I do promise to make this brief, because I’ve already unpacked a lot over these last two weeks about women’s sports, and more precisely, the movement behind them for the last four decades.

All the links in the “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” series can be found here. And just a few other things to point out as I wrap this up:

What are the illusions?

I’ve referred to this in my series title, but didn’t allude to them specifically as I went along. The illusions, as I’ve examined them, are:

• That the women’s sports “revolution” is still young: Actually, it’s in fine middle age, as am I, and that’s a place that ought to be relished. The heavy lifting of getting girls and women in the game — the most arduous task — is over. Girls and women have won, resoundingly. But the “evolution” continues, especially in areas that Title IX cannot touch.

• That women and men are equally interested in sports: This is a major bone of contention that animates so much of the Title IX battle. But that’s not the right statement. As women have had more choices and options open to them — largely because of Title IX — we’re seeing that their interests are more wide-ranging than men.

• That the male sports culture must change: Title IX isn’t enough for some women’s advocates. But most institutions in American society and American society itself have undergone dramatic change by opening doors to those who’ve been left out: African-Americans, immigrants, women, gays and others. Their fuller participation in society, over time, results in those institutions and society changing, not clarion calls for a cultural revolution. This evolution with women in sports is well underway.

• That women athletes are helplessly “sexualized:” There is a difference between gratuitous displays of “babes” who play sports and portrayals of a healthy, mature and adult female athletic eroticism. Some women’s advocates refuse to make a distinction, complaining that women athletes are being “exploited” by a media culture bent on reinforcing heterosexual “stereotypes.” Gay male admirers of male athletes have no such hangups; they gaze, unabashedly, and so do more than a few women at women athletes. Male and female athletes use their bodies to compete. Regardless of orientation, it’s impossible not to notice the sexual element in all this, and absurd to insist that we shouldn’t.

• That girls and women “need” sports: I can’t imagine not having sports in my life. But the truth is that a vast majority of girls and women, even four decades after Title IX, are happy, healthy and well-adjusted without sports in their lives at all. They’ve used Title IX to dominate college undergraduate enrollments, and many post-graduate and professional programs as well.

Mea culpas

I didn’t get to a few subjects I intended to address in depth, but they are priorities in the near future:

• Cheerleading and “Bambi” sports: Competitive cheer is gaining traction as a possible varsity sport at the college level, but there is resistance.

• International and youth sports: The development of sports in other countries and at the community level in the United States, where Title IX does not apply, fascinate me and I really do want to explore these issues more here, and elsewhere.

• Media, marketing and business: Complaints about a lack of media coverage for women’s sports, struggles to improve corporate sponsorships, endorsements and expand wider commercial viability did not get proper examination here. Some of my previous thoughts on media are here.

• Keep it short: I see that I’ve already gone too long summing up this series, for which nearly every post went longer than I planned. My apologies for making too much work for some readers. There has been so much ground to cover, and plenty more beyond what’s been mentioned here. This series ended up being more about catching up with nearly 40 years of women’s advocacy and not enough about looking forward. Maybe there’s another series in that!

Many thanks

There have been terrific comments here and I’m gratified and humbled by the response. Please don’t be strangers; I will be posting here intermittently through the rest of the summer but need to take a couple steps back for the time being. My e-mail address is wendy@wendyparker.org. The best way to stay in touch is to follow me on Twitter. It’s become my online home.

What’s next

I’m absolutely fired up to continue the conversation and expand on these topics. I’ll keep everyone abreast of what happens when I sort out some options I’m pursuing.

A reader asked me if I wanted to “start something,” meaning a group or organization, but I’m not an activist or organizer. While I’m pleased with how this series turned out, my aim has been to be a crusader for a common-sense approach to how we think about women’s sports.

For now, I’m going to watch the Women’s World Cup, catch up on summer reading, and perhaps get to the beach.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned!

This is the final post in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

I’ve been promising the last two weeks to explain what the above racquet is all about as I’ve made a racket about why and how the women’s sports movement lost its way.

The racquet was inspired by one of the creators of that movement who continues to inspire me and many other women today.

I bought it just days after she beat a self-styled male chauvinist pig in one of the greatest sporting spectacles of my lifetime.

It’s a Wilson Billie Jean King Cup racquet, a fabled relic of its day, wooden with a small head and long handle, frayed strings and a crack along the insignia. It’s completely unusable now, of course; when I last took it out a few years ago to see how it felt making contact with a ball, it shimmied like our family’s old 1969 Buick Riviera when I was learning how to drive.

I keep this racquet on the wall above my writing desk, as much a symbol of what King’s example has meant to me as her feat that night in Houston — and in everything else she has done — has meant to literally hundreds of thousands of women.

I had never been so fired up in my life, or since. Finally, I didn’t feel so all alone as a “tomboy.” The word didn’t sting so much any more. Here was a woman who did so much more than beat an old man on a tennis court in the Astrodome. She gave us the heretical idea that we might actually be able to do something in sports after we had grown into women.

I’ve lost so many things in so many moves in all the years since: gloves, cleats, my red, white and blue ABA basketball, a childhood’s collection of baseball cards. But somehow I’ve managed to hang on to the racquet, without really trying. There’s something metaphorical in all that.

