Those damn women

There are many things you can say about the caveman demographic in America, and one of them has always been that it rarely leaps out of the bushes to blackjack the unwary. Surprise attacks are not its thing. You always see it coming, and usually from a good stretch of the legs off.

So when the WNBA All-Stars came out the other day in black warmup shirts that read Pay Us What You Owe Us ... 

Well. Here came the knuckle-draggers, the Those Damn Women crowd, the usual gaggle of Neanderthal McCalls.

Social media erupted with folks blasting the players for being ungrateful and delusional, because the WNBA has always been a money pit propped up by the NBA boys club. In fact, with injured league dynamo Caitlin Clark on the sideline in streets, the All-Star game saw a 36-percent drop in viewership.

No one wants to watch women's pro buckets, the Usual Gaggle concluded from that. The Gaggle thinks it's just a pack of mean girls, occasionally adding a bit of bigoted garnish -- i.e., that too many of them like other girls. Unless it's poor Caitlin getting knocked around, or one of her teammates knocking someone else around for knocking Caitlin around, it's as off the radar as Amelia Earhart.

Why, how dare they ask for more money? How dare they say a league that's always been a sunk cost isn't paying them what they're worth?

Because the league isn't. That's why.

Now, I don't know how you feel about media yakker Jemele Hill, who's been a lightning rod ever since she called Donald John "Legbreaker" Trump an old white racist during her ESPN days. But she had something to say the other day about the Pay Us What You Owe Us business, and it cut the legs out from under the Neanderthals as neat as you please.

What she wrote in a post on the Magic Social Media Thingy is the WNBA just added a team in the Bay Area (the Golden State Valkyries), and will be moving into the Toronto, Portland, Detroit, Cleveland and Philadelphia markets in the next five years. That will take the league from 12 teams to 18, a breathtaking 50 percent expansion.

Throw in the chunky new media rights deal that kicks in next year -- 11 years, $200 million a year -- and this does not sound like a league that's turning out its pockets. It sounds like a league a lot of smart people with dough are getting behind.

"The WNBA is adding multiple franchises because there are a line of investors wanting in," Hill pointed out. "You think billionaires want in on bad products?"

And as for the WNBA never turning a profit ...

"The NBA lost money for over 40 years," Hill reminded. "Do you think player salaries stayed the same for 40 years?"

Um, well, no. Which is why the WNBA Players Association is demanding more of a cut for its membership in collecting bargaining talks that may or may not wind up in a shutdown in October.

Should Caitlin Clark -- or Napheesa Collier or Breanna Stewart or Aja Wilson, for that matter -- get paid what LeBron or Luka get paid?

Of course not. No one worth listening to is saying that.

Should they get paid more than they're getting paid, given the elevated profile and consequent attractiveness of the product?

Damn skippy they should.

Oh, yeah. And about that dip in viewership for the All-Star game?

The night before, the 3-Point Contest and Skills Competition nearly doubled their viewership from a year ago -- even with Clark sitting it out.

Pay the women. Pay 'em.