The Merchant of Hemp

Frivolity

In February of this year, United States citizen and WNBA player, Brittney Griner was arrested by Russian authorities for attempting to enter the country with two marijuana vape cartridges that combined, equaled less than one gram. To put it into context, if someone bought a full-gram vape cartridge, it would cost us between $20-40 dollars at a local dispensary. At trial, Griner was found guilty of “Drug Possession and Smuggling” and was sentenced to 9 years in a Russian prison and a fine of 1 million rubles or $16,500 in USD. 9 years for a frivolous crime, however, one must know and respect the laws of the country in which they’re visiting, especially an exceptionally corrupt one such as Russia. “When in Rome, do as the Romans do” or in this case, “Do as the slavs do to avoid the gulag.” On December 8th, Brittney Griner received her release when the U.S. agreed to perform a prisoner swap with Russia in exchange for Viktor Bout, a man aptly named, “The Merchant of Death.”

Terrorist

Viktor Bout is an arms dealer who was imprisoned by the United States since 2008 when he was arrested on charges of terrorism including, “Conspiracy to kill U.S. citizens and officials.” Bout was caught in a sting operation when he was attempting to supply a Columbian communist organization with anti-aircraft missiles and arms to use against U.S. forces in Columbia. In the late ’80s, during the Angolan Civil War, Bout was the person responsible for arming an entire side of the civil war (The Communist People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola) with automatic weapons. Bout armed and fueled a civil war that resulted in between 500,000 to 800,000 deaths and over a million Angolans being displaced. According to former U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration Chief Mike Braun when discussing Bout in a 60 Minutes Interview, “In my eyes (Viktor Bout) is one of the most dangerous men on the face of the Earth.”

Brittney Griner being freed and brought back to the United States was something that needed to take place. However, did it have to require freeing a man that is responsible for tens, perhaps, hundreds of thousands of lives lost in order to do it?

Equity

Since the exchange, countless media outlets have been coming out with articles and commentary claiming that this incident should never have happened in the first place if not for the pay disparity between WNBA and NBA players. Griner, who plays for the Phoenix Mercury, has spent her last six off-seasons playing overseas in Russia for supplemental income. While she receives $221,500 annually from the WNBA, she was getting paid roughly $1 million per season to play in Russia. The narrative surrounding the articles from places such as The New York Times and MSNBC, among others, centers on the fact that if Griner was able to make anywhere near what NBA players make, she wouldn’t have had to go overseas to play, and therefore this situation would’ve never happened and Viktor Bout would still be in custody. To quote a recent article from MSNBC, “It’s time for the league to step up for the safety and security of its players, without simply passing the cost onto fans. Let franchise owners, our homegrown oligarchs, sacrifice for once and make being in the WNBA a year-round job.” While I’m not unsympathetic to the sentiment, the issue with this statement is that it is not built in reality. 

One of the popular buzzwords of the day is, “Equity.” A word that implies equality, and in a sense, it is equality, however, what it means is equality of outcome. Equality of opportunity is the “Idea that people ought to be able to compete on equal terms or on a level playing field, for advantaged offices and positions.” Equality of opportunity is a concept that we ought to fight for in a society and one that should be upheld by law. Compared to equality of outcome which is a political outlook that involves the equal distribution of money and resources, the same outcome for everyone regardless of all external factors, including and especially, merit. When looking through the lens of “Equity,” all outcomes in which there are disparate results are a product of discrimination, to use the example of the NBA and WNBA, “WNBA players make less than NBA players due to sex-based discrimination.” As stated, equity does not take into account external factors such as the market and consumer demand, only the end result which is a pay disparity. If we look through the lens of equity then yes, at the surface level there seems to be something amiss because after all, by definition these are men and women playing the same game but getting compensated much differently. Through the lens of equity, WNBA attendance is so low compared to the NBA because of sexism exhibited by the consuming fans and the organization’s owners. After all, how else would you explain the average WNBA salary being $130,000 and the average NBA salary of $8.5 million? However, as is nearly always the case when looking through the lens of equity, it is incredibly shortsighted.

Revenue

When looking into the financial background of the two basketball leagues I consulted multiple outlets however the most thorough breakdown was by the hoops blog site “Drunk or Three.”

The Women’s National Basketball Association generates roughly $60 million in revenue on average per season. The cost of running the league is roughly $70 million on average per season meaning that the WNBA is operating on a 10 million dollar loss annually and has done so every season since the league’s inception in 1996. The league increased their game total per season this past year to 36, up from 32. The league-wide average attendance of a WNBA game is between 7,000 and 8,000 people with an average ticket cost of $16.68, this equates to roughly $50 million in total ticket sales. In the 26 years the WNBA has operated, they have never generated a profit. Now, let us compare this to the male counterpart, the National Basketball Association.

