College study proves the infuriating double standard women in sports live with every day

Here’s some hot, infuriating garbage for you: According to Ph.D. student Nicholas Subtirelu, who poured over thousands of articles about women’s and men’s basketball, no one mentions women’s weight when they’re talking about statistics, but men are frequently referred to by their hulking size.

He accurately recognizes the double standard most women live with every day—you should be strong and powerful but slim and dainty—as the main reason I just threw my computer across a room. This is particularly enraging because we’re talking about sports, the one arena where it’s always been beneficial to be physically dominant (even in golf, where some people have deceptively huge guns under those polos). Also, are you really a person who can tell what weight means in relation to someone’s size? Because whenever I see stats that say someone is 6’2 and weight 220lbs., I have a hard time conjuring up if that body type is more 1980s Arnold Schwarzenegger or 2015 Brittney Griner. No one thinks this way.

These are athletes, renowned for their physical ability; we don’t have to tiptoe around their weight, so just drop the act and let women live already.

Danielle Henderson is a lapsed academic, heavy metal karaoke machine, and culture editor at Fusion. She enjoys thinking about how race, gender, and sexuality shape our cultural narratives, but not in a boring way.