My Dog Has a Girlfriend

My Dog Has a Girlfriend!

How I Am Raising Him to Make Sure She Gets Exactly What He Gets.

My dog has a girlfriend. I am raising him to make sure she gets exactly what he gets. It's called equality. The WNBA just figured out how to do the same thing. Sort of.

I am writing this from a coffee shop in Kalispell, Montana. Pete, my dog, is next to me working on a pup cup delivered by Claire, his girlfriend behind the counter. Mark, my husband, is across town in a CT scanner making sure his cancer is still minding its own business. So it is that kind of morning.

The kind where you sit with your dog and your coffee and think about what actually matters. And also about last night’s news blurb. You know the one. The ten second piece about how women finally got a long overdue pay raise in the WNBA.

This week the league and its players association finally reached a new collective bargaining agreement, and the numbers are genuinely staggering. Not because they are so high. Because of how embarrassingly low they were before.

The best women’s basketball player in the world was making roughly one fifth of what the NBA pays its worst player. Let that settle in for a second.

Pete and I will wait.

The new deal changes things. The salary cap jumps from $1.5 million to $7 million and average salaries go from $120,000 to around $600,000.

For the first time in 30 years player pay is actually tied to league revenue. Which raises the obvious question of why it took thirty years to figure that out, but here we are, shocked.

The “But They Generate Less Revenue” Argument, Addressed

Swiftly and Without Mercy

Every time pay equity comes up, some guy explains that women’s sports just generate less revenue. Oh really, Kevin. Let’s look at that.

The Las Vegas Aces sold for $2 million in 2021 and were worth $310 million by 2025.The WNBA has $2.2 billion in broadcasting deals. Last year the league finally generated enough revenue to trigger player sharing for the first time ever.

Know what the players shared? Eight million dollars. Total. For the entire league.

The NBA salary cap last season was $141 million. Per team.

Read that again. I’ll wait.

Women’s sports generate less revenue in part because they have historically received less investment, less prime time broadcast slots, less marketing budget, less of essentially everything except being reminded that nobody watches women’s sports anyway.

The revenue gap is a symptom, not a justification.

But you knew that already.

It Is Not Just Women Who Are Angry About This

Here is the part that does not get talked about enough.

A significant number of WNBA players are wives and mothers. They put kids to bed, kiss spouses goodbye, and arrange childcare across an entire season. All for a paycheck that until this week was less than someone selling toxic cleaning products out of Target or Walmart.

And yes I went there.

Napheesa Collier, one of the best players in the league and a vice president of the players association, returned to the court just 74 days after giving birth. Seventy four days. For a $249,000 salary.

Let that one sit right next to the first one.

Their husbands, fathers, brothers, sons and partners have watched this play out up close and those men are not sitting quietly either. Mark is not exactly the guy who sits around analyzing the gender pay gap. He is a man who would rather watch the game at a bar than listen to me about how unfair it is. And yet at some point last year he looked at the WNBA salary numbers and said, flatly, “that’s screwed up.”

The players wore shirts to All Star Weekend that said “Pay Us What You Owe Us.”

Napheesa Collier walked into her exit interview last season and told the WNBA commissioner, on the record, that they have the best athletes in the world and the best fans in the world but at that moment the worst leadership in the world. She said that out loud. With her name attached. While being someone’s mother and someone’s wife.

That is not a woman waiting around for someone to decide she is worth more. That is a woman who did the math, built leverage, and used it.

On the Subject of Knowing Your Value

I think about this a lot. Not just in the context of sports. In the context of everything we allow into our lives, including the products we use, the environments we create, the choices we make on behalf of our families and our health.

For a long time a lot of us did not question what was in the cleaning products under our sinks. We bought what was on the shelf, assumed it was fine because it was on the shelf, and moved on. We were told it was fine. We accepted the terms.

Then some of us started reading labels. Started asking questions about what chemicals are actually in the products we use every day. Started making different choices not because someone told us to, but because once you know, you cannot really unknow.

Did you know the average household contains more than 132 toxic chemicals just in cleaning products alone? That the VOCs released from conventional cleaners can make indoor air quality worse than the air outside?

I did not know that either until I started paying attention.

That is what led me to the non-toxic, clean living products I use and recommend through Melaleuca. Not a hard sell, not a before and after photo, just the quiet decision to reduce our toxic load and stop accepting the default when the default was not actually serving Mark or myself.

When Mark was diagnosed with stage 4 lymphoma in 2021, I started looking at everything differently. The food, the products, the air in our house. You get news like that and suddenly the stuff under your sink stops looking harmless.

Chemical free living is not a trend. It is just a better decision once you have the information.

Same energy as Napheesa Collier walking into that press conference, frankly. A little less televised, but the spirit is the same.

You stop waiting for the system to catch up. You make better choices with the information you have now.

The Bottom Line

The new WNBA CBA is genuinely historic and long overdue.

It happened because the players refused to accept the frame that had been built for them. They opted out of the old deal, wore the shirts, voted to authorize a strike, and stayed unified through seventeen months of negotiations even when the league tried to get them to settle for less.

They didn’t settle.

Pete has finished his pup cup and is now staring at Claire with the focused intensity of someone who believes a second one is possible through sheer will.

Mark is somewhere in a hospital doing the bravest, most mundane thing a person can do, which is just showing up.

None of us settle. That is the whole point.

If any of this made you think twice about what you accept as the default. In sports, in your home, in the products on your shelf. I would love to talk. That is literally what I do.

Find me at CJFinnical.com.

CJ Finnical is a wellness consultant and clean living advocate based in Whitefish, Montana. She works with Melaleuca products because she got tired of giving her money to companies that were not giving her anything back worth having. She lives with a good man who has the right opinions even from inside a CT scanner, and a dog who is absolutely in a relationship with a barista. Find her at CJFinnical.com.