The NBA generates roughly $8 billion in revenue annually. The league-wide average attendance during the 82-game schedule is 17,186 per game per season with the average cost per ticket being between $85 and $95. When taking from the peak attendance year of the 2017-2018 season, the league sold a whopping 22.1 million tickets. During the 2019 season, the league generated over $1.5 Billion dollars in ticket sales. Mind you, this is only regarding ticket sales, not at all incorporating the money generated from advertising and television deals where we would find similar disparities between the two leagues. 

The argument put forth by the MSNBC article that WNBA players need to be paid more by the greedy and selfish owners sounds reasonable in theory however, in reality, the outcome would be much different. As stated, the WNBA has never made a profit in its 26 years of existence and in fact, loses $10 million every single season. The NBA whether out of generosity or the more likely explanation, for positive public relations and tax write-offs, keeps the WNBA afloat by subsidizing the league, giving them money to stay alive. Owning a WNBA organization is not a venture one goes into to make money, it is a venture one goes into as a hobby since there is no money to be made. So if we’re talking about substantially increasing player pay what you will effectively do is put the league out of business completely because, after all, who would voluntarily sign up to lose millions of dollars every single season? The league will be unable to find any owners and the league will fold. So then who will pay for these higher salaries? The fans. Do we think there is enough fan demand to be able to support exponentially higher ticket prices?

Market Demand

The unfortunate, or perhaps fortunate truth regarding the enormous pay disparity between men and women athletes is that it is not a result of sexism, it is a result of market demand. The common fallacy regarding pay is that it is set by greedy and selfish capitalists who wish to hold the working man or woman down. Yes, the business owners are who set the wages, and yes, they can be greedy, however, what determines a job’s value is not the owner but instead, the market, driven by us, the consumers. Where there is a high demand for a product or service, you’ll find an increase in the pay scale because that particular job is more valuable. The truth regarding the WNBA is that there is just simply no consumer demand.

The fact is that it is not men and their insatiable appetite for oppressing women that are preventing the WNBA and its players from making money, it’s their fellow women. Women, who constitute over half of the country’s population and make over 80% of all household consumer decisions, on average do not watch basketball, especially women’s basketball, they watch reality television. People’s words mean very little, it is instead the way in which people spend their time and money that paints an accurate portrait. So while people have the right to complain about pay disparity, they also have the right to spend their time and money on products. Consumers, including and especially women, overwhelmingly choose to simply not spend their time and money on the WNBA. Of all the women I know, many of whom were athletes, not a single one watches women’s professional basketball. Men, on the other hand, do not watch disproportionately more reality tv and instead opt for watching athletics. When it comes to basketball, men choose the brand of basketball in which the athletes are bigger, stronger, and faster, in short, they choose the far more entertaining product. 

This fact cannot be simply and neatly reduced to matters of sex, either. A similar argument could be made for minor-league baseball such as the Toledo Mudhens, the AAA affiliate baseball club of the Detroit Tigers. Major League Baseball generated $9.56 billion in revenue during the 2021 season. However, minor league baseball teams operated on an average of a 5 million dollar revenue loss during that same season with the average salary of the players coming out to $44,960. Do minor league baseball teams and their players not generate revenue because of prejudice, “Minor-leagueism?” Of course not, it is simply that fans (Consumers) would much rather spend their time and money spectating the best athletes because they provide the most entertainment. Does the fact that so little of Desperate Housewives revenue come from men indicate that Bravo is sexist? Of course not, it simply means that on average, women far prefer to find their entertainment from the series while their husbands or boyfriends prefer to be entertained by sports, even despite Real Housewives of Atlanta being a very entertaining show.

Equal Pays Act of 1963

The “WNBA players should make near what NBA players make” debate operates under the same false premise that political actors use during every election cycle. The long-debunked but never retired claim that “Women make 82 cents for every $1 a man makes for performing the same job.” The issue with this statement is simply that it is incorrect and it is been illegal to pay a woman less than a man for the same job since the Equal Pays Act of 1963. According to the U.S. Department of Labor and Statistics, women work an average of 36.4 hours a week compared to men working 41. Women are still the primary caretaker of children and therefore work more part-time jobs and less overtime than men. The fact that women are the primary caretakers of children allows fathers to have more time to dedicate to their careers, and with that, comes advancement in the field which equates to more money earned. Additionally, the “82 cents for every dollar” statement factors in all jobs in all fields where men, disproportionately work in STEM fields which have higher pay scales and work more dangerous and physically demanding jobs. In order to get a workforce to participate in physically strenuous jobs they must incentivize workers to forgo their health and safety by paying more money. Additionally, childless women make more money on average than married men with children, why is this? It is because they have more time to dedicate to their career than a man or woman with children and as a result, they achieve higher ranks in their chosen fields and with that, a higher salary. The inconvenient truth that afflicts women, and not men, is that as the biological sex tasked with the reproduction and continuance of our species it is far more difficult to have both a highly successful and lucrative career and a family. To draw a quote from intellectual Camille Paglia, “Feminism was always wrong to pretend that women could “have it all.” It is not a male society but mother nature who lays the heaviest burden on woman.”