In many ways, this racquet also symbolizes what I think the women’s sports movement has become today: Tough but brittle, successful but chastened, worn down but not without the goods, once refreshed, to spark future generations of females all around the world to get in the game, and to stay.

During this series I’ve explained how the noble intentions to live up to Title IX have been accompanied by hard-edged gender identity politics with little sympathy for displaced male athletes, rants against football and sexual expression, and desperate pleas that girls need to be “saved” by sports. Not only do these leaders ignore the notion that women may just choose not to play, they define equality in sports as based on participation numbers and percentages, and think this can be achieved only by their eternal vigilance in the court system.

Reviving the joy of play

The activists claim they’re only trying to make sure Title IX is being enforced, but as I have written in this series, what some truly crave goes far beyond what the law requires, and has ever been about. For them, this isn’t about sports, but to overthrow a dastardly “patriarchy” that haunts their dreams.

Their attempts to impress these notions upon young women hasn’t been as persuasive as it might have been, and I think I know why.

There's crying in basketball.

For years, the Women’s Sports Foundation (that King created), National Women’s Law Center and other advocacy groups serve up a battery of data and studies to illustrate not only how beneficial sports have been to girls and women who participate, but how they must be encouraged for females who have not. Or to underscore the legal rights for females to have equal access as boys to get in the game.

Learning how to compete and cooperate, staying fit and feeling healthy, getting good grades and avoiding teen pregnancy and boosting self-esteem are good things. If young women derive these benefits from sports, fine. If not, that should be fine too. Title IX is the law of the land and should not be repealed. It must be reformed to reflect the times and stop causing harm to men’s teams.

But what’s missing the most from this advocacy is the reason why we flock to sports in the first place.

Instead of being badgered to play for social and career imperatives, or for scholarship offers or fame and fortune on ESPN, both girls and boys need to be reintroduced to the idea of the pure joy of play, perhaps a quaint and even naïve notion in today’s society. It’s the subject of one of my favorite sports books, and it has informed me as I wrote this series.

I’m learning in middle age that extrinsic motivations simply will not work. Corporations keep pushing them on their employees, hoping the offer of a little beer money bonus will prompt more productivity and keep their docile little worker bees in line.

I may be getting older, but I’m no less rebellious about this kind of conformity, and I hate to think that we need to make sports yet another activity marked by duty and obligation, rather than fun and play. And most of all, a passion inspired by people such as Billie Jean King.

But that passion has stir inside the girl, and it has to stir deeply. Nothing else is possible without it.

Imagine

When I stepped inside the lines, the rest of the world melted away.

Like opening a book, taking the field and the court was for me an act of the imagination, as well as a means of escape. The world of adults — their rules and demands — could be blown off, at least to some degree.

I could hear coaches and parents cheering, and sometimes yelling, and occasionally I let an umpire have it. I could talk back to a grown-up and get away with it, although I came close on one occasion to getting tossed for my big mouth.

At the age of 12!

I’ve often wondered whether I’d be sore today if had I had more talent and ambition than the limited options offered to me at the time, slow-pitch softball and six-on-six basketball. I participated in what I could, and did the best that I could. Playing for the Atlanta Braves, or being the female Pete Maravich, all the way down to my gray socks, were fanciful notions better left for the dream world inside the lines.

This used to be my playground.

I didn’t have a point of reference for any of this. When Donna Lopiano repeats her oft-told story of being crushed as a young girl to learn why she’d never have a chance to pitch for the New York Yankees, I can relate to that. Although I have always hated the Yankees, and always will.

She ended up being a Softball Hall of Famer, playing for the famous Raybestos Brakettes. I gather this might not have been as satisfying for reasons I came to realize about my own experience: Softball was and is a fine sport, but it just isn’t baseball. If your heart is set on playing baseball, the so-called “female” alternative is really no alternative at all.

(Even more intriguingly, Lopiano never fielded a softball team when she was women’s athletics director at Texas; it was added only after she had become the CEO of the Women’s Sports Foundation and her old school was hit with a Title IX suit.)

What I can’t relate to is how Lopiano and other women’s sports advocates have allowed those stymied dreams to animate their activism beyond the simple notion of working to tear down the barriers of participation and competition for girls and women. That certainly was difficult and painful enough to do, and they should be tremendously proud of what they’ve done on behalf of hundreds of thousands of young women.

But to parlay that activism into an angry grievance against the so-called “male sports culture” smacks of an embittered sense of vengeance that’s just unbecoming. Even when it attempts to call out the unbecoming behavior of male athletes. The women’s sports movement was not supposed to have been about reflecting matriarchal attitudes.

Even after I became aware of how truly limited my sports options were because of my gender, I never believed that rectifying that meant others had to pay a price. I didn’t envy or hate boys because football and baseball were all-male pursuits, with their standalone cultures. If anything, I grew to love those sports even more, curiously attracted to the reality that they would always remain mysterious to me.

