US sports respect women’s money. That’s where it ends | Opinion

The teams, the leagues, the betting companies, the athletes – they’re all happy to take women’s money and see our butts in the seats. But God forbid they share their space in sports with us or treat us with even the slightest shred of decency.

And this doesn’t even include last month’s debacle by Good Good Golf and Callaway, both of which greenlit an ad that made light of violence against women. Or the general “broification” of traditional sports media where, Mina Kimes aside, the biggest spotlight belongs to men.

It’s exhausting, at a time when women’s sports have never been more popular and women athletes have never had more visibility, to be told we are to be seen and not heard when it comes to traditional sports. That we can have the WNBA and NWSL and college softball and volleyball, but football, golf and even betting on sports belong to men and we are not welcome. Or that if we insist on invading their space, it better be as eye candy.

“It’s about a reinscribing of those spaces and a reassertion of those sports as male-dominated and masculine-oriented institutions,” said Cheryl Cooky, a professor at Purdue University and co-author…

Original source: https://www.usatoday.com/sports/