Brittany Lincicome is the latest sacrificial lamb to be offered on the altar of gender equality. This talented and successful professional golfer on the LPGA tour was thrown last week into the lion's den of men's professional golf. The result at the Barbasol Open near Lexington, Kentucky was predictable but will doubtless be spun in the direction gender ideologues insist on.
Lincicome failed to make the cut, finishing five over par after two rounds. The cut (consisting of the top seventy players and ties) was at two under par. ESPN's stable of P.C. clowns (which now includes the "worst person in the world," Keith Olbermann) will doubtless note that her second round was under par and that she did better than a dozen male golfers. Omitted from their reportage will be the fact that the leading score after two rounds was fifteen under par (twenty strokes better than Lincicome) and that some of the guys she "beat" actually had lower scores but withdrew from the competition when it was obvious they wouldn't be around the following rain-delayed day. Two other males she bested (while the top PGA players struggled overseas) were fifty-three and fifty-seven years of age.
No one should doubt that Lincicome is a good golfer and a superb female golfer. I am sure she would beat me by a dozen strokes on almost any course, but then so would almost any good high school golfer. The issue here isn't whether some female athletes can beat many or even most men. It's why folks in elite media and corporate ivory towers keep putting female golfers in positions where they are certain to fail – at least by the standards applied to male golfers.
That last clause is critical. No male golfer would be touted for failing to make a cut and finishing near the bottom of his fellow competitors. But whenever a female "accomplishes" this feat, P.C. prima donnas with microphones hail another "shattering of the glass ceiling." Ignored in all this virtue-signaling is the glass-shattering damage that might be done by throwing good athletes into competition that's above their heads – an unintended consequence that also applies to many affirmative action placements. More importantly, elites ignore the profound social damage that's done by pretending males and females are equal in every respect.
Poor Michelle Wie was almost destroyed by the P.C. rush to prove she was as good as any male golfer, an ideologically fueled imperative that led to a string of eight missed cuts (with increasingly poor scores) that started in 2004 when Michelle was a mere fourteen years old and ended four years later. Fortunately, the great Annika Sorenstam had already established her Hall of Fame credentials with dozens of LPGA and European wins when she missed the cut at Fort Worth's Colonial tournament in 2003 – a result that didn't deter P.C. enthusiasts from insisting on their nature-be-damned beliefs with young Miss Wie.
The fundamental mendacity that permeates "gender equality" lunacy is illustrated by the taglines that accompany Babe Zaharias's forays into men's golf. A tremendous multi-sport Olympic medalist, Mrs. Zaharias (née Didrikson) made the 36-hole cut at the L.A. Open but failed to make the 54-hole cut. She is nevertheless hailed as "the only woman to make the cut in a PGA Tour event." Never mind that in January of 1945, there was this thing called World War II going on and that Zaharias's score of twenty-three over par after three rounds was hardly stellar. Moreover, at that time, the L.A. Open, according to the Golf Historical Society, "was not a regular tour event, and was played for War Bonds by both professionals and a sprinkling of amateurs."
A PGA website, "The history of women playing in men's PGA Tour events," further misleads folks by observing that Zaharias also "made the cut" in 1945 at Phoenix and Tucson. In fact, though Zaharias "qualified" for these War Bond tournaments, the Arizona Daily Star's 2006 historical retrospective of the Tucson event noted, "The Babe finished 39 shots off the lead, but ahead of five men in the 47-player field." Joining in the mendacity, an online Phoenix magazine observed that Zaharias "made the cut" in the Phoenix Open and finished thirty-third, failing to add that "thirty-third" (in a field of unknown size) amounted to being thirty strokes behind the eventual winner, Byron Nelson.
We are all supposed to nod our heads and pretend, along with our progressive betters, that these "accomplishments" prove that women can do anything men can do – and do it just as well. So if a 29-year-old Billie Jean King beats a 55-year-old has-been, Bobby Riggs, this result presumably indicates some kind of equality of the sexes. (I had forgotten that Riggs had just demolished Margaret Court, who, as even a P.C. "Battle of the Sexes" website puts it, "was in the midst of a career that produced more Grand Slam singles titles than any other player – man or woman.") This "man or woman" coda is now ubiquitous among sport commentators, implicitly declaring that any accomplishment in women's sports is equal to any accomplishment in men's sports – an assumption that works as long as fans are dutifully aware of their P.C. obligations and the sport in question doesn't involve stopwatches, weightlifting, or specific distances like shot-putting.
Just once I would like to see a female officer on "Cops" take down a large male suspect like Lt. Benson regularly does on "Law and Order." Unfortunately, in the military and various other occupations for which upper body strength is crucial, Hollywood fantasy doesn't reflect the real world. Perhaps when some girl gets severely injured playing football with the guys, folks may wake up to the obvious truth, but I doubt it. Instead, they'll focus on football's violence while sticking their P.C. heads in the "gender equality" sand and dreaming of a future in which male-female distinctions are a thing of the past.
Richard Kirk is a freelance writer living in Southern California whose book Moral Illiteracy: "Who's to Say?" is available on Kindle.