For me, it was all about getting in the game, and staying there, first as a kid on the sandlots of suburban Atlanta, and later as an adult privileged to write about sports from all over the country and the world for my hometown newspaper.

It ranged from collecting names and times of competitors at a youth track meet to watching Brazil win the World Cup in person. In between were lots of high school and college football and basketball, soccer and Olympic sports and quite a bit of women’s sports.

It was a theatre of dreams that will never die.

Billie Jean showed that it wasn’t a place just for boys.

When I stepped inside the lines, I could dream.

And be.

What’s Next: On Saturday I’ll post a collection of all the individual posts in this series with a few final thoughts, and explain why I wasn’t able to get to everything I intended. It’s been a thrill to do this, and an honor to have some really thought-provoking comments from readers.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

This is the ninth in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

Today is a day to celebrate. As it should be.

As Title IX enters its 40th year, and with another 12 months of buildup until another milestone, we will be hearing a lot more of what we’ve been hearing about the law from all the usual suspects.

The individuals and organizations I have examined here will be undeterred in sticking to their talking points, all of which have been examined in this series.

While I do believe that many of these people do believe what they say, they’re also smart to keep the charge in their rhetoric. It furthers their advocacy, and helps them accrue brownie points in their careers as professional feminists.

A subversion of the law

Latest example: University of Pittsburgh law professor Deborah Brake, author of the recent book “Getting in the Game: Title IX and the Women’s Sports Revolution.” Formerly a staff attorney at the National Women’s Law Center (a charter member of The Sisterhood), Brake promises readers what she claims to be the first legal analysis of the law as it pertains to sports. More than anything, she serves up warmed-over diatribes about the patriarchy, and gives away her true aim — adding sports to the realm of “feminist legal theory” — almost from the start:

“It is time to move gender equality in this area to a more central place in a feminist agenda.”

This book is not really about sports at all. As the following passages reveal, for Brake the story of female athleticism is an abstract to serve a much more holy purpose. Not only that, but she actually disdains everything that Title IX was meant to be when Congress passed it 39 years ago today. To her, the law hardly goes far enough, because men still rule the roost in sports. A few dreadful examples:

“Unfortunately, Title IX’s approach to gender equality has made no serious attempt to expand the range of masculinities sports constructs, and it has failed to disrupt sport’s linkage to hegemonic masculinity.”

“Degendering sports is an important part of securing sex equality in sports.”

“For the most part, schools have done little to change a sports culture that links hetero-masculinity to athleticism.”

“The law has been less successful at reigning in the privileges of elite men’s college sports.”

And then there is this:

“. . . Title IX’s utter lack of success in challenging the culture of heterosexual male privilege that pervades men’s sports.”

And so it goes on like this, for 230 bloody, mind-numbing pages.This was not Mariah Burton Nelson writing in 1994, but rather a law professor in 2010.

Brake is less a Title IX legal scholar than an ideologue. But you wouldn’t know it judging from uncritical interviews on a higher education website and NPR’s acclaimed “Only a Game” program when her book was published.

Not only do Brake and her like-minded sisters I’ve profiled here give women’s sports a bad name. They also marginalize them more effectively than any hegemonic masculinist ever did.

The temptation to fight the past

For nearly three decades, Jack Fertig was as a men’s assistant basketball coach at a number of universities, including Tennessee, where he became an early and still-avid admirer of Pat Summitt. At USC, he was fond of Trojan basketball great Cheryl Miller, who served as head coach in the mid-1990s and became a pariah in her own sport when she succeeded Marianne Stanley, who was fighting and later lost an equal pay battle in federal court.

Fertig also served on Fresno State’s athletics gender equity committee while on Jerry Tarkanian’s staff in the last decade, during one of the nastiest Title IX disputes in recent memory. In a recent blog post, Fertig, now a public speaker and teacher in Fresno, recalled those memories while watching his current high school’s girls softball team, and wondered what the landscape for women’s sports might be like today had females not been held back for so long. He appreciates the historical march women have made in sports, and like a lot of men of his time, has regrets about the past.

But then there’s his frank closing passage:

“There is no argument that the female gender was hindered by the lack of opportunity and, certainly, the women’s rights movement hastened justice in that area. Now that women are afforded the chance to compete, whether it be in the athletic field, medical field or, simply, at the ballot box, there are some women who aren’t – and never will be – satisfied. They are bound and determined to ‘make up for the past.’

“I was in a coaches’ meeting once when the director of athletics posed the following question to a female coach, ‘Would you rather see the football team win so we make more money and everybody’s budget is increased or would you rather everybody’s budget be cut?’ Without hesitation, she chose the latter. Later, when a foolish, vengeful proposal was brought up, one of the men coaches said, ‘That would screw the men’s sports.’ The same miserable female coach retorted, ‘Good. We got it for 20 years; now it’s your turn.’

“If you guessed the meeting took place at Fresno State, you wouldn’t be too far off. Fighting for a just cause is noble. Continuing to be – I coined the term, a contrarian – does nothing but cause ill will and becomes a divisive force helping no one but the ego of the contrarian.

