A month ago at the Bank of the West Classic, Germany’s Sabine Lisicki hit a serve 131 miles per hour—the fastest ever recorded in women’s tennis.

And that’s faster than most men on the pro tour hit, too.

I’ve long thought the the very best women in women’s tennis could consistently beat the middle- and lower-ranked men if they were allowed to play together. And these women would probably only lose 60-40 to the top men. This offers some empirical support for that contention.

If you are in a TL;DR mood, the reason is that the very, very best female athletes are shunted away from other sports (baseball, etc.) that are not financially remunerative to them and into tennis. And there is far more egalitarianism in that sport so they receive equal training and opportunity.

In fact one of the reasons that I’ve always liked tennis because women are treated far less unequally there than in other sports. If you turn a TV on, you are as likely to see a women’s match as a men’s. That’s true of no other major sport.

The women’s game had until a few years ago been more cerebral and less about punishing ground attacks,  but that is changing and I like it a little less than I used to for that reason.

However, if you want to see the very top female athletes in the world do cool shit you can’t do, tennis is the place to look. Funny how much of the “natural” gender disparity disappears when you treat everyone more equally, isn’t it?*

*I am not arguing that women are not on average a bit less strong. It is true that in many sports, top women will always be dominated by top men. There is a thing called “biology.” However, treating everyone as if they belong and caring about their achievements is always better to me than the alternative.

Interesting bit about authorial intent.

Rather than trying to resolve the unresolvable and aligning creators’ intentions with our own feelings, I think we ought to try to do something different: learn to live with ambiguous stories, and to embrace conflicts between authorial intent and our own interpretation.

I mostly do not care about authorial intent. It’s interesting as a measure, as the article points out, but the world and a work is broader and more diverse than any creator can imagine when making something.

Here’s another piece partially on authorial intent that even more succinctly states how I also feel about it.

Movies – like TV, literature, painting, culture – are orphans. They have parents who produce them and nothing more; their effect upon those who meet them later – the audience – is determined by all kinds of other factors. What an artist intended with a piece of art is mostly irrelevant, because what a work of art is is not defined by that intent.

Authorial intent and listening to what authors say about their works is to me kind of like the parent who hears their three-year-old opine that “the dog probably tastes like Pop Tarts.”

The usual response, “That’s nice, honey” works here too.

Authors are not omniscient nor are they omnipotent. Often, they are not even aware of the deeper meanings of what they write, surrounded by culture as are all the rest of us are, and many authors despite being very good are fairly ahistorical.

That is to say, once they unleash a work on the world, it is no longer theirs. Their opinion of it and interpretation thereof is no more valid than anyone else’s.