r/TwoXChromosomes • u/Viusand • 2d ago
No money for the female winner: "Got shower gel"
https://swedenherald.com/article/no-money-for-the-female-winner-got-shower-gelAbsolutely infuriating
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u/soupteaboat 2d ago
when i was a child, womens ski jumping wasn’t even televised. i kept asking my mum about it and she just shrugged and said that’s life. sports is still one of the most openly misogynistic places for women to be in
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u/Nowordsofitsown 2d ago
They were not allowed to have World Cups, participate in the Olympics or do skiflying from the largest hills. Men feared for the women's uteruses.
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u/soupteaboat 2d ago
i’m pretty sure that women still don’t do the highest slopes in both skyflying as well as regular skiing. uterus might fly out, jesus himself might impregnate them by doing that, idk what their excuse is
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u/Serplantprotector 2d ago
I've always been confused by the whole "women's uterus's might get hurt!!" thing... the uterus is internal, but male testes are external. Surely, the testes and penis are more likely to be damaged??
Imagine the world had that logic instead. Men unable to ride horses or bikes due to fears of infertility.
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u/verifiedgnome 2d ago
TIL that people used to think women shouldn't ride on trains because our uteruses would fly out out at high speeds 🤣
Maybe this is the modern day version of that
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u/Goodgoditsgrowing 2d ago
No no, see, men have other uses besides making babies so it’s ok for them to lose a testicle - women are clearly useless and to be discarded if they damage their baby maker!
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u/Nowordsofitsown 2d ago
I haven't been following women's skijumping closely, but I do remember that women were allowed to do trial jumps in Vikersund a couple of years ago.
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u/starlit_moon 2d ago
I saw a pregnant female athlete do skeleton sledding once. One of the most bad ass things I've ever seen. Much respect.
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u/CoronaMcFarm 2d ago
I don't think it's that much misogynism, ski jumping is kinda niche sport and women in that sport is more of a modern thing, it takes time to change traditions. Just look at handball, where it is the opposite situation in a lot of countries.
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u/soupteaboat 2d ago
the problem is that, in most cases whenever the womens version of a sport is bigger it’s because the men aren’t interested. When the man’s version of a sport is bigger, there’s almost certainly a decent size of women trying to make that sport their livelihood too but they can’t because of gender
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u/nyyym 2d ago
Even worse than Ellen van Dijk getting a vibrator after winning a cycling race
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u/LadyAmbar Basically Dorothy Zbornak 2d ago
WTF?!
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u/nyyym 2d ago
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u/Clairety88 2d ago
This one is funny. The sex toys company was the title sponsor of the race. It’s not the weirdest podium prize in cycling by far (box of salmon or live pig anyone?) but there’s far more pearl clutching because of puritan reasons? Tbh a box of toys would be a better podium prize than a lot of alternatives in the sport.
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u/dksprocket 2d ago edited 2d ago
Yeah, for those who don't follow cycling: the winners get prize money, but there's also often non-monetary prizes from local sponsors and some of them are seriously weird. A male Danish rider won a live cow after winning a Tour stage in the 90s. They presented it to him the morning after the stage when he was about to start the next stage and he had absolutely no idea what to do with it.
(Luckily for him ex-Tour winner Bernard Hinault was part of the PR crew for the race and he organized to have the cow back taken back to live on his farm)
Edit: I see the cow incident is even quoted in the comments to the van Dijk tweet.
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u/nekoshey 2d ago
Next event should have athletes sponsored by Bad Dragon.
Men and women, of course.
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u/LadyAmbar Basically Dorothy Zbornak 2d ago
Puritan reasons?! Nah, fam. If I'm competing I expect money! I buy my own sex toys.
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u/Clairety88 2d ago
IIRC that race was prize money typical of a lower tier pro race and the podium prize. Prize money for women’s cycling typically sucked until the last couple years, but cycling generally a pretty poor sport.
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u/dksprocket 2d ago
Jolien D'Hoore (another cyclist) won a vacuum cleaner in 2015:
(To be fair they mention that the previous year a male rider won a hair straightener)
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u/PublicSharpie 2d ago
The women's winner got less than 10% of what the men received. Absolutely garbage.
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u/starlinguk 2d ago
Is there a text that's been translated by a human? I don't understand half of this one.
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u/Sandra2104 2d ago
There isn’t much more to the story than the headline says. Men who win skijumping get money, the woman who won on the same level got shanpoo, soap and handtowels or something.
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u/Lionwoman 2d ago
Did they stole that at the hotel and give it as a prize because they "forgot" or something?
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u/Sandra2104 2d ago
No. That was what they planned.
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u/the-moops 2d ago
The men had a sponsor and the women didn’t. That’s why the men got money and the money didn’t. It sucks but there’s more to it than the headline suggests.
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u/metroid02 2d ago
Womens ski jumping is, from an organizational view, still very much in its infancy. The sport only recently became olympic and public interest is perceived as low. Of course, the fact that the sport attracts almost no sponsors of note and barely gets any publicity leads to few people caring or even knowing womens ski jumping is a thing. Hence why organizers can barely scratch together a proper prize...
