On Contests and Gender.

I was just reading the BBC News Online sports pages and came across something that might be deemed questionable. One of the dominant world sporting events at the moment is the Women’s World Cup (football, that is, or soccer to the Yankees.) The list of scores from today’s matches has the word ‘Women’ after each team, so we have France Women, England Women, Costa Rica Women, and so on.

Now, the column is headed ‘Women’s World Cup.’ Everybody knows it’s the Women’s World Cup. I doubt there’s a single football fan anywhere who thinks it’s anything other than the Women’s World Cup, so why does each team have to have ‘Women’ appended? And when we come to the next men’s event in 2018, will each team be listed as France Men, England Men, Costa Rica Men? No, it won’t.

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In other sports news…

England is champion of Europe in one event at least. The London sewers have the highest concentration of cocaine residue of any place on the continent. Amsterdam wins on cannabis, but that’s just wimpy.

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In other international news…

It appears that Chinese women (it might have been noticed that I have a bit of a thing about Chinese women) are currently engaged in a countrywide and hotly contested debate on the subject of whether or not they should shave their armpits. No mention was made of which side is currently in the lead, and being a mere European male it’s probably better that I don’t offer an opinion.