Why is it so hard to state the definition of a woman? March is Women’s History Month. The Toronto Raptors quickly found out that pandering to women by using a lame video tribute doesn’t always work out so well.

The Canadian basketball team released a 13-second video on Twitter this week that features three of the team’s players answering a question – “Beyonce said girls run the world. Why do you think that’s true?” The result is so lame it is cringe-worthy.

saved this before the raptors inevitably deleted

a new candidate for the who-the-hell-approved-this-sports-team-account-tweet hall of fame pic.twitter.com/mwI04AW1I3

— Molly Morrison (@mollyhannahm) March 1, 2023

That looks like a hostage video. Are these three men the best representation of the team? I don’t follow professional basketball so I don’t even know who they are but, good heavens, why did they choose answers from these three? Did the media team write the script for them? The answers center around women giving birth and being “queens”, which is a term used mostly by black Americans.

“They are the only one that can procreate,” Malachi Flynn answered.

“They birth everybody,” Precious Achiuwa said.

Scottie Barnes added that “all women are great because they are queens.”

Were these the best answers from the entire team? How bad were the other answers? It boggles the mind. While it probably wasn’t intentional, the message sounds as though women should be mainly recognized for having babies. That’s it. Not all women are able to have babies and some decide not to do so for other reasons. They are doing the same jobs and have the same responsibilities as women who do have children. So, the “they procreate” response, while definitely being a major distinction between women and men, doesn’t apply across the board. What does apply across the board is a simple dictionary definition of the word ‘woman’, as I found by checking the Merriam-Webster definition, “an adult female person.” Four words. Why is that so hard? Why couldn’t one of them just say that?

The video was quickly taken down after the criticism began on social media. An apology followed.

“We’re an organization that prides itself on doing the right thing when it comes to inclusion and representation, and we made a mistake [Tuesday],” the Raptors told the Toronto Star in a statement.

“Our sincerest apologies to our players, our staff and our fans — we’ll work to do better today and every day after.”

I don’t know that they needed to apologize. It’s enough to say they made a mistake with the video. The team owners and/or management wanted to show support and recognize women in the spirit of Women’s History Month. That is expected today. In a woke society, all made-up distinctions, like one month out of 12 months being designated as Women’s History Month, must be acknowledged. In this case, though, the publicity the team generated from participating in acknowledging the contributions of women in history backfired. It was a bad marketing decision.

The team announced it will hold Women’s Empowerment Month on March 14 when they play the Denver Nuggets. Maybe that is all they needed to do in the first place.

What the players said is true. It is not offensive. It’s just really lame. If they were going to the trouble to make a video for social media, someone should have put a better one together. For example, they could have complimented the women in their lives. I think it was a mistake to ask them to explain the Beyonce quote. They should have just kept it simple.