“It’s truly a shame women weren’t offered identical chances men were at the same time nor does it make sense. As the popular Virginia Slims commercial told the world, though, women have come a long way, baby. Unfortunately, there are those who feel they haven’t won unless someone else has lost. Since we’re all members of the same ‘team,’ it would behoove us to work together constructively rather than destructively.”

(If you think Fertig is tough toward some of the women he dealt with at Fresno State, check out his assessment of Nick Saban during the latter’s one season as Toledo football coach, where Fertig also worked. “Alpha dog” and “Big Kahuna” are among the more charitable descriptions he has for the current Alabama coach.)

One of the most troublesome issues I have with establishment sports feminism is its zeal to allow the past to influence the present, as if we were still in that past. Because of this, there also is little contemplation of the future. What Fertig has written here is something he and I discussed at length last summer when we first became acquainted.

He’s also making a crucial distinction between the need to identify and eradicate true discrimination and the doggedness of some women’s sports advocates who feel the need to fight every grievance, real or perceived, to the death. This is a distinction that has been long lost on the likes of Deborah Brake, Donna Lopiano, Erin Buzuvis, Mary Jo Kane, Mariah Burton Nelson, et al. Their fanaticism is cemented, even though they will continue to be regarded as authorities on Title IX when they’re cited by the mainstream media.

Yet Fertig is closer to appreciating the true spirit of Title IX than any of them.

In perhaps the only true sentence of her book, Brake just glosses over it:

“Title IX’s biggest success, and its most revolutionary impact in term of producing cultural transformation, is the huge increase in the number of girls who grow up playing organized sports, with many of them continuing to do so into adulthood.”

That’s all the law was meant to do.

Title IX was never meant to be an end unto itself, a self-perpetuating mechanism commanded by those who have mastered the legal process and are adept in connecting with the media, and for those who have made it a creed, an article of faith, and even a belief system.

It was, and is, a vehicle for those girls and women who encounter legal obstacles to gain equal access to educational and sports opportunities. It’s up to them to take advantage of those opportunities (or not), and it has been their continuous and growing participation that has changed the culture, as Brake mentions, and not the male-bashing, utopian notions of jargon-spouting academic feminists like her trying to boost their professional bona fides.

If Title IX and women’s sports are to continue to thrive, the law needs a new compliance framework for sports and the “movement” needs some new leaders. Because both Title IX as it is enforced now and some of its most vocal adherents are worn out and have nothing new to offer.

Coming Friday: In the concluding post of this series, I finally explain what the racquet pictured above is all about, and why I’ve found it necessary to make all the racket about women’s sports. This might be more personal than I planned, but what I’ve learned from writing this series, and exchanging thoughts and ideas with readers, has been a revelation.

Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

This is the eighth in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

At about the time young girls in America were beginning to flock to playing fields and other athletic venues in unprecedented numbers, women’s sports leaders in the 1990s began cranking up some new rhetoric about the reasons they should be participating and competing.

This went beyond obtaining an athletic scholarship and a college education in the process, as Title IX was permitting them to do.

As the female experience in sports was poised to make astonishing breakthroughs later in that decade — the Atlanta Olympics, the creation of the WNBA and the Women’s World Cup — a new line in the sports feminist narrative was sounding a bit more stern, even grim: Participating in sports was imperative, for the sake of good health and a prosperous career, among other factors. Former University of Iowa women’s athletics director Christine Grant summed up this sentiment rather famously:

“Girls must play sports. It’s essential for successful people.”

Her sister-in-arms, Donna Lopiano, at the time presiding over the Women’s Sports Foundation, added more details of how girls and women would benefit from sports:

“Greater confidence levels, self-esteem, and a better self image. They are also less likely to be involved in an unintended pregnancy, less likely to take drugs and engage in other high-risk behavior, and more likely to stay in school. The health benefits are tremendous and include a lower risk of breast cancer and osteoporosis.”

It’s hard to dispute that a positive experience in sports can yield these and other benefits, beyond the pleasure of playing. I understood that even as a young girl in pre-Title IX America. Told how unusual it was for a girl to want to play ball as much as I did, I shrugged off such statements, defiant of even polite suggestion of conformity. I was (and remain) stubbornly independent off the field as well, but never in my life did I think the urge to get girls to get in the game would become even more conformist than what I fought against.

Playing for all the wrong reasons

The symbol of this almost desperate attempt to encourage girls to get involved in sports was a 1995 Nike commercial, If You Let Me Play Sports. An influential sports shoe company with a brilliant reputation for powerful marketing and imagery packed more into this 30-second spot than all the pronouncements of sports feminists could manage in 30 years:

This ad certainly felt like a triumphal moment for women’s sports leaders, a cultural watershed in reaching the American public about the values and virtues of sports for girls. Clucked a Nike copywriter:

“It wasn’t advertising. It was the truth.”

But was it?

I was initially chilled at seeing this ad when was first unveiled, and my feeling soon switched to horror.

First of all, the title of the ad.

Who was stopping girls from playing? Anywhere in America? In the mid-1990s? This has been part of the sports feminist mantra — that girls and women, even then, were somehow still being prevented from playing, even two full decades into the Title IX era. If not actually on the field, then in a larger cultural context. Except that this was patently untrue.

