As for choice, I am pro-choice in so many ways. What’s been revealing to me as I’ve worked on this series is how assertive some leaders have been in presuming that their choices should the ones that other women aspire to. This has been an issue in the larger feminist movement, and it has seeped into sports. They remain oblivious to this, which even for them I find particularly striking.

What emerges for me in this particular essay is a cruel triple-irony: First, the centrality of sports in American culture has left sports and sports marketing so profoundly vulnerable to commercial manipulation as seen in the Nike ad. The selling of sports to young women (and their parents) is something that comes so naturally. YET, while sports are so easy to market at the high school/youth levels, professional sports leagues like the WNBA do not enjoy the cultural heft/weight/stature that they are seeking.

The second irony is that while marketing entities/outlets have been so easily able to propagate the “sports are necessary for girls’ development” angle, news outlets – which should be fact-checking and soberly evaluating these kinds of claims – seem more inclined to want to shield and shepherd this mantra/belief system. Media outlets are such profit-centric organisms today (unlike the 1960s and earlier) that they are much less inclined to critically examine the factuality of various claims if said claims benefit various advertising/revenue-generating efforts. How (and when, and why) editors and publishers choose to cover certain stories remains one of the central challenges of daily journalism. It’s not so much the reporter (though the reporter certainly bears some share of the blame) as it is the (executive) editor signing off on stories that are either one-sided or nakedly thin and superficial. Market imperatives seem to be driving coverage (this is why, for instance, media outlets continue to descend on Ohio State when the bulk of that story has run its course, whereas the North Carolina and Oregon stories – which don’t sell as well – aren’t receiving the same weight/constancy of coverage). There is such a pronounced “choose the angle/tenor/focus” dynamic at work here with respect to the editorial decisions being made in newsrooms about how to cover women’s/girls sports. Journalism is supposed to counteract marketing, but it so often winds up amplifying it these days.

Third, the notion of choice for and among women holds an ironic place in all this. In matters of sexual activity and expression, choice is so paramount. (This is not meant to be a discussion of THAT ISSUE. I make the reference only because the notion of choice itself is so prominent among many feminists, and is seen as the ground from which so many other feminist efforts – and virtues, I might add – have emerged over time.) This essay and other installments of this series (convincingly) portray a Title IX establishment that remains insistent on one way of proceeding even as a 2011 world poses problems that 1972 legislation is no longer suited to address.

Referring to Monday’s post about Title IX, for instance, why shouldn’t a female athlete be able to CHOOSE to attend Penn State if she wants to play in a participation sport that’s part of the school’s 29 athletic programs? Similarly, why shouldn’t a female athlete be able to CHOOSE to attend Texas if she wants to be in one of the more established and resourced sports among the 16 that UT selectively CHOOSES to promote? Quota-based, sports-participation-oriented compliance requirements at the collegiate level are removing choice from the equation in women’s sports, with the whole of collegiate athletics being adversely affected as a result.

All this, because an entrenched alliance of political power players – helped along by easy marketing opportunities and uncritical journalism – have been able to establish and maintain such a complete stranglehold on Washington, D.C., and the court system in this country at the Federal level.

Sad and depressing.

Third,