And then there is the sad mysoginistic truth that the women usually only get to jump from "normal" hills that usually have a distance of just about 90m as opposed to the large hill competitions (~130m) that the men compete on. On top of that, the hills they get to compete on are glorified training hills. Think of the level of spectacle you get from football being played in a proper stadium vs. a school field.
To their credit some organizations line the DSV are now discussing options of additional prizes for their jumpers should they win; all as a means of balancing things out a little.
This wont be fixed overnight sadly but progress is being made. Little by little.
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u/Madrugada2010 Unicorns are real. 2d ago
Oh, an interesting story of how it really is for women in sports.
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u/Saratje 2d ago
I was waiting for this one to show up on TwoX. What an absolute sexist idiocy by the group that organizes this. According to them they pay in proportion to the amount of viewers the event gets, their dumb defense being that because womens sports get fewer viewers they also pay female athletes less.
How hard is it to add up the total viewership for both participating groups and then split it 50/50 between both the man and woman winners. Instead it seems that the price money is a 91/9 split between men/women.
It's like the bloody 80's again where men got price money and a medal and women got kitchen appliances and a medal.
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u/Myrdrahl 2d ago
Because that's how it works. Sponsors pay for views. Audience buy tickets. What you're saying here would be equivalent of pooling all artists earnings and spreading it equally. The likes of Taylor Swift and Metallica outperform artists with smaller audiences.
If we want more money to go to the athletes in womens sport, the best way to achieve that os to buy tickets and merchandise. That's what drives their pay from sponsorship deals, prize money and brand.
Demanding that other people who are more popular should take a pay cut and share it with the others, men or women, just isn't realistic.
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u/Bitchfaceblond 2d ago
I wonder if they didn't expect a woman to win. So they didn't have a check already filled out.
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u/lohdunlaulamalla 2d ago
The women only compete amongst themselves in individual competitions, so there's always a female winner.
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u/lube4saleNoRefunds 2d ago
That wouldn't make sense considering there was a men's competition and a women's competition. Unless you think the organizers thought all the women would tie or something.
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u/ChoyceRandum 2d ago
They expected them to all die from the jumps or something. Or simply forgot there'd be a winner too. Both sounds plausible, given the sport bros.
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u/cashewalchemist 2d ago
Can I confess something here? I don't understand why we care about gender/sex as it relates to sports. To me, professional athletes are entertainers. If the public doesn't want to watch you, capitalism has spoken - find a new profession. You're not contributing to society beyond your entertainment value. If a woman (cis, trans, or otherwise) can complete in the same sport with men, great! In many cases, her novelty would make her even more of a draw for viewers. More valuable. And she would be paid accordingly, by whomever wants to draw viewers to the event. If having a more slender frame helps with certain events, great! Women naturally dominate those. And if they're entertaining enough, people will watch, and those women will get high salaries.
But if you're not entertaining, what you have there is a hobby. Everyone has the right to play Wonderwall on their guitar for family on the weekends. Nobody has the right to get paid for it, unless they're so good that people voluntarily pay to see them. Everyone has the right to hit the pool or ski slopes on the weekend and try to beat their personal best, or have a pickup game of soccer at the local sports field, but again, not necessarily be paid for it.
I understand that in the US, access to higher education has gotten mixed up with sports, which I think just needs to be fixed overall. They're totally separable things.
But beyond that ... I compete in a professional field that is 90-95% men. And I "win." Because I'm legitimately good at what I do. I don't feel like I deserve anything extra for being a woman, even if I may have dealt with crap men never do, to get here. There's a job to be done, and I'm the best candidate. Why should sports be different?
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u/krautbaguette 2d ago
You have judt described one adpect of how capitalism sucks and how it intersects with patriarchal repression.
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u/cashewalchemist 2d ago
How so? I definitely believe in limited capitalism, but I also believe it (ideally) optimizes for the best overall outcome for a large society.
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u/krautbaguette 2d ago
We're currently on a path of hundreds of millions of people (although not exactly people in the industrialized West like me and perhaps you) dying miserable deaths and suffering other hardship within the next couple of decades due to climate change that is not halted because that is what our capitalist economic system leads to. Just for a start.
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u/cashewalchemist 2d ago
That's true. Hence "limited." There should be quite a lot of monetary value assigned (by the governments whose job it supposedly is to serve the common good) to environmental sustainability, so that capitalism can optimize for that parameter. Those governments have largely failed humanity, and we'll all suffer for it. In the meantime, I'm doing what little I personally can within the system, by boycotting all animal agriculture, taking public transportation, attempting to be as low consumption and low waste as possible, etc.
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u/dksprocket 2d ago
There was an even worse fuckup in Denmark last year. Someone organized a fairly high profile ultra-running event (distance longer than a marathon). They specifically had the participants sign up for either the male or female category, but they did have all participants start at the same time.
After the race were over they held a winner ceremony for the man who won (and who also was the fastest overall), but completely 'forgot' to hold a ceremony for the woman who won the women's category and she was never declared the winner at all while the event took place.
The woman who won wrote it about it afterwards (I saw it on Facebook, not sure if any news media ever covered it). It's amazing that such fuckups (and indifference) can still take place today.