Originally posted by Mr Zero
Wait a moment, are you trying to oppress me because I have no legs?The only way we are ever going to breed out the keening howls of the tree swinging low-brows who think that it's perfectly acceptable to talk in terms of "letting women" do anything (as if it's something that anyone has a right to allow or disallow) is to take the first obvious steps.
No more male/female division at a pro-competitive level.
No more female/male world record.
Compete as an equal or dont compete at all, thats the only way that missing-link and his pack of monkeys is ever going to understand the difference between equality and mere "winning"
Sorry, Zero, I don't quite get the coherency of your logic there. We all agree, I hope, that equality is mostly about equality of opportunity- which is to say, all females should have the same opportunities as all males. Both genders should have the same opportunities to try out for, for example, a football team, and it is merely biology that gives more men the chance to fulfill that opportunity, as opposed to sexism.
So following on from that, as you say, we don't tell featherweight boxers they cannot box becuase there are heavyweights. That would be silly.
So surely by extension of that logic, why would be possibly deny the opportunity for women to compete in their own relevant areas in sport? As Link says, lump it all together and that will simply lead to the removal of women from nearly all competitive events that require physicality. As we know, biological fact is that they don't have the same potential as men do in these things.
It strikes me that to deny them this opportunity to compete at the appropriate level will simply destroy the deserved aspirations and hopes of many skilled and talented people. Look at tennis- who wants to deny that Navratilova, Graf, Seles, the Williams sisters etc. are just as skilled in their disciplines as McEnroe, Becker, Lendl, Sampras etc. Their games are very entertaining- heck, some of the woman's games are WAY more fun than the over-powered men's game. And sometimes not. But only this gender seperation- again, an inevitable result of biology- makes it possible for anyone to be interested in Women's Tennis at all, and watching these skills- because as we know from mixed games, men tend to destroy more skilled female opposition.
So if you ask me, equality of opportunity demands gender seperation at the point at which it is simply not physically possible for women to compete with the men any more, else opportunity to play at the top level is being denied to women, and that is the same logic as different weight classes in boxing.