I popped onto Twitter for a few minutes yesterday and saw a Vine someone had posted of Little League pitcher Mo’Ne Davis pulling the string on a batter. It was a great clip, an ideal example of a young, talented athlete competing at her sport.
Predictably, immediately beneath the tweet were comments (from dudes, surely) about how she was headed for Tommy John surgery. If you go and read about Ms. Davis’s success here at Fox Sports or anywhere else, you’ll undoubtedly see lots and lots of comments that are intended, from one angle or another, to do the same thing: diminish the young woman’s accomplishment.
This sort of dispiriting witlessness is the Internet mustard that gets spread over pretty much everything that women do in sports and, boy, could we do without it, especially when the subject is an amateur. There’s no money at stake, and no one is trying to sell you anything. What is the point? I appreciate, much too well, the male craving to be a giggle machine twenty-four hours a day, but you must understand that there is nothing funny or clever about trying to cut down an adolescent athlete, regardless of gender. Don’t do it.
Owen King is the author of Double Feature.
