Joe Rogan | Could We Create a Sport Where Women Have the Advantage Over Men? w/Adam Conover

You know, I heard a really great, this is just the beginning of a thought, right? But it came up just somewhere, I was talking to some people about this. And in sports, one of the things, our assumption that men have an advantage over women, right, in sports. In sports? In sports, yeah. In sports assumption? Yeah, well, yeah, let me expand on it. Men have an advantage over women in sports. Is partially based on the fact that so many of the sports were designed for male bodies, right? They're optimized for male bodies, right? Basketball, for example, right? How is that optimized for male bodies? It's like the height of the basket, you know? The way that the ball moves around. You know, like, if we're going to say that. If we're going to say that, men and women have physiological differences, right? And then we're creating sports and the sports are sort of tuned to the physiological differences of men and women. I think we're splitting hairs here. We're talking about power, speed, athleticism, all those, there's an advantage that males enjoy. When you look at, say, gymnastics, right? I would say that, like, women, for the events that are in a women's gymnastic competition, right, have an advantage over men, right? Men don't compete on the ring hold thing, you know what I mean? Men don't compete at some of that crazy, you know, bar shit, you know what I mean? Right. It's larger. It's height, it's flexibility, it's like there's a lot going on, right? So that's a rare case where women's gymnastics, we've actually created events in that and, like, competitions that, like, only women can do, right? And so we sort of optimized that sport more for a female body, right? What if we did that with a lot more sports, right? And how about this? What if we were able to develop, because again, the rules of the game, right, are not absolute. The rules of the game are things that humans create, right? And so why do we, like, maybe part of our assumption that men are better at sports than women or men have an advantage on sports than women are that we have constructed most of the games that we've constructed are actually sort of biased towards a male type of body, right? That sounds ridiculous. The reason why gymnastics is, like, why women are good at gymnastics, first of all, their flexibility, their lightness, all those things. Also, they're not competing against men in a one-on-one type of situation. Like one's trying to defend, the other one's trying to attack, like a game of basketball or a game of football or any other sort of team sport. I mean, they give you two of any male gymnasts and try to have them compete against the female gymnasts. That's a physical event. It's a physical event as opposed to a sport. So a physical event is you have to do this thing. It's very athletic. It's an athletic endeavor. You do it, you balance, you land. No one's trying to stop you from doing it. And when you're shooting basketballs, you're not just shooting basketballs. You're trying to shoot a basketball what people are trying to defend. You're trying to juke left and then go right. You're trying to be sneaky. You're trying to shoot from the outside. There's all this shit going on. And a lot of it involves your ability to move fast, to close distance, to have the physical strength to leap up in the air. And there's a huge physical advantage that men enjoy. This is not because the sport's designed this way. It's because the sport is very simple. There's a basket on one side, a basket on the other side. You got to get it in here. They got to get it in there. Ready? Go. If you're faster and you're stronger, you'll be able to accomplish that better. Males are faster and stronger. There's a reason why there's a male and a female division. It's not that these sports were designed for males. It's that men are physically bigger and stronger and faster. These are physiological advantages. You can have a thing like a gymnastics balance beam event where women are going to shine because they're lighter and more flexible and they can do things with their body that men can't because of the shape of all the mass, all the different things. But that's rare. That's the outlier. Yeah, I don't think we actually disagree that much. The reason it's rare is because historically, we've created most of our sports around things that men have the advantage in. You're not wrong that... But sports are...most sports involve speed and power. Most sports. Men have an advantage in speed and power. I know, but we created those sports, right? What would we possibly be able to create where women would have an advantage that is an athletic event where a man's speed and power does not give him an advantage? I mean, look, man, this is not...again, like I said, this is the beginning of a thought, right? I use this as a thought experiment, as sort of like a possibility opening device, right? But so you postulate, hey, now you make a fair point that there's a difference between individual athletic events like gymnastics and competitive one-on-one or events like grappling or basketball or something like that, right? And so, again, I'm thinking this through myself as I'm talking about it, right? But I don't think it's impossible that you could come up with a one-on-one competition that privileges, that is designed around the same athletic qualities that make a woman give her an advantage in a certain gymnastics event. I don't think there's any reason you couldn't do the same thing for a...find a one-on-one competition that did the same thing, right? There's also... What could it be? I mean, well, here's an example. For instance, I believe, I'm not sure, I'm not 100% sure, but I believe in like shooting events, right? For example, that women and men are on a level playing field, correct? Or that sort of air rifle sort of thing that like...there are events, right? There do exist athletic events where you can have men and women in direct competition with each other, right? Where that event is not designed around