Secondly, there has been little response to having young girls spout the same talking points of activists, as if they have any idea what they’re really saying. The worst example was the somber girl, sitting on a swing and saying in a monotone that if only she could be allowed to play sports:

“I will be more likely to be leave a man who beats me.”

To have the words of adults come out of the mouths of children is reprehensible, this line above all. There’s an implication here that females must be implored to get into sports, to “become strong,” if for nothing else than to deal with abusive men. Mariah Burton Nelson must have been beaming.

Rarely has the veracity of these statements in this ad, and in the entire “girls must play sports” meme been questioned. What are the sources for these claims? We are never told. This all sounds so right, so they must be true.

It’s OK not to play — really, it is

Yet a flood of books, research and other claims were forthcoming in the wake of the Nike ad, and as social scientists, academics and the larger feminist community issued warning signs about how girls were being “shortchanged” in American society.

A 1998 book, “Raising Our Athletic Daughters: How Sports Can Build Self-Esteem and Save Girls’ Lives,” plays off these claims, which were expertly demolished by dissident feminist Christina Hoff Sommers.

Now girls needed to be “saved” through sports. But what if they stop playing? This is a terrifying prospect for the well-meaning co-authors, Jean Zimmerman and Gil Reavill, so they devoted a chapter to it. “When Sports Fails Girls” leads where the title suggests. There are lengthy discussions of eating disorders and body image, and of sexual abuse by and relationships with coaches.

Zimmerman and Reavill mention only in passing that girls may become interested in other activities, and even “in boys.” Apparently, “some people” believe this, but they don’t bother to explore that possibility. It is a glaring omission.

Today, as a third generation of young girls and women participate in sports, there is more research being conducted into the topic, and that is being widely hailed in the mainstream media. So is the Nike ad, still uncritically. Chirped The Wall Street Journal:

“A 10 percentage-point rise in girls’ participation in high school sports leads to a 1 percentage point increase in female college attendance and a 1 to 2 percentage point increase in female labor-force participation.

“Maybe athletics should be added to reading, writing and arithmetic.”

Yet women are more than 50 percent of college students today, and are becoming more in demand in a labor force that increasingly favors knowledge- and information-based collaborative skills. Whether or not they played sports does not appear to be a factor. They’re changing the cultures of education and work, indeed, they may be actually shaping it, by the sheer dominance of their numbers. This is hardly being shortchanged.

While these developments are good news, there are other basic questions unanswered. Why, when women are diving deeply into all kinds of academic, athletic and extracurricular activities, is such a disproportionate amount of attention being focused on those who play sports? Stevenson’s research doesn’t address those girls and women who don’t play sports and who aren’t interested in it at all, but are having succesful, happy and healthy lives. What about them? What about those of us who did play, once upon a time, and did drop out, and are just fine?

Yes, Title IX and the women’s sports movement opened the doors of sports to girls and women who might not otherwise have been able to play. But to continue to insist that this must be a top priority, a higher-value choice among many that females now have available because of health, fitness, academic and professional reasons, is to disrespect the fact that not all women will make the same choices. There’s a certain comformity in this notion that I find detestable, given the rebellious roots of my sports experience.

And finally — and I will write about this in more depth in my final post on Friday — all these feel-good stories and studies are missing any examination why those of us who love sports were drawn to it in the first place:

If not for the joy of sports, then for what? What’s the point?

Coming Thursday: As the Title IX establishment celebrates the 39th anniversary of the passage of the law, some envision how the “revolution” might continue. Their ideas subvert the original intent and spirit of that statute and do little to broaden the mainstream appeal of women’s sports. Warning: I may get a little angry about all this.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

This is the seventh in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

Yesterday I mapped out a few ideas on how Title IX compliance might be changed to reflect the progress of women’s college athletics today, mindful that none of these will probably go anywhere. Instead of boosting participation numbers to match proportionality, I argue that issues over funding, facilities and related matters be made the focal point of new sports regulations.

Today I’ll explain why what we have now is what we’re stuck with, probably for at least another 30 years.

Has this all been a waste of time, then? I don’t think so. The public’s view of what Title IX is has been defined by just one narrow band of interest groups that nonetheless dominates, in large part because there’s not much in the way of any alternative being presented.

Why the 3-part test won’t go

It’s politics. The Women’s Sports Foundation and National Women’s Law Center have made Title IX their highest priority, and it shows. Ever since the mid-1990s, with the Cohen vs. Brown decision and a policy clarification that made proportionality the de facto standard for sports compliance, the Title IX establishment has scored victory after victory, in courts of law and public opinion.

Rather uncritical mainstream media coverage hasn’t hurt with the latter, even though some reporters do a good job explaining the concerns of those advocating on behalf of displaced male athletes. But critics like the College Sports Council have struggled to get any kind of sustained traction for their views, outside of “he said, she said” stories purporting to demonstrate “balance” on a hot topic. And they simply don’t have the law on their side, as it is being interpreted by the federal courts. At times, the CSC can sound as shrill as the women’s groups it opposes, and that’s saying something. We have two entrenched positions that are ironclad. This will not spur meaningful change.

