femmenietzsche:

The Kournikoving of College Sports and Its Discontents

Lol, I hadn’t considered this, after the Supreme Court let college athletes earn money the top earning female college athletes are mostly just random hot chicks:

Overall, of the top 5 in women’s collegiate earnings, four of the athletes are some variation of blonde, and yes the list skews attractive.

Small-sample-size alert, but there are implications here, implications oh-so-carefully broached in Kurt Streeter’s New York Times article, titled, “New Endorsements for College Athletes Resurface an Old Concern: Sex Sells.” Such a fraught topic gets the most wordy subhead imaginable, lest the NYT risk putting a foot wrong here. So after the title, it reads:

Female college athletes are making millions thanks to their large social media followings. But some who have fought for equity in women’s sports worry that their brand building is regressive.

That’s not the only concern, apparently. From Streeter:

Race cannot be ignored as part of the dynamic. A majority of the most successful female moneymakers are white. Sexual orientation can’t be ignored, either. Few of the top earners openly identify as gay, and many post suggestive images of themselves that seem to cater to the male gaze.

Like or hate the demographic outcomes (we at HoS are neutral on such matters), there’s no conspiracy here. This is the free market, the one many high minded sports writers demanded that the college men have access to in the interest of fairness. This same set just didn’t anticipate free market results on the women’s side that they’d regard as unfair. Women’s sports, from the perspective of the prestige sports writer, was about a greater quest for equality that managed to highlight marginalized groups. Now, all of a sudden, it’s about….hot blondes getting paid?

Men have their general preferences, preferences that are reflected in the dating market, and now, apparently, the NIL market. It’s a touchy subject, but certain groups do better on the dating apps than other groups. Short guys can attest that life isn’t exactly fair in this space.

As observed in dating site statistics and also in common sense noticing, a large cohort of men show more interest in a slender straight-presenting blonde than in some other sorts of women. These men also show more interest in women who appear available to the intentions of guys. These average revealed preferences are uncomfortable for some to deal with, and here comes the NIL revolution, making it all so salient, putting a number to what’s been suspected.

NIL legalized a market that was always there, one sports media barely considered while hyperfocusing on what this revolution meant for big-time college football. Men, who comprise not just the majority of sports fans overall but the majority of sports fans who watch women’s sports, had the collective capacity to upend the incentive structure of collegiate female athletics. We just didn’t see it because the status quo had NCAA women’s sports high on prestige (from winning competitions) but low on monetary compensation (scholarships). Now that compensation is allowed, the system finds itself scrambling to reckon with what gets rewarded.