So you open the Sunday Week in Review section, and you see an article titled "Why Don't Women Watch Women's Sports?" The article starts out by noting that while millions of young women now play sports, not many watch sports. In fact, most spectators of women's sports are men. Why?

This is a fascinating question. You refill your cup of coffee. Thank God for the Sunday Times, right?

Wrong.

First, it turns out that it's not really true that most women's sports fans are men. In general, a bit over half of the television audience is made up of men, but most fans in the stands are women. Oh well. We still wonder: why don't more women watch?

The article quotes women's basketball expert Stacey Pressman. She's been to one WNBA game, and she says: women's basketball is boring. That's enlightening. Nice career, Stacey.

The article then tries to give an actual answer -- it quotes a researcher from ESPN who says that "sports is more of a social currency" for men and "they need to know what happened in the game last night so they can talk about it with their buddies. Women don't have the same need."

OK. This answer has some initial plausibility. Men talk about sports at the water cooler; women't don't. There may be some truth to that. But this just raises more questions.

Women's sports aren't part of the "social currency" for men -- men don't talk about women's sports at the water cooler. So why do any men watch women's sports?

More fundamentally, why aren't sports part of the social currency for women? Even though lots of women play sports, not many watch sports on TV or spend a lot of time talking about sports. We haven't gotten very far from the article's initial question, and we're still wondering: Why?

Well, no answers are forthcoming. The article next produces a soundbite debate about Title IX between Donna Lopiano of WSF and someone else. Boring and irrelevant.

Then, the article concludes with a typically stupid quote from an evolutionary psychologist: men were hunters, so men like sports. (You can get tenure for shit like that?) What does this have to do with the question of why women don't watch sports even though they play sports?

Oh well. The article doesn't really give us anything approaching an answer, but the question is real. Any ideas?