The Green-Eyed Jury

Diary Entry: March 22, 2025

Men have long navigated the world under the serene assumption of their own superiority — the natural heirs to greatness in athletics, public life, and the realm of the intellect. This belief, however, is a hollow monument. As the doors of society creak open, women demonstrate a capacity for excellence that requires no asterisk, revealing that the old order was built not on merit, but on sand.

The true engine of men’s historical dominance was never talent; it was a conspiracy of exclusion. Unable to prevail in a contest of equals, they erected structural barriers and shadow-plays, whispering in factions to herd rising women into corridors of circumstance where the spider waits. Their advantage was never earned; it was an architecture of sabotage, designed to extinguish any woman whose talent burned too brightly. In this, they reveal themselves not as champions, but as jealous guardians of an unearned throne. Their machinations are not the creed of competition but the bitter rites of usurpers, a frantic prayer aimed at undoing a success they cannot themselves achieve. But the irony is this animosity is directed not only at women, but ultimately, at themselves — the death rattle of a fraudulent empire.

A startlingly clear illustration of this emerged from the seemingly unrelated stage of modern gladiatorial combat, the UFC. If ever an arena was built on the myth of male dominion, it is this: bare fists, blood, and the managed spectacle of brutality. Enter Sean Strickland, a man whose honesty is as raw as his sport, who made appallingly disparaging remarks about women:

“We need to put women back in the kitchen.”

“We need to go back to taking women out of the workforce.”

“A Woman In Every Kitchen, A Gun In Every Hand.”

“If the female MMA was to separate from the male MMA no-one’s going to watch that shit.”

“If I had a whore for a daughter I’d think she just wanted to be like her dad lol!!”

Mr. Strickland is apparently unaware that women’s MMA has already produced its own legends — the marvelous and spectacular Amanda Nunes, Ronda Rousey, Holly Holm, and Valentina Shevchenko, among many others — who lit up the crowd no less than their male counterparts. Even here, the fortress shows its cracks.

But Strickland’s commentary did not end with misogyny. He offered another, more revealing complaint, arguing the UFC lacks American champions because it lacks the deep-rooted resources — the funding, the incentives — that fuel the NFL’s colossal empire. His logic was of a brutal, simple kind: without investment, even the fiercest talent withers. His point was not about gender; it was about the machinery behind the spectacle.

Here lies the heart of the matter. For any endeavor to flourish, it must be fed. Equal pay, fair financing, a systemic belief in the athletes’ worth: these are not luxuries but the very soil from which excellence grows. The talent is already there. What is missing is the system’s faith. Yet when women articulate this precise argument — when they demand fairness in their craft — the response is a ritual of dismissal, a condescending lecture on “economic reality.” His admission exposes that defense for what it is: a hollow justification for an inequitable system. The problem was never biology. It was capital. One can only speculate where women’s ability to compete might be today, in all aspects of life, had it not been for centuries of systemic subjugation — the deliberate underfunding of their talents, the dismissal of their ambitions, the constant sabotage of their motivation.

Strickland’s brand of vulgarity, however, is merely the most explicit form of this resentment. Not all discrimination is so nakedly declared. It often employs subtler tactics — hidden, insidious, yet just as vicious. The goal remains the same: to belittle women, to steal their shine, to extinguish their fire, and to poison their celebration.

That women can command a stage with equal, if not greater, intensity is no longer a matter for debate. Yet when they do, a male impulse often emerges to undermine their success, sometimes without even the pretense of subtlety. Nowhere did this drama blaze brighter than in the U.S. Open final between Naomi Osaka and Serena Williams. The match was a crucible: ferocious competition between titans, a legacy on the line, and an arena ignited by its spectators. Osaka stood across the net from the most fearsome presence in the sport’s history, her idol, the unyielding Serena Williams — the GOAT. She also faced a roaring American crowd whose noise was a physical force. Both athletes were spectacular, but in the brutal calculus of sport, one must be more so, and on that day, Osaka earned the title, fair and square.

