Women and sport and my confusion

As readers would know, I pay very little attention to sport.   It's only occasionally of interest - State of Origin rugby league; the spectacle of Olympic openings and of some individual sports - how can you not be impressed by how people learn to pole vault or ski jump?   And if an athlete seems a nice enough person, it can be good to see them win and get some benefit out of years of what would otherwise be more-or-less wasted effort.

But when it comes to women's team sports, I cannot muster any interest, let alone enthusiasm, at all.  Hence today's excitement about Australian and New Zealand hosting the FIFA Women's World Cup leaves me completely cold, and once again baffled as to how they have become popular. 

I like to think my inability to want to watch a team of women is sound in evolutionary biology terms.   Men's team sports, particularly the only one I ever watch (if only a few times a year), rugby league, is readily interpreted as a substitute to watching a team of hunters planning and moving as a pack to hunt their quarry.   Or, to update the analogy, as a substitute for watching competing lines of men trying to acquire ground in battle.   (This is why it makes so much sense to me as to why it should be my preferred code - not like soccer or AFL where clear lines moving up and down a field of play don't exist.)

This reasoning leaves little room for an explanation for people liking ball hitting games like cricket, baseball, or even tennis; although with the latter, it is so concentrated on the individual's stamina and talent, I can see why it has some appeal.  With cricket and baseball - well, they both often have the crowd amusing themselves while the play itself is boring, so they have their own weird dynamic of crowd solidarity that is not exactly part of my make up, but it's obviously a thing.

But back to team sports - I can't shake the feeling that gender really matters to why I don't have any interest in them because what is happening on the field is nothing like what women have ever done in an evolutionary sense.   It's different from watching a woman who is good at an individual sport - I see nothing wrong with that, unless it's something like weightlifting.  (But hey, I couldn't care less about what men do in some obscure sports, either.)

Yet, I seem to be alone in this, and lots of men (increasingly, on both sides of political spectrum, too) will say they are enthusiastic followers of women's team sports.

I really don't understand how that has happened.   I find it so strange, especially when in quite a few sports there is a high proportion of lesbian players, rendering any more base evolutionary biology explanation irrelevant, that I am starting to wonder if there is something weird going on, like plastics chemicals in drinking water, or something.  [I am joking.  Sort of.   Seriously, I find this more surprising and inexplicable than Western societies' turnaround on gay relationships.]