Now is the perfect time for men to watch more women’s sport

The National Women’s Soccer League (NWSL) recently attracted a viewership of 18.7 million across the recent playoffs, and the 2023 Women’s Cricket World Cup reached 192 million global viewing hours, up 44% from the 2020 World Cup.

Streaming platforms, social media, and increased sponsorship have all helped to boost the availability of women’s sporting events. The creation of The Hundred cricket tournament in the UK pulled in large audiences and the women’s fanbase for cricket is rising exponentially.

Women’s sport is a form of televised entertainment that is currently (mostly) protected from the onslaught of prejudices and tropes that actresses and female presenters face. The athletes can be themselves, with no script, and just play the game they love.

Historically, there has been male pressure on women’s league sports for uniforms to be more revealing to boost viewership, but this has been largely and successfully resisted (although volleyball seems to be a glaring exception).

This means that women’s sporting events are one of a few places on television where you are guaranteed an honest and real portrayal of women being women and it is this where men could use more exposure.

When players are selected for a sporting team they are selected based upon their athleticism and ability to play the sport. The team, therefore, will not be representative of the narrow part of the bell curve where men have imposed beauty standards.

Sporting teams thus reflect a greater diversity of appearance and the players, for both practical and social reasons, are likely to wear minimal to no makeup or be overly concerned with their appearance. With a team uniform, there is also little concern for the pressures of dressing to please. Playing on a team immediately puts women on a more equal footing to men.

When watching women’s sport, the personality of the players radiates through in the game. If a player is successful or disappointed, she will deal with this in her own unique way – playing it cool, recruiting 90 per cent of her body into an energetic outburst, looking at a teammate who failed to do something basic with murderous intent, or just in a state of disbelief that they pulled off the impossible.

Women’s sports allows women to have a personality and can serve to remind any male viewers that this can be just as endearing and entertaining in the absence of sexual thought.

This will of course require more men to get over the idea that watching women’s sport is not as entertaining as watching men play, and stop them wading into discussions of biology that they haven’t studied in over 30 years, and psychology that they haven’t studied ever.

The only thing that can shift the needle on misogyny is for men to see what equality looks like. Men have nothing to lose by introducing more women’s sport into their lives. And now there is more availability than ever.