In many parts of the world, female competitiveness is still treated as a curiosity, met with polite, condescending applause. Not that night. The crowd met this contest with a roar that felt primal, a pride of lions urging both women on. In another time, such passion might have curdled into xenophobic chants. But a threshold had been crossed. The audience, finally feeling the tremors of what these women had achieved, was not choosing between nations. They were witnesses to something elemental: two women, in utter command, owning the grand stage as equals to any man who had ever come before.

The empire, however, seemingly irritated by this spectacle, struck back. Embodied by the chair umpire, it unleashed a cascade of disproportionate penalties for infractions that male players commit with impunity. By penalizing Williams for coaching, for smashing a racket, and finally docking her a full game for calling him a “thief,” he weaponized the rulebook. It was a naked power play, transforming a historic final into a contentious display of authority and casting a pall over Osaka’s victory. And the masterstroke? A chorus of voices immediately sought to blame Williams, claiming she was envious of the younger champion and was cynically playing the “woman card.”

This is the very anatomy of the problem. As one commentator succinctly put it: “When a woman is emotional, she’s ‘hysterical’ and she’s penalized for it. When a man does the same, he’s ‘outspoken’ & there are no repercussions. Thank you, @serenawilliams, for calling out this double standard.” Thank you, indeed.

This prejudice does not only illustrate hostility toward women; it reveals the fundamental character of the aggressors. They attack each other just as viciously, hating their own as much as they hate everyone else. As the domains they once exclusively owned begin to slip from their grasp, they resort to deprecating and belittling women.

Take basketball, a game that represents the epitome of physicality, where giants dominate. The WNBA has for years been subject to mockery and dismissal, a tired punchline. Norm Macdonald famously joked, “The next time I watch a WNBA game will be the first time I watch a WNBA game.” Little did he know that the WNBA could produce excitement just as illuminating as that of the NBA.

Consider Caitlin Clark, the hinge on which the WNBA’s newfound importance swings. Her arrival proved that women’s basketball, at its peak, is a spectacle of pure, unadorned electricity. The results were immediate: arenas filled, ratings soared. The league’s ascent was sealed during the All-Star selections. Clark was chosen by nearly 1.3 million fans. More telling, however, was the verdict of her peers: the players themselves ranked her the ninth-best guard, a remarkable honor for a 22-year-old and a sterling seal of approval from the only jury that matters. As another player rightly said, the effect is not limited to Clark; she is the tide that lifts all boats.

And this is no “barbie league.” As men’s basketball grows softer, one need only see the ferocity aimed at Clark on the court; the hard fouls she endures are a kind of violence that speaks its own hostile language. Yet, knowing all this, Kevin Durant, a titan of the sport, tweeted a viciously unfair comment: “WNBA player should wear bikinis during games so more people would watch.” The sentiment is identical to Macdonald’s. But Macdonald was an outsider. Durant is as insider as it can get, yet he could not help but make the same derogatory, reductive comment.

If women are every bit as capable, why do men so often appear to succeed where women falter? The answer lies not in aptitude but in the structural barriers, the factional conspiracies born of an envy that seeks to undermine female success.

That these dynamics are not confined to the athletic field but play out with equal viciousness in my own arena, the law, I can personally attest. For generations, law was a man’s world. The memoirs of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, one of a handful of women in her law school class, serve as a stark reminder. Hillary Clinton, this tireless defender of women’s rights, has told similar stories. By the time I arrived, the climate had shifted, but the bedrock of tradition remained. Near the college entrance, the main cafeteria wall stood as a powerful testament to female achievement — a large space dedicated to alumnae, featuring posters of esteemed judges, professors, and attorneys. Each portrait was accompanied by an inspiring quote, a silent exhortation to the next generation.

My own proof of the lingering rot came from a course called Corporate Reorganization — a title promising all the swashbuckling adventure of alphabetizing a library. One would assume such a desiccated subject would be taught by a man, using a syllabus written entirely by other men. Instead, it was led by a woman.