Strong Men & Strong Women

The purpose of putting this together is for two reasons. 

First, when did we become so soft as a nation on the global stage that in order to retrieve a citizen, it required the exchange of a mass-murdering terrorist? Yes, we should have made a deal to have Brittney Griner freed, however, are we so weak that it had to come at the direct expense of what will undoubtedly be thousands of future lives lost? There’s an expression that comes from author G. Michael Hopf, “Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.” The generations before us have lived through difficult times, whether its times of war or times of economic depression. Successive generations, including my own, have experienced prosperity, only knowing a world in which we the United States are the wealthiest, safest, and most prosperous in the world. An excess of prosperity breeds comfort and with comfort comes complacency, and with complacency comes a soft and weak citizenry. This is the natural life cycle of a society and it is no more evident than how we conduct ourselves on the global stage with adversarial countries. 

The second reason is that I hope someday I am blessed and fortunate enough to have a daughter of my own. If I am blessed with a daughter of my own, I will want for her to try everything, whether it’s athletics, music, art, theater, or whatever endeavor she wishes to apply herself. Selfishly, I hope one of those endeavors is athletics where I can coach and support her, aiding her in maximizing her output and achieving her goals along the way. My fervor will undoubtedly be equal to that of a son, should I be blessed with one. 

What I don’t want, however, is for her to believe that she is “Lesser than” and a second-class citizen simply because a professional male player makes more than a female player. I do not want her to adopt a victim’s mentality and think that she is not as capable as a man of doing anything when the circumstances are fair. I do not want her to believe that she must rely on systems of “Equity,” rather than merit, in order to be successful and compete with men. A false sexist premise of the past involved the idea that men were more intelligent than women, this is tangibly and unequivocally incorrect. When you examine IQ test results across various demographics you’ll find no variation between the sexes, we are of the same intellect, and with that, the same capabilities. I myself am surrounded by women that played sports, some of them exceptionally well. My mother was an exceptional athlete and softball player, she is the person who taught me baseball and basketball, and to this day she has a better swing and a stronger throwing arm than most men I know. The trace amounts of athleticism that I have as a man is a product of a woman. However, are we to deny what we all see and know, that there are physical characteristics, on average, that divide down sex lines? Men, on average, are larger, have higher bone density, and have more muscle formation than women just to name a few of the physical differences. Do we honestly think that being bigger, having stronger bones, and having a frame that can gain more muscle do not contribute to being advantaged in athletics? Are we to honestly say that if a platoon of women stormed the shores of Normandy in World War II that the Ally powers would’ve had the same outcome? If you operate under the false premise that the only differences between men and women can be attributed to one sex getting a pink blanket at birth and the other getting a blue blanket, then yes, I can see how one could view the disparity in pay between NBA and WNBA players as a direct result of sexism. And yes, sexism exists in the past, present, and future. However, when looking at the example of athletics where merit is king, men clearly are in a physically advantageous position and the American consumer knows this which is why they generate 8.6 Billion dollars for the NBA and their players make much more money. 

This argument, and “Equity” more broadly, completely disregard causation and external factors and only looks at the end result and if in the end result there is a disparity, it is chalked up to oppression and discrimination. In the game of life where nothing is fair, athletics represent an artificial environment of equality. Everyone starts from the same position, the same rules apply to everyone, and at the end of the contest, the only thing that matters is who has scored more points and won. Merit is king. If a sex-inclusive basketball league was established, the unfortunate truth is that not a single female would be rostered because they simply couldn’t compete physically. A similar compensation debate was brought forth regarding the U.S. Women’s soccer team. Shortly after this came about, the U.S. Women’s team suffered a blowout loss to an amateur boys 14-and-under team in an exhibition, a humbling experience for Megan Rapinoe I’m sure. While we’re asking questions such as, “Why don’t WNBA players make as much as NBA players” it seems as a society there are much better questions we ought to be asking. A much better question is, why do we degrade femininity and motherhood by unironically defining “Success” as hunting and gathering, or more broadly, masculinity? Why are we telling our daughters that authentic womanhood is defined by something as empty as income? Why do we define equality for women as women competing against men at being men?

“My feminism is all about strong men, strong women. It’s not about women, castrated men. Man has traditionally ruled the social sphere, feminism tells him to move over and share his power. But woman rules the sexual and emotional sphere, and there, she has no rival. Victim Ideology, a caricature of social history, blocks women from recognition of their dominance in the deepest, most important realm.”

-Camille Paglia