There is a lot of nonsense in this thread - not GCA's finest moment.
Is there another sport where women are so ridiculed and derided?
"Criticism is easy to do, but rarely worth listening to, mostly because it's so easy to do."
Lyne
This isn't ridicule. This is a fact. The reason other sports don't have the same issue with womens' play is that they have separate womens' games and leagues on different courts or fields. There's no reason to point out that womens' basketball isn't played at nearly the same level and at a much slower pace than mens', for example - because they're not on the same court at the same time. It doesn't matter whether they're good players or bad players. What matters is that they play slowly, and nobody ever gets on their case about it. There's a reason there are ladies' times on weekends. Nobody wants to do it necessarily, and they wouldn't if the ladies could play fast. The reason the good times are reserved for men (or "members" in the current PC parlance) is that the women are slow, nobody wants to be stuck behind them and they're immune to the kind of peer pressure and self-selection that men use to shame the slow men into not taking the early times. It's one thing for a guy to call out his buddy for being slow; it's quite another to call out his wife for it.
David,
That is NOT the reason that there are "ladies times" on weekends at a very, very few clubs. It is simply a holdover from the days in which is was presumed that women had weekdays more or less free and could play then, while men were working. It's an artifact of a bygone era; nothing more than that.
You say that slow play by women is a fact, and if that's the case I'm sure you must be able to cite some sort of study or other hard evidence. There MUST be such a study, because otherwise, it would just be an opinion, right? YOUR opinion...
I think that men such as yourself react to a slow player who happens to be female as a confirmation of what you already believed about an entire gender. "See! I told you so! Women golfers are SLOW!"
On the other hand, you react to a slow player who happens to be male on an individual level, rather than drawing a conclusion about THAT entire gender. "Wow; that guy is a real a*****e for playing so slowly!" This is, of course, exactly the way that men who hold a negative view of women drivers react, despite mountains of evidence (most especially actuarial tables and insurance rates) that prove that women are better drivers than men. And yet somehow the stereotype persists! Perhaps it's because people (men) repeat it as a self-serving "fact"...
At my club, the first tee time each Saturday and Sunday goes to two couples who play a fourball each day. The second tee time goes to a group of men who rarely putt out, never look for balls that go into the woods, pick up at double bogey, so on. The second group (in which I have played many, many times) never even sees the first group after the 4th hole, and the second group plays in 3 hours walking!
Does that anecdote prove that ALL women play quickly? Of course not; that would be crazy!