She was a prodigy, a young partner at a prestigious Chicago firm. Professor Pigou, with a helpfulness aimed squarely at me, noted that she was nearly my age — a subtle communiqué, I understood, that my own career trajectory was not exactly meteoric. The class was a masterclass in itself, a legal role-playing exercise where we argued hypotheticals before drafting majority and dissenting opinions. “Great for developing litigation skills,” Professor Pigou praised the format, looking me directly in the eye, before a brief flicker of cognitive dissonance crossed his face as he presumably recalled the CV detailing my 400 litigations. “…skills which, of course, you already possess,” he amended, a masterful recovery.

Our professor managed the complex machinery of the class with formidable grace. She was a shrewd conductor of its quiet orchestra, well aware of the American art of dissent: first, affirm everything your predecessor has said, then add that you merely wish to offer a “unique perspective.” In the Socratic circle, she knew the vote was a cascade, a waterfall of consensus flowing obediently from wherever it began — a living model of the voting paradox in Frank H. Easterbrook’s “Ways of Criticizing the Court.” Her cleverness was tactical; she often started the vote with students she suspected were unprepared, denying them the safe harbor of the group’s opinion. This intricate structure maintained a fierce, competitive hum.

My own case serves as the prime exhibit. The topic was cross-collateralization, a practice pointedly absent from the Bankruptcy Code. I traced its bloodline from Gilded Age railroad deals to the modern era, arguing this controversial tool was not the pariah it was often made out to be. My intent was to profoundly shake the settled ground. Initially, my position won.

Then came the backlash, an exercise in weaponized scrutiny born of the very atmosphere she had cultivated. In the intellectual coliseum she had constructed, every aspect of my work was placed under the microscope. The initial volley was a perfect illustration of this tactic, bypassing my legal analysis entirely to strike at its formal presentation: the font. Courier, my classmates noted — correctly, I will grant — is the severe dialect of programmers, not a vessel for prose. They declared it a “statement” that made the text “difficult to read,” a gossamer-thin pretext for the intellectual mutiny that would follow. This, in an age where Microsoft Word can alter a typeface in the space of a single sigh.

The real drama unfolded in the ensuing email chain. One by one, in a breathtaking display of synchronized enlightenment, my classmates declared that upon “further review,” they were reversing their votes. Every single American student flipped. The lone dissenter in this newfound church was an exchange student from the UK, who had apparently missed the divine signal. The numbers tell the story with an accountant’s chilling precision: of all votes cast that semester, fewer than 8% were ever changed. A staggering 67% of those rare reversals were clustered in my case alone. The terrorists, it seemed, had won. I ended up in the minority, or to be more precise, all by myself, and was consequently faced with formulating the majority's decision as a dissenting opinion.

Through this entire orchestrated mutiny, our professor remained unshaken. For the intellectual bloodsport, the weaponized critique of a font, the stunning reversal — all of it was the chaotic fruit of the intensely competitive world she had cultivated. She had not only proven she could command the arena; she had proven a woman could construct it from the ground up.

What, then, should be done? It seems to me the situation is ripe for a cultural revolution. The time for proving women are “as good as men” is over. The time for combating the systematic barriers erected to maintain a false dominance must end.

What is required now is to set the record straight, to tell these stories in their excruciating detail. The era when women needed to be 400 times better than men merely to break even is, at last, closing. The narrative that begins from a presumption of male superiority must be dismantled. Once this truth is not just spoken but believed, their dominance will dissolve. Their tactics will fade. And they will be left with a choice: resort to direct physical violence to suppress all opposition, or yield the future to more talented, more open-minded people.

But an empire founded on violence is a fortress of sand. Its reign is always ephemeral, for its nature is not to inspire, but to command; not to include, but to cast out. And considering its legacy of transgression, its very place in the future of civilization is a claim written in disappearing ink.