBA being the prime example.

The joke was basically to tell the people complaining to put their money where their mouths are. If you notice, no one every brings up tennis when they talk about wage equality in sports. Main reason, female tennis is just as exciting at men's tennis, and the ratings and revenue show that.

Females make up 3 of the top 10 highest paid tennis players of 2021. Why? Because female tennis is just as exciting, gets just as high ratings as the men, and the female athletes generate just as much revenue from their sponsors as their male counterparts.

Want more people to show up, so you can generate more money to pay your athletes more? Put out a more exciting product that people want to watch on a consistent basis.

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Not at all. Having this argument here will go no where though.

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Im saying he cares about the discussion of mens vs womens sports as well as competitive integrity. You can do both and still be consistent.

when he says men do this, do that, he doesnt mean all men.

when he says women do this, do that, he doesnt mean all women.

I like basketball but I just don't care for the WNBA. I don't feel as invested.

I love women's tennis, though. More than men's.

Bill Burr is a philosopher and scholar of our time

To throw another wrinkle, there are players in the wnba that do not identify as a woman.

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Oh boy... given that I've seen like a dozen peer reviewed studies posted on CE before explicitly detailing the competitive advantage that trans women have in women's sports, I'd love to see your links and we can make this a good old fashioned peer-review fight. I'll start:

https://bjsm.bmj.com/content/55/11/577.full?ijkey=yjlCzZVZFRDZzHz&keytype=ref

Results Participants were 26.2 years old (SD 5.5). Prior to gender affirming hormones, transwomen performed 31% more push-ups and 15% more sit-ups in 1 min and ran 1.5 miles 21% faster than their female counterparts. After 2 years of taking feminising hormones, the push-up and sit-up differences disappeared but transwomen were still 12% faster. Prior to gender affirming hormones, transmen performed 43% fewer push-ups and ran 1.5 miles 15% slower than their male counterparts. After 1 year of taking masculinising hormones, there was no longer a difference in push-ups or run times, and the number of sit-ups performed in 1 min by transmen exceeded the average performance of their male counterparts.

https://jme.bmj.com/content/45/6/395.full

The inclusion of elite transwomen athletes in sport is controversial. The recent International Olympic Committee (IOC) (2015) guidelines allow transwomen to compete in the womens division if (amongst other things) their testosterone is held below 10 nmol/L. This is significantly higher than that of cis-women. Science demonstrates that high testosterone and other male physiology provides a performance advantage in sport suggesting that transwomen retain some of that advantage. To determine whether the advantage is unfair necessitates an ethical analysis of the principles of inclusion and fairness. Particularly important is whether the advantage held by transwomen is a tolerable or intolerable unfairness. We conclude that the advantage to transwomen afforded by the IOC guidelines is an intolerable unfairness. This does not mean transwomen should be excluded from elite sport but that the existing male/female categories in sport should be abandoned in favour of a more nuanced approach satisfying both inclusion and fairness.

https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/105/3/e805/5651219?login=false

Thigh muscle volume increased (15%) in TM, which was paralleled by increased quadriceps cross-sectional area (CSA) (15%) and radiological density (6%). In TW, the corresponding parameters decreased by 5% (muscle volume) and 4% (CSA), while density remained unaltered. The TM increased strength over the assessment period, while the TW generally maintained their strength levels.

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33289906/

We report that the performance gap between males and females becomes significant at puberty and often amounts to 10-50% depending on sport. The performance gap is more pronounced in sporting activities relying on muscle mass and explosive strength, particularly in the upper body. Longitudinal studies examining the effects of testosterone suppression on muscle mass and strength in transgender women consistently show very modest changes, where the loss of lean body mass, muscle area and strength typically amounts to approximately 5% after 12 months of treatment. Thus, the muscular advantage enjoyed by transgender women is only minimally reduced when testosterone is suppressed.

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The numbers in attendance are off but the money is true.

https://www.wsn.com/nba/nba-vs-wnba/

I think Kelsey Plums point about revenue sharing is good though. Though I dont know if that is an overhead thing. But an 80/20 split vs a 50/50 split is a more reasonable conversation.

And he doesnt have to care about womens sports to rant about it. People rant about trans athletes all the time even though they were referring to sports as "sportsball" prior to trans athletes coming up.

At the same time, I dont disagree that Bill Burr is being hyperbolic for views and for the sake of entertainment. I dont think he cares about this issue that much beyond being annoyed at the discourse and building a set.

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If you have a list of studies to read available you can send them to me and I promise Ill read them. One of the last studies I read did make good points about muscle mass but they also had conclusions I felt didn't match the data in the study. The data would inform one part of their conclusion, but they would ignore another part of the data that might mean something. Not in a p-hacking way, so the study was sound but not complete. I wish I could find it but the person I followed wasnt a "pure" enough trans woman and got doxxed by the left so she had to leave the space.

