Our friends at The Believer are now publishing web exclusives. To celebrate, we’re sharing excerpts of their inaugural weekly column, in which Katie Heindl (author of the beloved Basketball Feelings) writes about the WNBA for both longtime fans and the casual observer. If you want to follow along and bypass the paywall, pick up a Believer digital-only subscription. For just $16 a year, you’ll also have full access to the magazine’s complete two-decade archive, including the most recent issue.
It’s always been ironic to me that one of the last perceptive hurdles in equality between women and men’s sports has to do with emotions. I say perceptive because I’m not referring to the persistent pay disparities, or the discriminatory treatment of trans athletes, or the many gender-based prohibitions that inform how women are seen as lesser than their male counterparts, but how the in-game actions of women and men are interpreted differently in our culture—how it is we watch them.
In men’s sports, we tend not to criticize the players’ emotional responses to the game. They scream in triumph, pleasure, frustration, and camaraderie, going back and forth with chippy animosity that might escalate into confrontational anger, fists flying. There’s sneering, shit-talking, stalking around behind refs and opponents. After a big bucket, there’s cartoonish pride; they pose like bodybuilders and pantomime sleep, two hands tented softly under a cheek. There’s plenty of complaining, staggering around clutching heads and chests in despair. Even tears fall occasionally. In women’s sports, by contrast, the expectations on how athletes should emote are many, even if they are unspoken and often conflicting.
In the Finals matchup of the NCAA Women’s Final Four tournament last year, as the fourth quarter wound down, then LSU senior Angel Reese trailed Caitlin Clark around the floor and waved her hand tauntingly in front of her face to mean “you-can’t-see-me,” a gesture borrowed from WWE wrestler John Cena. She was also borrowing it from Clark, from a couple games earlier, when Iowa beat Louisville to enter the Final Four. I was at that game, and I laughed at the timing and precision of it, this petty gesture saved for deployment at exactly the right time. It reflected Reese’s on-court aptitude; she knows how to capitalize on the momentum of a moment, she’d been doing it all night for LSU. And as a competitive barb, the callback was perfect. Clark saw it this way too, a gesture made in the spirit of friendly competition. But online, in the fallout of that game, viewers lost their minds. Reese was called “classless” by multiple sports journalists (none of whom typically covered women’s basketball), an “idiot” by former ESPN host Keith Olbermann, and worse (none of which bears repeating). Many, including Reese, called out the racist double standard: Clark’s initial face wave had been celebrated, including by Cena himself.
Read the rest of the essay over at The Believer.