There’s also no willpower in Washington to change any of this. Title IX has become something of a third-rail issue, and frankly, it wasn’t a terribly high priority in Congress even before the current economic crisis. Bush’s education secretary didn’t act on his own Title IX commission’s recommendations, some of which tried to stake out at least a few new ideas worth pondering. They’ve been shelved, probably permanently.

It’s legal. There’s quite a bit of case law and legal precedent for maintaining the status quo. A new set of regulations would take years to craft into a workable set of options for colleges to follow, as guided by the courts. The Supreme Court declined to take up Cohen v. Brown in 1997 because there had been no disagreement at two lower court levels. There has been little since about anything significant regarding the 3-part test.

Football and proportionality

Because the 3-part test is here to stay, here’s another vexing issue that has been around for years: Should football be counted in the proportionality equation?

I’ve long said no — and so have others — because football is a different animal, both in having no female equivalent and with the specialized nature of the sport prompting large rosters. I say this realizing that this suggestion now is basically a non-starter.

Here’s a little history lesson: Two years after Title IX was passed, there was an effort in Congress to exempt revenue-producing sports. However, the Tower Amendment failed, leading to legislation that created the sports regulations we have now, including the 3-part test. I don’t see how any renewed effort to take football out of Title IX compliance will fly.

And given the current problems in college football, it’s implausible that any position to keep that sport away from the gender equity fray can be taken seriously. Even if it makes sense. If you make it a men vs. women thing, which the women’s advocates will do, it will be very easy to pinpoint where the more troubling issues lie.

Currently the Football Bowl Subdivision (formerly I-A) scholarship limit is 85; it used to be 120 before Title IX compliance began in earnest. I’ve thought for a while about cutting the number, perhaps to 70, and then taking football out of the picture.

But I hate the idea of more men being turned away. Even if you agree that football is bloated, there are real human beings who did nothing to hold back women athletes but who are paying the price for what happened before they were born.

I also loathe roster management, although keeping down costs is a persistent issue in football. Here’s another doozy from Ball State, which spent $88,000 to lodge football players before home games. The NCAA could put some teeth in curtailing this, but it hasn’t for years. Serious college football reform efforts would need to include much more than any impact on women’s sports, but those are about as likely to take place as scotching the 3-part test.

Title IX advocates insist there’s still a lot of fat remaining that needs to be cut. Especially below the BCS level schools do lose money on football, sometimes a lot of money.

The political reality is the women’s advocates won’t budge in having football tied to proportionality, and they’d raise holy hell if anybody tried to cut it out. Without football in the mix, most schools would comply with Title IX, and men’s and women’s non-revenue teams might get more proper attention.

These changes alone still won’t yield the money that would conceivably be redistributed to the women’s side. And scaling back football, even to a modest degree, has never encouraged a young woman to try out for a team.

Some other suggestions for reform

Sportswriter Beau Dure doesn’t think that football “should be given a pass.” But he suggests adding a fourth prong of compliance for schools that already provide a healthy roster of sports for women:

“If you’ve got fully funded women’s basketball, field hockey, golf, lacrosse, soccer, softball, tennis and volleyball, do you really have to add women’s-only rowing and equestrian just for equity’s sake? Or cut a men’s program for fear of following Brown as a loser in court?

“If I have a bias in all this, it’s as a fan of soccer and Olympic sports. They’re threatened — across the board. Women’s basketball has grown by leaps and bounds — at Duke, I attended games that drew a couple hundred fans; today, they draw several thousand. Great. Let’s invest elsewhere.”

What an amazingly sane idea.

Little room for optimism

However, the last thing the powerful women’s interests groups want is for colleges to actually reach compliance; it would endanger their advocacy. Besides, there’s fertile new ground for litigation at the scholastic level, and the National Women’s Law Center’s most recent publicity stunt is a declaration of these intentions. Hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of high school districts across the country face lawsuits and some very painful prospects at a time when many of them are laying off teachers, gutting academic programs and closing schoools.

More disturbingly, so-called Title IX legal experts are getting all dreamy about the future of the law, interpreting the current status as only just the beginning of where they want to go next. Says former NWLC attorney Deborah Brake in her recent book on Title IX:

“Degendering sports is an important part of securing sex equality in sports.”

Protect your privates, fellas. Here we go again. More on that later in the week.

Coming Wednesday: Do girls and women really need sports? Yes, this is another heretical question I’m asking here. But you may not be aware of the soul-crushing reasons women’s advocates have cited to virtually beg females to get in the game.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

This is the sixth in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

Since I’ve been saying for quite a while that the 3-part test for Title IX sports compliance is flawed, I thought I ought to propose how the law might be improved. I’m not alone in suggesting at least an evaluation of where we are after more than 30 years, but you probably won’t hear much about all that this week, with Thursday’s 39th anniversary of the passage of Title IX approaching. The Sisterhood chanting has already begun. It will be largely uncritical.

The College Sports Council, which has called for changes to Title IX for a number of years, wants to reinstate the interest survey (boosted by the Bush administration in 2005 but booted by the Obama administration in 2009). This is a non-starter for the Title IX diehards, who claim that women are as interested in sports as men. While I generally agree with the CSC on Title IX issues, it offers few other ideas on reforming the law.