My point earlier was that neither of us is going to convince the other in this topic. And there are plenty of other topics to discuss the trans sports issue in. The wnba conversation deserves its own space.

g0ldie posted...

...I read this in his voice

Lmao same

Deutschenlied posted...

Men shouldn't give a fuck about women's sports?

Men give a fuck about the national womens soccer team, because they win.

How did this turn into about trans women?

VeggetaX posted...

How did this turn into about trans women?

CE gonna CE

I think what I love most about Bill is that he takes shots at everyone, indiscriminately. Somehow this rant never comes across as misogynistic, just real.

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With feminists.

pinky0926 posted...

I think what I love most about Bill is that he takes shots at everyone, indiscriminately. Somehow this rant never comes across as misogynistic, just real.

Some of the best "Current Event" comics are the ones that do nothing other then hold a mirror up to the audience and talk about how ridiculous they are acting when it comes to certain issues.

For example, in Chris Rocks most recent standup, he talks about how the big difference between Men and Women when it comes to relationships is how Women value success over looks, whereas Men value looks over success.

And the example he gave was Jay-Z and Beyonce.

While Beyonce is wildly successful in her own right, she's also a beautiful woman. And is she was working in Burger King, Jay-Z would still find her attractive.

But if Beyonce was still Beyonce, but Jay-Z was the one working in Burger King, NO CHANCE.

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I think you're looking WAY TOO far into a 5 minute comedy bit that was made for haha purposes.

Sounds like you're more of a Seinfeld "What's the deal with Ovaltine? Why is it called Ovaltine if the jar is round? Why isn't it called Round-tine?" kinda guy.

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To these points, I refer you to yourself:
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Link them if you have them, because I haven't seen them.

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I'm guessing this a copy/paste from this article:
https://www.webmd.com/fitness-exercise/news/20210715/do-trans-women-athletes-have-advantages

Which also states the following (and directly addresses your grip strength study):

How are other potential advantages such as lean body mass and strength affected by medical transition?
Harper: Lean body mass and strength are less affected than hemoglobin, but we don't really have studies on trans athletes. Our review and another one looked at studies on non-athletes. One of the important things to note is that even before starting hormone therapy, the trans women in these studies were substantially less strong than cis men. I put it colloquially that as a population group, trans women would rather starve themselves to look like models, than put on muscle to be athletes.
But that's the population these studies looked at -- they weren't looking at trans women who are active in sports. We found that the trans women didn't lose very much strength or lean body mass. But they probably didn't build up very much before they started hormone therapy. How applicable that finding is to trans athletes is somewhat debatable.
There's absolutely no question in my mind that trans women will maintain strength advantages over cis women, even after hormone therapy. That's based on my clinical experience, rather than published data, but I would say there's zero doubt in my mind.

Your review found that lean body mass and muscle strength decline but remain above cis female levels up to 3 years after hormone transition. Do you think that represents a plateau or that there will be further declines over time?
Harper: It is probably true that the greatest changes in the strength of trans women on hormone therapy occur in the first 12 months, but there aren't enough data to make a definitive statement. It is possible that there are further declines in strength after 36 months, and a recent small study out of Brazil suggests that the entire strength advantage might go away. But they just looked at grip strength in eight trans women, compared with eight cis women matched for BMI, so I think the matter is far from settled.
Given the range, would you assume that there might be different advantages for trans women in different sports?
Harper: Absolutely. I've been saying since 2018 that we should be looking sport-by-sport on regulations for trans athletes.

Harper: Its not just strength, its height sports. Trans woman will lose strength with medical transition, but they wont lose height at all. In sports, like basketball and volleyball, that advantage isn't going to be mitigated; the strength advantage will be mitigated, but that the height advantage isn't going to go away at all.

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If Im reading this study correctly.

It asserts that men and womens muscle fibers function similarly. So men have advantages inherent to their muscle type. (Not disputing this, just clarifying)

Then it uses a set of 8 trans women with an average age of 34. With an average time spent on hormones 15.6 years. And these women have not had gonad removal surgery.

And then it tests their strength by measuring grip strength?

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My bad, I said "guy" as a general term. Meant no harm.

You then have to look at those people, not at Bill. How people interpret his jokes aren't up to him, as a vast majority of them see them just as jokes.

Questionmarktarius posted...

Men give a fuck about the national womens soccer team, because they win.

Ahhh, I think very few men care. USWNT gets viewers during the WC because they usually do well but no one cares about them outside of that. Their WC qualifier numbers are terrible and the women's league is a joke.

Its like the WNBA. Its the same sport but with slower and less skilled players. Its not as enjoyable to watch.

