Betting based on the players' menstrual cycles
In the United States, some men are placing sports bets by, they say, predicting the menstrual cycles of WNBA players. They claim this allows them to predict the players' performance and the outcome of games. The rise of this type of betting, called blood money [Blood money] has coincided with a particularly successful period for the women's basketball league, which is experiencing a surge in both spectators and attendance, especially with a significant influx of male fans. This was reported by journalist Molly Longman in an article for the magazine. Wired Following an investigation, it was confirmed how this trend has increased in betting houses. One of the instigators of this practice is a social media content creator who popularized the strategy by guaranteeing a 68.75% success rate in betting. This individual boasts of studying female players, analyzing their data for a month, and deducing which phase of the menstrual cycle they are in at any given time: follicular, ovulatory, or luteal. The report by Wired It emphasizes the sexism of the character, who refers to the players as "victims" when analyzing them. Longman cites scientific experts to refute this self-proclaimed expert's ridiculous theories. Analyzing the individual's discourse, it's easy to see his extreme misogyny, because he can't even acknowledge a stage of athletic fulfillment for women: he always finds some supposed obstacle that makes the players, for one reason or another, incomplete or lacking.
This new trend in betting confirms how sexism is able to take advantage of progress to reinvent and become more sophisticated. Because of this type of character, women's sport is nothing more than a new arena for the economic exploitation of women's bodies. They are not talented professional athletes who participate in the emotion, motivation, and dynamics of a team sport, but simply menstruating beings. Weakened laboratory rats, easily predictable and eternally subjected to the limitations of a rule that functions with the precision of a Swiss watch. All in the same rhythm, with identical symptoms, lunatics on the court who betray their biology in every move and every basket. After many years of taboos, stigmas, and stereotypes, it is symptomatic to what extent the necessary disclosure that has had to be made in recent years about women's bodies has been perceived by certain men as yet another tool to continue controlling them, simplifying them, and considering them all the same. The dubious data that these clever gamblers obtain through their observations and magical conclusions from ChatGPT leads them to believe that they have discovered a new way to exploit women, to use them, because they are merely souls subject to the whims of hormones. Men who believe they can profit from an obvious and predictable physiology that not even women themselves can manage.
Of course, nowadays, sports science takes into account the menstrual cycle and hormonal changes as factors associated with performance in its research. This gender perspective is essential in medicine and in any field, but always at the service of female athletes, with rigor and personalized studies. The far-fetched theories of gamblers believe that the effort, training, resilience, body awareness, or the spirit of overcoming adversity that are considered so crucial in male athletes are meaningless in women.
Betting on the North American women's basketball league and this blood money They only serve to remind us that every step forward in the progress of women involves a new, increasingly creative form of oppression.
