Boring boors who bash women’s game miss the point

Amanda Marcotte of the online magazine Slate did the state some service recently when pinpointing a flaw or two in the admittedly tired criticism of the Women’s World Cup, which was running over the past few weeks.

You’ve probably heard a version of that criticism yourself: women’s sport is boring, who’d want to watch that, men’s sport is real sport. The usual nonsense.

Marcotte pointed out the attractiveness of the word ‘boring’, however, as the crucial weapon in the critics’ lexicon: they “love to fling around the word boring, both because it’s hard to argue back against a subjective assessment and it implies that anyone who watches the game is doing so out of some kind of political duty instead of pleasure.”