I may under the biggest illusion of all in believing that the 3-part test can be replaced with new regulations to fit the times. But I’ll throw out a few ideas that are by no means anything more than that.

But first, here are the three options for Title IX sports compliance that were adopted in 1979:

– The percentage of female and male athletes is substantially proportionate to the percentage of female and male undergraduates, respectively.

– Demonstrate a history of continuing and expanding opportunities for the underrepresented sex (women in virtually every instance).

– “Fully and effectively” accommodate the interests and abilities of the underrepresented sex (again, this is almost always females).

Why the 3-part test must go

It’s antiquated. When the HEW policy interpretation cited above went into effect, women were in the distinct minority in college athletic programs, and far below parity in higher education overall. The latter is hardly the case today, with women comprising in many cases 55-60 percent of a college’s undergraduate enrollment.

With regards to the first test, while women are not at 50 percent in most cases in athletic departments, they are surpassing that in some instances, even at programs with large football programs. Example in my backyard: The University of Georgia, where 52 percent of the athletes are women. But because the female undergraduate enrollment is 58 percent, a school with one of the most successful women’s athletics programs in the nation is vulnerable to Title IX litigation.

That’s why UGA likely will add another women’s sport in the near future. Like many schools, it is open to a lawsuit for reasons having nothing to do with sports, but rather how many females, most of whom will never suit up, gain admission through a non-athletic component of the university administration.

It punishes male athletes. Title IX absolutists expect athletic departments to keep up with enrollment patterns, but to reasonable people this truly is the warped logic of proportionality. Georgia hasn’t cut men’s teams to move closer toward complying with the first test, thanks to bulging athletic coffers. But it’s the exception and not the rule.

As for the second test, there’s no seeming end to how long women’s teams may be added. There’s one big problem: There aren’t that many more sports to add. The NCAA’s list of Emerging Sports for Women, which is compiled to assist athletic programs with Title IX compliance, currently has only four sports, and one of them, squash, will be dropped in August.

The other three sports don’t figure to attract a groundswell of support; indeed, both equestrian and sand volleyball were issued reprieves by the NCAA last year after failing to add enough varsity programs to “show promise” of being NCAA-sponsored sports. The other is rugby, which currently has only two varsity women’s teams in the entire nation. If the NCAA can’t find any viable new sports to add then perhaps “emerging” is the wrong choice of words.

Lacrosse, now reaching into the Deep South, may be the only women’s sport left with major growth potential. There’s also the controversial subject of competitive cheerleading, which I’ll discuss in a later post this week.

As for the third test, it’s hard to “accommodate the interests and abilities” of the underrepresented sex if you can’t adequately survey what those interests may be. The Title IX establishment doesn’t trust interest surveys, claiming they could get caught in an e-mail spam filter. It’s more likely they fear the answers that women students may provide won’t jibe with their proportionality ideal. A political favor by the Obama White House has made the activists happy (as conservative interests were pleased with the 2005 Bush policy clarification), and that’s all that matters. This prong has been effectively neutered.

What I’d like to see

The battle to get girls and women in the game has been a resounding success. Shifting the Title IX compliance framework away from participation and toward taking care of what’s been built is a possibility worth pondering.

Another example in my backyard: Two years ago, Georgia Tech — which because of its low female enrollment achieved proportionality years ago — opened a beautiful new on-campus softball stadium for its nationally ranked program. Tech has just seven teams for women, and is the only school in the ACC without a women’s soccer program. Without the pressure of having to add teams, Tech is better resourcing what teams it has, which helps with recruiting and enhances the student-athlete experience.

Throughout the country, there are still are plenty of disparities in facilities, funding, equipment, travel and recruiting budgets and related components of operating a college sports team. This is part of Title IX compliance, too, but it’s overshadowed by the furor over the 3-part test. A recent series of stories in the Ball State student newspaper illustrated what work remains to be done, and it is considerable at that school and many others.

Imagine this: Instead of wasting time and money adding teams in obscure sports that struggle to attract participants, schools could use those dollars on better venues, improve coaching salary scales and create an environment for women athletes that’s truly special. New regulations based around these deficiencies would fulfill the spirit of Title IX better than the current numbers game athletics departments have to play to get right with proportionality.

So much of the money that is spent on women’s sports has often come with little of what I call emotional support, and this might be the biggest shortcoming of all. Too many athletics directors simply throw money at women’s teams because they have to under Title IX, and then go off and deal with football boosters or new arena architects. They don’t want to be bothered.

Far too many women’s teams, especially in basketball, could stand to be better marketed and promoted. There’s plenty of TV exposure in hoops thanks to rich conference multi-sport deals, but a more ground-level marketing wouldn’t hurt. If they’re not going to make money, at least they could draw more of a crowd. Too many schools do too little in this regard, and this change has to start at the top.

On the other hand, women’s sports activists who have won resoundingly in the courts for their cause also have won over few people with their us vs. them, to-the-death tactics. It’s hard to give something emotional support when you might be sued by people who have no interest in persuading you to care.

