Just when “anecdotal stories” good enough to be treated as a solid evidence behind some presumed social trends to grace the pages of prestigious New York Times?
When it supports some noble cause, of course.
And the noble cause in this case is a promotion of girls’ sports, a favourite topic of many NTY staff writers. Understandably it’s much more pleasant and uplifting than dealing with more hard core topics like drugs or inner-city violence that mostly affects boys. Maybe this female staff writer has a younger sister. Or nieces. Or the girls sport team she belonged to when she was in high school needed some boost.
She doesn’t even bother to look for another “anecdotal evidence”, in other cities or other sports to support her claim, but is content with citing just one story from Chatanooga, TN. Girls soft ball in one obscure town in the South. And even local officials don’t have numbers to back up but has to rely on their memories or hunch.
Lest’ see it from another way. We can also draw conclusions from this (anecdotal) story that girls are generally less independent, as they need mothers, fathers, and sisters around to travel to other towns to play sports. Boys could manage all these by themselves.
In addition, girls are less serious and stoic about sports they are playing, which explains why girls sports are boring and don’t succeed as players in more senior category - remember for boys “It was eat, sleep and drink baseball.”, but for girls, its’ shopping, sightseeing and leisure activities when not in the fields. While the boys who didn’t drop some dollars on visiting town may some day be million-dollar professional baseball player, thanks to his eat-sleep-drink-baseball attitude, girls will only hope to be some mild-mannered office workers lamenting discrimination in sports – as men earn more money in sports, of course!
By the way, obviously I wasn’t the only one who noted this story…
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