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If anyone is still curious about Robin's fascinating question after this great comment thread, I pursued it down the rabbit hole over two long posts on my philosophy-of-sport blog, This Sporting Life. There first post is here.

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Farmville is another. As a female gamer my favorite games have always been the collecting variety: Harvest Moon, Dragon Quest Monsters, Pokemon, and Animal Crossing.

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Remember, gathering DOES include animals. Trapping, shellfish gathering, fishing, and netting are often counted as "gathering" by anthropologists. Either way, while men might be well-suited for hunting pronghorn out in the desert, in modern hunting in the US, skills like visual search and fine finger control are more important than being able to chase. I've seen persistence hunts in video and they do seem a bit like modern sports, but a whitetail deer hunt is more about patience and aim.

What I'm trying to get at is that whitetail hunting is a perfect sport for the ladies. Plus you get good meat!

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I completely disagree with the major premise of this article. "Games" as played in modern life are not practice for hunting animals for food, they are practice for killing other humans in combat or war. Team sports especially.

When I played high school football many years ago, every metaphor that the coaches used was a war-type metaphor. They were all euphemisms for defeating and killing opponents.

The use of females in such games are as cheerleaders, scantily clad females; transparently representative of something to be fought over.

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Sports, as they are practiced in modern, adulatory society, strike me as bit "hunter" and a bit "gatherer."

"Sport," in its intrinsic state, may express itself closer to the complete "hunter" profile, but as expressed amidst the plethora of cult of celebrity, endorsements, scores, standings, statistics, teams, ranks, awards, judges, medals, uniforms, colors, fandom, contracts, wealth, clownishness, strikes me as an activity torn between its hunter roots and modern gatherer tendencies.

Imagine a football league in which scores are not tracked, teams are loosely knit and dynamic conglomerations of individuals competing in spontaneous spurts of non-publicized competition, in which there are no judges or referees or crowds or uniforms, and hence, no acclaim for the players involved...would this not more closely mimic the ideal of "sport" than its plastic show biz manifestation which I assert is a nothing but a glittery psychological form of "gatherer?"

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What about cooking, sewing and knitting?

I believe these are ranked at county fairs and such, and these are traditionally female dominated competitions.

Another thing to look at would be the talent component of beauty pageants.

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Perhaps the relevant skills that increased a woman's value as a mate were performed in camp and thus easily judged without a distinct competitive activity. For instance everyone can see how well made your clothing or baskets are and everyone might be able to see how much you gathered by seeing how much you carried back into camp. However, a man's particular contribution to a hunt, and thus the social status he gains with the other men, is less visible thereby requiring some more public kind of contest/ranking to advertise this to the women.

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Personally I would hypothesize that it has to do with the kinds of social behaviors that were valuable in men and woman. Women tend to gain status by being overtly cooperative while men tend to gain more status by overt competition. Why is this so? Maybe it's because of what I said above.

Another possible answer is that female kin are more certain than male kin (you might not know who your father is) thus making cooperation more genetically valuable to women since they could better predict who to cooperate with. This could be amplified then as a sex linked characteristic. Also it likely stems from differences in the activities undertaken. One can offer an almost limitless list of just-so stories.

I'm comfortable with the fact that women seem predisposed toward a more overtly cooperative type of social hierarchy but as for why it seems this diverges too far from the strong pressures that allow one to make guesses educated in this area.

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Things that are based on gathering are called "games." Consider, for example, the scavenger hunt, or the Easter Egg hunt, or for that matter rummy or mah jong, where you try to assemble sets of elements in defined useful configurations.

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Why don’t women prefer sports designed to show off the skills for which female bodies were designed?

Our mate choice mechanisms don't have to be so specific. For preference for a potential mate who is good in sports to be selected for, all you have to do is to be attracted to him. You don't have to realize that being good at sports is an indicator of physical fitness or whatever. Evolution takes care of that for you. Male-type sports confer high status, so females play them.

As for why most sports tend to show off more hunting type activities, I think there are 2 reasons.

Firstly, our ancestral division of labor, plus male interest in showing off and competing with other males, led to hunting being the main sport. Then patriarchy made it so that the newer sports that got adopted were mainly male-dominated, and so reflected what males tend to already do. Then came equal rights for women, but unfortunately with status being somewhat bound up with what males already do. So when females seek status, they often end up doing male-type activities.

Secondly, hunting skills are in general more conducive to having spectators and getting excited about.

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Could it be that the OP is taking gender-essentialist assumptions too far? Maybe some activities just happen to be fun for a large number of *humans*, as a function of our being, you know, human.

Men and women have SOME differences, on average, to be sure, but good grief, sex is not so binary of an attribute that we should expect to be surprised when reality doesn't conform to the standard ev-psych caveman narrative.

(That aside, I am not sure what it means that I found the particular line of caveman reasoning indicated in the OP far less obnoxious than the whole "Mathematical Ability Lives In The Penis" thing that seems to be all over the internet these days. But I digress.)

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How about World of Warcraft or Diablo 2. The central attraction of these games is the loot and the status effects of same.

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Sports are a substitution for activities that we used to do and don't do anymore.

Most men don't hunt in their daily lifes than they need to find a replacement; in compensation, women continue to do many activities that ressembe gathering, then they don't need a replacement.

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By your definition, golf is more of a female sport than a male one, since beginners spend most of the time searching for a mushroom-sized ball in the middle of trees and bushes

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Do we really know that adult women participate less in sports? If we discount professional athletes (NFL, NBA, WNBA, etc.), is there any study indicating the number of women participating in sporting activities relative to men?

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In other words I like a fierce chick even if I don't actually want her to ever fight or even intimidate anyone.

I used to know a bohemic babe who threw knives. Not spontaneously in inappropriate ways, I mean, but as a hobby using actual throwing knives. Turned me on (even more) but it could be my idiosyncrasy. I don't really know how to do it, but the question is whether men prefer even *non-famous* sportswomen cet paribus. Like, a girl who could beat up in a local 10-miler but not actually approach winning, just place like 10th out of 500. Thus, she is at the 98th percentile for the whole population, exceptional but not enough so to gain status from it.

By the way I think this may be why modern women pursue status. I find status mildly attractive but not very much. It may be that men want women with with genes such as would confer high status in males but don't actually want the woman to be one to waste energy on status competition. Since the environment didn't allow women to pursue status they evolved a general drive to display status; there was no need for them to evolve a drive to specifically display only their male relatives' status. The non-specificity of this drive is now maladaptive vis-a-vis sexual selection because it causes women to spend intense effort becoming lawyers, hence Roissy's constant sassing at not-highly-marraigeable female lawyers. Though I admit street observations from Roissy could always be specious in any particular case. And by the way I'm not speaking normatively in these posts.

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Robin - If you ask me, women should sometimes display male skills even if they don't really need to use those skills themselves. It makes them more desirable to men since they will bear sons with similar skill levels.

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