a particular facet of a male or female body, right? So, my point is, look, men have...do you agree that men have run the country and the world for like most of civilization? Almost every country. Okay, great. So men have been the ones setting up the sports. So the fact that, as you say, it's rare that we have sports that are sort of more designed around a female, you know, the differences between women as opposed to men, right? I think that might be because men have been setting up all the sports, right? And so my point is... But there's some sports that women gravitate towards. How do you mean? There's sports that women gravitate towards that they really enjoy. There's women's volleyball. It's huge, right? Oh, no, they exist. There's many sports that women have traditionally gravitated towards. Gymnastics, as you said earlier, is a perfect example. But probably way more women involved in gymnastics than men. Oh, absolutely. But those are the sports that get the less attention, right? Gymnastics gets huge amounts of attention. It sure does. They're examples of ones where that is a real female-forward, female-first sport, right? You know what one bothers me the most is the volleyball. Why is that? Because the girls have to dress like hoes. Like even in the Olympics, they wear thongs. Can you imagine? The fucking basketball players had a dress like that? Yeah. That's fucked up, man. Well, I think they can choose what they're wearing. I think that... Well, they can. What's her name? The Muslim Egyptian team. They dress in traditional garth. What's the name of the volleyball player who has the black tape on? Very famous. The two women from the US, they're very famous volleyball players whose names I can't remember. They probably aren't complaining about what they're wearing. They're probably choosing what they're wearing. I don't know. I don't think it must force them to wear that stuff. But I mean, when I tune into Olympic volleyball, I'm like, damn, look at these girls in their underwear pretending they're at the beach. They're not even at the beach. It's a choice, apparently. It's a choice. They want to wear it. They want to wear it. I don't see them. Good move. Okay, but is that a choice for the men basketball players? Can they wear thongs? They can wear short shorts if they want to. Can you imagine? Yeah. I think they're wearing a cut off with a midriff showing and little booty shorts. They might be allowed to if they wanted to. Well, speaking back to, speaking of the narrow masculinity, they might get shit in the locker room, you know what I mean? Maybe not. Maybe they make a point. I like the short shorts that they used to wear a couple decades ago. Oh, okay. Like, yeah, Larry Bird style. You know one of the things I love about baseball when I started watching baseball is you get to choose your own baseball pants. You ever noticed that? Do you? Like, you get to choose. When you look at them, some of them wear really tight baseball pants and then some of them wear really baggy baseball pants. And I just love imagining, I like clothes. I imagine them going to like the baseball tailor and being like, dude, I want to like sag my pants. I want to, you know, show a little swag, but you don't want to impede your performance. So I think the tight would be better as you're running. Like if swimmers shave their bodies to be more aerodynamic, I mean, how much really, if you're just running to first base, how much does like baggy pants, the wind catching the baggy pants? Could that be real? Well, you look at like Manny Ramirez had like the baggiest pants I remember and like you had to imagine that guy was like a little bit suboptimal with his baseball pants. You know, maybe he was pulling them up and stuff. Yeah. Maybe a big ass thighs and they only feel good with baggy pants. Let me just put a bow on what I was trying to get out earlier, right? Because I know I was, I was sort of like getting to a pretty spacey place. My point is just what our show is about so much is about showing how the things that we take for granted in our world, like the way the world is so much of the time is just something that we built, right? And we can question it. And so when we say men are men have advantages in women over sports, I'm like, well, hold on a second. Let's look at how we set the sports up. And is it possible that we could set up, set it up in a different way, right? That would allow more people to compete in sports, right? It might not be the same sports. I'm not going to say that women should play in the NFL against men, right? I don't think that would be safe. I don't think anyone should play in the NFL. Frankly, I think it's way too dangerous. It's very bad for people. But is it like, is our assumption just based on, hey, these are the sports that we invented. We happen to invent sports that where men have the advantage. Can we imagine a world where 90% of sports are ones where women have an advantage or would we be having a different conversation? And if that's the case, could we come up with some sports that like everybody could, you know, that where there's no, uh, does it make sense? It would have to be non-physical sports, I think. But I think, yeah, you could come out with competitions where women and female, traditional female characteristics would have an advantage. For sure you could. I mean, it could definitely be done. You know, it's just the ones that exist now that involve running and lifting things and moving fast and physiologically males have an advantage. That's why we have these distinctions. And that's why we have men's divisions and women's divisions for over hundreds and hundreds of years ago. You know what? This is just not fair. It's not fair. You know? But, you know, I mean, is it the like, that's the, that's the notion of fairness we have now. I think the interesting thing about the question of trans athletes is it's going to challenge that notion. I mean, there's conversations like this one, you know, I think that's really cool. And that's what I think we're sort of, we should be down to have as a society, right?