Women's Running reports a MASSIVE drop in female tracksters' share of abusive online comments
Sadly, male athletes are paying an obligatory and devastating price, even if they apparently haven't noticed
A Women’s Running article by Erin Strout summarizes the findings of a new World Athletics report: The share of online abuse of track and field athletes directed at women at the 2022 World Athletics Championships was 31 percent (and 27 percentage points) lower than at the 2021 Tokyo Olympics one year earlier. Females (or women, often one and the same) were subjected to 87 percent of this kind of abuse at the Games and only 60 percent this summer in Eugene. At this rate, by the time the 2024 election rolls around, women athletes will be experiencing no online abuse at all.
This heartening framing is not the one chosen by the proudly irate and eternally flummoxed Strout. She also neglected to celebrate the sudden and w00tworthy tripling of the share of this type of abuse directed at men.
First, these reports commissioned by World Athletics are merely the organization’s way of plausibly maintaining a high Corporate Social Responsibility score. The cigar-smoking twats running it don’t give a scratchy fuck, and half of them probably maintain sockpuppet accounts to hector especially nettlesome athletes of all genders. WA's motivation here is therefore nothing more noble than completing a checkbox item.
This relates to the next, and probably main, problem: Even if someone wanted accurate and useful results from this kind of AI-driven research, these results would be very difficult to produce owing to inescapable losses of data capture, vast amounts of non-purgable static, and high intrinsic subjectivity.
For example, there are no control groups in either report, and it’s hard to imagine what these would even look like. And what’s the zero-level of harm, i.e., the kindest post or tweet that defines “abuse” orbthe meanest that doesn’t? To cite one among many confounders, men casually banter with men in a way that most women would perceive as abusive whether the banter came from a woman, a man, both, or a bot.
Speaking of bots, it’s impossible to quantify how many of the Twitter accounts flagged in the report were bot accounts. It would be of interest to know the gender breakdown of the abusers of each gender of athlete, but that’s impossible.
Strout does a passable job of describing how the data for the two reports were collected, but this just means that’s she’s being a studious stenographer of garbage. There just isn’t much to work with, and wouldn’t be even for good-faith knowledge-hounds.
The incidence in these posts of outright uses of the N-word—very non-fuzzy evidence of abusive posting—was, to me, surprisingly and encouragingly low, considering the high percentage of top-tier pros who are black. And the thesis that the shit flung at track athletes as a group isn’t as bad as it might be is supported by the iffy threshold for “abuse” implied by some of the categories. My favorite among these is “unfounded doping accusations.”
If we* could perform accurate, independent blood tests of every athlete targeted by unfounded doping accusations, we'd suddenly find an amazingly high incidence of founded unfounded accusations. How often, after all, do pro athletes complain about being accused of doping by random people?
In fact, when do pros ever complain about doping? They're the group that stands to pay the highest costs of drug cheating, yet are almost universally silent until they retire and usually even afterward. (Being essentially forced by public and professional pressure to issue public denials, a la Sir Mo Farah in 2015, is clearly different.)
Weird.
The report also appears to have flagged any complaining about non-women in women’s events “abusive.” I’m sure these posts were aimed mainly at DSD athletes; depending, obviously, on their granular content, this doesn’t make them abusive. Trans activists and their dizzy, stealth-misogynist allies like Strout invented the term “misgendering,” another irony since they alone are guilty of it.
There’s no mention of Facebook in this article. But in 2020, when Derek Murphy shared a post I'd made castigating Laz Lake’s hyperwoke attempted cancelers in his Marathon Investigations group on that platform, the immediate and unironic responses included “white men supporting white men” amid orders for Murphy to delete the link to my site.
This would surely qualify as targeted abuse, right? The thing is, I don't care about the labeling itself, as I’ve written before. The women spouting these directives—some of whom eagerly identify themselves as current writers for running magazines—are unfuckable hags and I’m happy on that basis to ignore rather than engage their static. It's the successful speech-suppression efforts coupled to the hagstatic that twists my balls into a hairy, odd-looking, even unsightly pouch.
That was your warning that my mansplaining was about to swivel in the direction of a new bitch, David Roche. In a different unedited or drunk-edited Outside, Inc. scrublication, Trail Runner, Roche just served up a dumpsterload of word salad about strides.
One might, as usual, debate the content itself; in this case that could take the form of arguing that strides are supposed to be alactic while Roche’s recommendations constitute a real workout.
But it’s more fun to focus instead on the writing. For example, it’s delicious that the phrase “helps translate” appears in the clause “a stimulus that helps translate to top-end output into better workout and race performances.” (CALLING ZOE ROM, FIRST OF HER [CURRENT] NAME.) And the sentence “That’s interesting, but expected” is unusually bold gaslighting, since what makes things interesting by definition is outlier, not expected, status; Roche might as well have proposed a rare but worthless precious gemstone.
Roche and Strout are hilariously incompetent, and both are gathering shitbirdian momentum. The greatest angle here is that if i’m not mistaken, Strout is writing a book that will consist of her reviews of just this kind of “research.” This is great, because:
The research will be cherry-picked
The research will have serious inherent flaws and limitations
Even if these two conditions didn't apply, Strout demonstrably lacks both the brains to perform this kind of analysis and the integrity to do it fairly
Strout’s book will consist of a sour queef in literary-tabular form, rich in unjustified inferences and easily spotted misapprehensions. I sincerely hope she commissions Roche to write the foreword and Rom to make sure no one else sees it before the book goes to publication.