EDIT:
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Missed this part. Feel free to ignore this post and we can discuss it some other time in some other topic. I appreciate the respectful attitude, though.

IGNORE EVERYTHING BELOW THIS, which while I find a fascinating bit of math, will only continue to derail the topic:

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Anecdotal evidence like "well if there's an advantage where are they all" isn't an actual argument because you're talking a TINY fraction of the population, taking the TINY FRACTION of that subset that is interested in professional sports, and then arguing that this entire pool of people, likely less than a tenth of a percent of the population, can't possibly have an advantage because they're not overrunning sports.

So let's look at some numbers because I like math:
Fewer than 2% of NCAA athletes make the pros.
There's about 480,000 NCAA athletes out of pool of college students of about 19 million, or about 2.5%

About 0.6% of of the population is trans. Let's assume the ratio of m2f and f2m is even, so about 0.3% of the population is mtf.

So 0.3 percent of 19 million is about 57k people, and 2.5% of that is about 1425, or roughly the number of NCAA trans athletes you could expect assuming everything is equal across the board. Of that pool of people, 28 in total should be able to break through the NCAA into the pros. 28 trans people, TOTAL, of the entire trans population, would be an accurate representation within professional sports.

If your argument is that there's no advantage because you're not seeing enough winners, you'd just have to look at the likelihood of being a champion in that pool of 1425 (or 28) versus the likelihood of being a champion in the 480k block to determine if, in aggregate, top level trans athletes are disproportionately represented relative to their population in sports.

whitelytning posted...

Ahhh, I think very few men care. USWNT gets viewers during the WC because they usually do well but no one cares about them outside of that. Their WC qualifier numbers are terrible and the women's league is a joke.

Its like the WNBA. Its the same sport but with slower and less skilled players. Its not as enjoyable to watch.

I see the USWNT like I see most Olympic sports.

People REALLY care for 2 weeks every 4 years, because it gives them a minute to puff their chests out when the US does well, then promptly forget about the sport after the 2 weeks is up.

Gymnastics, Track & Field, Women's Soccer, etc.

All "Must See TV" fr 3 weeks every 4 years, but otherwise forgotten sports.

whitelytning posted...

Its like the WNBA. Its the same sport but with slower and less skilled players. Its not as enjoyable to watch.

To me, better athletes doesnt always mean more enjoyable to watch. The NBAs athletes have kinda broken the game and their regular season is unwatchable.

WNBA basketball has a better fundamental flow, like how the game is meant to be played. Its not a bunch of dudes standing around waiting to chuck a 3 while watching the elite player on their team do something that just isnt fair.

He's right. I can name only three female basketball players.

Hes not wrong at all

in order for the WNBA to be more popular, they would need a player like Michael Jordan who the casuals or non basketball fans will want to watch

This is just comedy, he was telling jokes, and you're here analyzing it.

Just relax and realize maybe his humor isn't for you.

Savoots posted...

This is just comedy, he was telling jokes, and you're here analyzing it.

Just relax and realize maybe his humor isn't for you.

You have to ask whats the value of a basketball league where losing one player reduces the total number of dunks by 100%.

metallica846 posted...

Its official now.

Bill Burr hates women.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kk5iqoYVUQc

divot1338 posted...

You have to ask whats the value of a basketball league where losing one player reduces the total number of dunks by 100%.

Talk about the the point of the joke, but not the joke itself.

You want to talk about a joke then you ruin comedy, and that's what's been happening for a long time.

Antifar posted...

This comparison doesn't work; Serena is every bit as overmatched by men as WNBA players.

And she knows it. In an interview with David Letterman she tells him she doesn't want to play against the men because she'd get stomped.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fHnPQ3bTwJk

Savoots posted...

Talk about the the point of the joke, but not the joke itself.

You want to talk about a joke then you ruin comedy, and that's what's been happening for a long time.

Do you think comedians are funny because of what they say, or because they combine seemingly random sounds in a way that triggers an unconscious physical response that resembles laughter?

I don't get why people now pretend like there's no such thing as a bad joke. Or that there is one sense of humor and you don't have it if you don't laugh at everything said by a comedian or announced as a joke. By this logic, anything written as sad must be cried at. Why ruin the sadness with the wrong emotional response to the artist's intent?

Human beings have been analyzing comedy since it was invented.

TentacleDemon posted...

And she knows it. In an interview with David Letterman she tells him she doesn't want to play against the men because she'd get stomped.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fHnPQ3bTwJk

She knows it because she did get stomped by a dude, her and her sister.

https://www.sportskeeda.com/tennis/news-the-williams-sisters-vs-karsten-braasch-the-world-no-203-destroyed-serena-williams-venus-williams-battle-sexes

Kajagogo posted...

He's right. I can name only three female basketball players.

I only know one, Lola Bunny