I Like What the WNBA Means for My Daughter. I Love What It Means for My Son.

Having a daughter is like having a mirror constantly held up to your own perverse relationship with femininity. “Mommy, why are you always fixing your hair?” “Mommy, why do you say you hate math?” We want to do better than the faux ‘90s and early aughts Girl Power we were spoon-fed (Charlie, how your angels get down like that!), but we’re also stuck with the tropes that raised us.

Take sports. We were told to play them, namely to stay slim and have fodder for our college applications. But we also had very few models of what successful women athletes could be, with the most notable ones—Tanya/Nancy, Monica/Steffi—mired in girl-on-girl drama. The exception was, of course, Mia Hamm, who even a theater-kid like me looked up to for her hard-working intensity and ability to grace a Sports Illustrated cover with all her clothes on. But she too faced uphill battles, having to claw her way towards getting the same compensation as her male counterparts leading up to the 2000 Olympic games.

And as for professional team sports? Fuggedaboudit. Unless you were using the women’s rugby team as a punchline, there was just…nothing.

Or maybe I should say “nothing as far as mass culture was concerned.” The WNBA was founded 29 years ago in 1996, and churned out stars like Sheryl Swoopes and Lisa Leslie. But was anybody watching? In the early days, the games were shown only on “women’s” networks Oxygen and Lifetime, and while every kid under the age of 12 could rattle off the full roster of the ’95 Bulls, you’d be hard-pressed to find a child who knew Swoopes’ name, let alone her stats. (She accumulated over 4,800 career points, in case you were wondering.)

But then something happened in the years I was busy not watching basketball. Women’s sports got good. Women’s basketball, in particular, went from niche to normal. Women watched it. Men watched it. Major networks aired it at non-weird time slots. Suddenly, it was everywhere, from your office March Madness bracket to the pages of Vogue.

It's also extremely fun. Over the past few years, I’ve loved taking my daughter to New York Liberty games and having her see stars like Sabrina Ionescu absolutely dominate on the court. She reveres Ellie the Elephant and was annoyed when I wouldn’t let her skip school to attend last year’s championship win parade. This is empowering, most assuredly. But what surprised me most was not my daughter’s reaction to women’s basketball. (She is, much like her mother, generally disinterested in activities where balls fly at your nose.) It was my son’s.