The new Pac 12 media contract is unbelievable, and I think it will be a boon for men’s and women’s non-revenue sports. For what it’s worth, commissioner Larry Scott, a former director of the Women’s Tennis Association, has stated he thinks women’s basketball ought to try to be self-sustaining.

I think that’s a long shot, but I’d love to see some of these conferences and schools market that sport a lot better than they do now. Given the resources, coaching salaries and TV exposure, it’s worth a shot.

Back in the 1990’s I had thought Title IX might just result in the then-powerful College Football Association leading a charge for football programs to leave college athletic departments entirely, become club teams semi-affiliated with their schools, and let the rest sink or swim. It seems sanity has prevailed, if you can call the BCS and the billions of TV rights dollars flying about “sane”.

What’s kind of scary to me is my wish, even now, that they had done it.

The professional lobby that lingers like pigeons on Title IX’s Government-Greek facade exists partly on the strength of the relative health of college sports, growing through irrigation made possible by all sorts of fresh new streams of media revenue.

Reflected glory is still giving The Sisters a tan, which is a real shame. The money would be nowhere near where it is now and — perish the thought — proportionality would have been reached by most athletic departments without those 85 male scholarships! Now what?!

Really, it’s good this never happened. As a matter of fact, the opposite is occurring and it has nothing to do with the WSF or any other lobby. The sheer magnitude of what the Pac-12’s new TV deal will bring to all of those schools in terms of competitive salaries, facilities, scholarships, recruiting budgets and more means the Pac-12 could be the dominant league in all sports outside of football and men’s basketball, with a particular bump for its women’s sports. If you’re the best and you’re drawing from a more limited pool of participants than the two big, well-played sports, it stands to reason you’ll be heads and shoulders above everyone else. Oh, but I forgot — “participation” is a nasty word and an even nastier metric.

It’s a shame The Sisters won’t see the rising tide lifting all boats, only that one boat displaces more than the others. What a bitter existence, forcing yourself not to notice what you claim to have been working for come to be, just so you can continue to work for it!

Most people just don’t get this. They think that if they “keep trying” to do more for women’s athletics the gender feminists will be satisfied. They couldn’t be more wrong. Each victory and step in real world progress for women’s sport is just seen as a springboard to an even higher, more punitive gender feminist objective. Once people figure out that these folks won’t be happy until they are totally in control they’ll be prepared to deal with the types of people that Wendy calls out in this post. Until then nothing will change.

The delayed approval of cheerleading as a Title IX sport is a good example of this mindset. Any objective person who is familiar with athletics knows that women who compete in true competitive cheerleading are most certainly athletes. The real reason that the gender feminists in the Title IX power structure don’t want it approved is that they see cheerleading as an activity that supports the patriarchy and as such it doesn’t matter how athletic it’s participants are or how much of a sport it obviously is, they will not support it because it isn’t consistent with their worldview. The quotes are out there. Take a look.

One of the real misfortunes of this situation is that there are numerous gender feminist professors in academia, many being supported by taxpayer dollars that spend most of their time doing work to support their political agenda instead of using all of their impressive post-secondary degrees to truly help girl and women athletes. Wendy mentioned the fact that many of these women have PhDs in fields like kinesiology. The most heartbreaking example of this travesty is the lack of real world attention the epidemic of ACL injuries that women’s athletes incur have been receiving. The reason it doesn’t get attention from these doctors of kinesiology is that they don’t want to admit to the fact that multiple studies have confirmed that women athletes incur serious ACL injuries at a rate of two to eight times more frequently than male athletes. Admitting that this is a fact and trying to help fix it wouldn’t be consistent with their social constructionist views on gender. So they ignore it and instead focus on studies that support their political agenda while the real world problem of women tearing up their knees just continues on. If you are interested in the types of studies these women are doing check out their work and that of their graduate students sometime. Start with The Tucker Center at the University of Minnesota.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, my daughter played on a fairly high level youth travel lacrosse team up until high school. A couple of years into high school she chose to stop playing. Hard to argue with her when she graduated with a 4.67 weighted GPA….. I thoroughly enjoyed my daughter’s competitive time. Even though she doesn’t play she did ask us to bring her stick with us when we visited her last month in Germany during her semester there. Sport can still serve as a bridge to others, despite national origin.

I see the current generation of athletes at the University of Maryland support each other, regardless of gender, at their various competitions. The ACC Wrestling Championships were held at the University of Virginia on a Saturday this past season. Maryland’s Women’s Lacrosse team was playing at UVA on Friday night and most of the wrestlers were in attendance as the athletes on both teams are friends.

We’re now into perhaps the third generation since the passage of title ix. It met its primary purpose long ago. The WSF’s claims that there would be losses of women’s opportunities if title ix went away are empty. Today’s parents aren’t going to allow the elimination of opportunities for their daughters and they shouldn’t have to stand by helplessly as their son’s are denied opportunities to compete. The Fresno State passage was interesting since they eliminated their very successful wrestling program and added a women’s lacrosse program that has had next to no success.

Eliminating the current application of gender quotas enforced by the OCR would go a long way to saving opportunities for males and I strongly believe this would allow growth for women that isn’t also constrained by quotas but driven by interest.

A question: Are the social evils manifested by the larger sports industry the kinds of evils that are fully/substantially disconnected from testosterone-drenched inclinations? Phrased differently, how much is the reality of sports – as a pervasive, consuming industry, not as a game or a diversion (or a healthy outlet for youth exercise/participation) – due to male power versus the dynamics of power, economics, etc.?

Much of your series has clearly articulated how The Sisterhood has crossed various lines and taken arguments/causes too far. Something to think about as we all continue to wrestle with these interlocking issues is to identify the thresholds/liminal spaces where male overrepresentation in places of power ceases to be a cause/driver of problems, and larger forces of economics/media/law begin to be more central.

Separating men-caused problems (which have obviously existed in the past) from systemic/structural factors (so pervasive in the present moment) is essential. When that act of sifting runs its course, people on the front lines of this issue can then identify what’s a real problem and what’s an old, worn, reflexive ideological argument no longer based on reality. Sport has perpetuated patriarchy to some extent – Augusta National, for instance – but in many cases, it’s not true. Coming up with ways to separate fact from myth with respect to patriarchy’s role in creating sports-industry problems would seem to be a top priority for anyone trying to educate a mass audience on women’s sports.

You’ve deftly identified the gross excesses and severe ideological flights of militancy on the part of The Sisterhood. What’s the middle ground, the place where claims of patriarchal abuse have *some* degree of truth (while being much less than the full story or the final say on an issue)?