A golf company posted a thirty-second ad this month showing a man shoving a woman to the ground over a driver, and within days, two corporate apologies and a boycott campaign were already dominating the sports news cycle. Meanwhile, a North Carolina woman still lives with a brain injury and a paralyzed side of her body from a volleyball spike thrown by a male athlete competing as a woman, and the same cultural institutions that moved at internet speed to condemn a fictional shove have spent years questioning whether she is telling the truth.
That contrast is not an accident. It is a confession.
Here is what actually happened. Good Good Golf, an upstart apparel and content brand, teamed up with Callaway on a co-branded driver launch and released an ad in which co-founder Garrett Clark tells golfer Alexis Miestowski, in a menacing tone, not to touch his new club, then shoves her to the ground when she reaches for it. The backlash was immediate and fierce. Good Good apologized on August 22, insisting the brand had “always stood” for inclusivity. Callaway CEO Chip Brewer followed days later, admitting the company had pre-approved the footage before it went live. “That approval should never have happened,” he said. “Mistakes were made, and we are taking the matter very seriously.” Social media erupted with calls to boycott Callaway and donate to the Ladies Professional Golf Association and domestic violence charities. Within days, the ad was scrubbed from every platform that carried it.
Good. It should have been. A staged depiction of a man physically dominating a woman, played for shock value to sell a golf club, deserved outrage. We should not normalize violence against women or use it in marketing material as an attempt to downplay a very real reality. Nearly one in four American women will experience severe physical violence from an intimate partner in her lifetime, according to the CDC’s National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey. Domestic abuse is not a marketing gimmick, and companies that treat it as one should be made to feel the consequences in their bottom line. Nobody on the right is arguing otherwise.
But watch what happens when the violence against women is real, documented, and ongoing, rather than staged for a thirty-second commercial.
In October 2022, Payton McNabb, a student at Hiwassee Dam High School, went up for a play against Highlands High School and took a volleyball spike to the head from a much taller, much stronger opponent who was competing on the girls’ team while male. She was knocked unconscious for thirty seconds. She woke up with a traumatic brain injury, a brain bleed, partial paralysis, and permanent loss of peripheral vision on her right side. She lost her chance to play college softball. She still struggles with memory and needs academic accommodations. The opposing player, by her account, never apologized, and eventually sent her a dismissive text message instead. There was no Chip Brewer moment. There was no company falling over itself to say mistakes were made. There was, instead, a chorus of activists and commentators who spent years questioning whether McNabb was telling the truth, and at least one comedian who mocked her injury for laughs.
McNabb is not an isolated case, and that is precisely the point the golf-ad outrage machine refuses to confront. In 2024, San Jose State’s Blaire Fleming delivered a spike so violent against an opponent that video of it circulated nationally, and Boise State forfeited a match rather than play against the team, triggering a federal Title IX investigation that is still unresolved. In Massachusetts, a six-foot-tall male basketball player with facial hair wrestled the ball away from a girl at Collegiate Charter School of Lowell, throwing her to the ground so hard the school forfeited the game rather than continue. These are not hypothetical injuries dreamed up by conservative pundits. They are catalogued, videotaped, and in McNabb’s case, the direct basis for legislation that passed the North Carolina General Assembly in 2023.
The science backs up what these girls already learned the hard way. A landmark 2021 review in the journal Sports Medicine, authored by researchers Hilton and Lundberg, found that male puberty confers durable advantages in strength, speed, and cardiovascular capacity that testosterone suppression only partially reduces, even after years of treatment. This is not a fringe theory. It is the same conclusion the United States Supreme Court reached this year. On June 30, in Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., the Court ruled six to three that states may lawfully restrict school sports teams to biological sex under Title IX, upholding laws now in effect in twenty-nine states. Justice Brett Kavanaugh, writing for the majority, noted plainly that allowing a male athlete to compete on a girls’ team “necessarily displaces or disadvantages a female athlete, replacing her on the roster, knocking her out of” the lineup entirely. The nation’s highest court looked at the same evidence conservatives have been citing for years and agreed: this is not bigotry, it is biology, and it has consequences for real girls.
So why did Callaway apologize within days while GLAAD published a “fact sheet” attacking a concussed teenager instead of demanding accountability for the athlete who hit her? Follow the incentive. A golf company answers to sponsors, retailers, and a consumer base it cannot afford to alienate. The activist apparatus that governs school sports answers to an ideology it refuses to abandon even when the Supreme Court, the CDC’s own data on male physical advantage, and the broken bodies of teenage girls all point the same direction. One institution feared losing customers. The other has decided that protecting a narrative matters more than protecting children. Scripture has a name for this kind of selective moral outrage: straining at a gnat while swallowing a camel, performing horror at a small and symbolic offense while ignoring the far greater one standing in plain sight.
Real Americans are not fooled by the difference between a staged commercial and a real injury, and they should stop pretending the outrage is about consistency at all. If you can summon a boycott over a thirty-second ad but cannot bring yourself to say Payton McNabb’s name, your outrage was never about protecting women. Demand the same fury for the girls who actually got hurt. Nothing less will do.
Hannah Nelson is the Vice President of American Faith Media. Any opinions or independent views expressed within this article are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of any affiliated organizations or publishers.
