New Age is spoiling The Telegraph

When I read the headline Flagrant Sexism is Spoiling the French Open, I was shocked.

That reaction wasn’t caused by the putative demise of the year’s second Grand Slam event. What little of it I’ve seen suggests that the tournament is running smoothly enough, and it’s certainly not lacking in attendance statistics.

The word that went through me like a jolt was ‘sexism’. The effect was especially jarring because the offensive term appeared in The Telegraph, our supposedly conservative broadsheet.

The only context in which this coinage should ever befoul a conservative paper is scathing mockery of the New Age jargon. Using it as a meaningful term is an outrage.

This is no trivial matter for he who controls language controls the mind. By accepting glossocratic usages as meaningful and standard, a conservative paper betrays its core readership and its heritage. To use a tennis term, it forfeits a match to the enemies of everything such a paper is supposed to uphold.

It was only after I overcame the initial shock that I read the rest of the headline, which then led me to read the rest of the article. I undertook that effort to find out what on earth the author, Fiona Tomas, could possibly mean.

If I understand the word ‘sexism’ correctly, which is never to be taken for granted with this lexical stratum, it denotes a preferential treatment of men over women (never the other way around). Like all such non-words, it boasts astounding elasticity, easily expanding to castigate any attempt to suggest that men and women are biologically different.

At that point, sexism can neatly segue into other transgressions regarded as felonies by the New Age lot, such as misogyny, transphobia, homophobia and, well, conservatism. But the term’s narrow meaning is unequal treatment of men and women, in this case those playing in the French Open.

Such inequality could be interpreted as the two groups getting unequal prize money. But that charge no longer applies: the prize money is the same even though the men spend twice as long on court and show ten times the skill. I’ve often fumed in writing over that gross iniquity, brought about as it was by heinous political pressure exerted by the kind of people who wield words like ‘sexism’ naturally.

Anyway, the wrong side won that battle a long time ago, so in what form has sexism reared its ugly head at this year’s Roland Garros? Alas, curiosity can not only kill a cat, but also draw a chap into an article he knows will be idiotic and pernicious.

It turned out that Miss Tomas’s beef concerns the allocation of prime-time slots to men’s matches, leaving the women to do battle while Parisians and European TV audiences are at work. That, according to her, constitutes sexist bias at its most glaring.

She quotes one of the more vociferous players, Ons Jabeur, as “summing it up magnificently”: “Honouring one side of the sport shouldn’t mean ignoring the other.”

Now, as a Muslim, Miss Jabeur grew up with a religion whose tenets famously place a strong emphasis on equality between the sexes. Thus, one can understand the strength of her feelings, while still lamenting the weakness of her argument.

Honouring one side over the other has nothing to do with it. Rien, as they say at Roland Garros. The decision to schedule men’s matches at a time when more people can watch them is dictated by commercial considerations and also a proper concern for the audience.

Jabeur’s – and vicariously Tomas’s – argument would only make sense if more spectators would rather watch a women’s match than a men’s. But that’s not so, as any tennis fan would tell you, other than those who like peeking under short skirts more than watching a great game.

Show me a spectator who says that he’d watch Ons Jabeur play Coco Gauff in preference to, say, Alcaraz playing Sinner, and I’ll show you a liar – or else an upskirting pervert.

Miss Tomas anticipated that line of argument and set out to preempt it: “This flagrant sexism is based on the flawed rationale that women’s matches – by virtue of being played over three sets rather than five – lack quality, which risks broadcasters being left unsatisfied and fans not getting as much bang for their buck.”

What’s flawed isn’t the organisers’ rationale, but Miss Tomas’s silly notion. First, women’s tennis is inferior to men’s not just because it’s played over three sets, not five – although, in terms of “much bang for their buck”, enjoying five sets and not three does offer more enjoyment, other things being equal.

But they aren’t. Men’s tennis is vastly superior on every level, including those that have nothing to do with men being physiologically faster and stronger. This is something Miss Tomas either doesn’t understand or refuses to accept.

That’s why, having dug a hole for herself, she spurns traditional wisdom and goes on digging: “Aryna Sabalenka’s forehand was exceeding speeds of some men’s players at last year’s US Open.” Irrelevant if true.

That sentence alone proves that, unlike most spectators, Miss Tomas has never struck a tennis ball in anger. If she had, she’d know that any of those feeble-hitting men would play Sabalenka, world Number One, off the court without losing a game.

There’s more to a tennis shot than sheer pace. It’s true that Aryna Sabalenka, an Amazon six footer built like a middle linebacker in American football, can hit her forehand with awesome power. But all professional (and most semi-professional) male players hit the ball with a much greater variety of spin and placement – and an infinitely higher consistency.

Anyone can whack the ball very hard, provided you remove the net and the requirement to keep the ball between the white lines. Any grown-up without obvious physical impairments could probably drive a tennis ball the length of several city blocks.

But only a highly skilled player can strike the ball hard over the net and into the court time after time, moving his opponent corner to corner and keeping the rally going for 30 shots if he has to.

Watch the French Open, and you’ll notice that the women can hit hard and they can hit consistently, but they can’t hit hard consistently. Most points even between top players end with one of them dumping the ball into the net or driving it several feet over the line.

The men, however, usually commit fewer unforced errors in five sets than women do in three. For example, Sabalenka can’t hit three of her monster shots in a row, an inability that shows she hasn’t worked as hard on her technique as the men do.

Miss Tomas thus satisfies two essential requirements for a modern journalist: wokery and ignorance of her subject. Let me tell you, this young woman is going places. There’s no way of knowing where The Telegraph is going. Judging by this article, the paper has already arrived.