Coming Tuesday: Why all these ideas — or anyone else’s — are likely to go splat. And why unwedding football from proportionality is a longshot.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

Thanks to all those on Twitter and elsewhere for their comments this week to the start of my series, “Women’s Sports Without Illusions.” I’m really humbled by it all.

Of course, I’m not expecting the precincts of The Sisterhood to report in, at least directly. They prefer to stay wrapped in a cocoon of their own making, locking up blog comments and talking only among themselves.

I’m not sure I intended it to turn out this way, but my posts this week ended up being a short history of the women’s sports movement, nearly decade-by-decade. As I’ve been pointing out, this isn’t just about Title IX. Perhaps my biggest arguments have been about the cultural grievances that I outlined in Parts 4 and 5.

Next week, which marks the 39th anniversary of the passage of Title IX, I want to lay out some ideas about where women’s sports goes next — indeed, where they actually are now. These include reworking Title IX and examining the challenge of women’s pro sports and developing women’s sports around the world, where true oppression still exists.

Of course, I may under the biggest illusion of all in thinking we can move beyond the rhetorical, legal and other cultural realities of the present. I just want to revive the notion of “joy” in women’s sports, which its leaders have disdained for a very long time now.

Regardless of your views on this — and if you disagree, please speak up — let’s start having a conversation. This was one of the main reasons for me taking the plunge and putting this series together. Feel free to comment here or on any of the posts in this series.

Oh, and I promise to write a lot shorter next week!

Part 1: The elusive notion of gender equality in sports

Part 2: Women’s sports and the matter of choice

Part 3: How women have held back women’s sports

Part 4: Making football the enemy of women’s sports

Part 5: Sports and eros, or why sex is more fun than gender

This is the fifth in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

After she revealed the famous black sports bra that was dubbed “the cloth symbol of Title IX’s success,” World Cup-winning soccer star Brandi Chastain was rebuked by other women for showing a lot more than that before she ever became famous.

It wasn’t the provocative demonstration of underclothing following her clinching penalty kick in July 1999 in the Rose Bowl that drew the ire of some women’s sports figures. Instead, it was a pre-World Cup pose in Gear magazine in which Chastain was crouching and completely in the buff except for two strategically placed soccer balls.

Other photos in the spread showed off a ripped physique that symbolized Chastain’s arduous journey back to the U.S. women’s national team after she was dropped from the 1995 World Cup squad for being out of shape. Chastain was proudly defiant, and hoped it would inspire young girls:

“Hey, I ran my ass off for that body.”

More than a year later, as the American team prepared for the Olympics, the Village Voice rounded up the voices of disgruntled sports feminists — referred to fondly on this blog as The Sisterhood of Perpetual Indignance — to lecture a fully grown adult for apparently letting her entire gender down. Said Mary Jo Kane, an oft-quoted critic of such poses:

“If you’re a female athlete or you’re somebody who’s trying to promote a female athlete and you’re concerned that they might have the ‘wrong’ image, the easiest way to establish their so-called heterosexuality or their normalcy is to take their clothes off.”

Translation: Chastain was unwittingly implicit in media exploitation of her body. She didn’t know that she was buying into the twin evils of “heterosexism” and “homonegativism” that are rampant in American media culture. That’s why Kane had to speak for her. She and her ilk do this a lot, and they even conduct academic research into this subject, as I’ll detail below.

Here’s another former fan, so turned off by the “sexualization” of the U.S. women’s team, that she said she rooted for China in the finals.

For the love of God.

As I wrote yesterday, the anti-football fetish of some sports feminists signified a troubling new grievance on the gender equity front during the 1990s. But when it comes to the subject of sex, establishment feminists have an even greater level of discomfort than the clashing of shoulder pads. They’d rather talk about gender. Incessantly.

Indignantly.

Representation obsessions

The 1999 Women’s World Cup might be regarded as highly as Billie Jean King’s “Battle of the Sexes” win in 1973 over Bobby Riggs as a touchstone in the development of women’s sports in America. The U.S. team was seen as the wholesome girls next door, and as David Letterman’s “Soccer Mamas!” Even star midfielder Julie Foudy, later a president of the Women’s Sports Foundation, jokingly referred to herself and her teammates as “booters with hooters.”

William Saletan of Slate proclaimed this event had something for every feminist, which ought to have been a good thing. But the “difference feminists” were not amused, especially when it came to sex appeal.

For them, there is no such thing.

Kane is the director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota. She is frequently cited in major media outlets as an expert on sports and sexism, and was most recently an advisor for espnW, for which she was quoted in The New York Times. Like many professional feminists, Kane is very accomplished at being front and center on these topics. It all appears so mainstream and reasonable, until you look at what she and her Tucker Center cohorts are researching:

“Examining Online Intercollegiate Head Coaches’ Biographies: Reproducing or Challenging Heteronormativity and Heterosexism?”

“Playing Unfair: The Media Image of the Female Athlete”

And there also is a full-fledged lecture series with these headliners:

“Sex vs. Athletic Competence: Exploring Competing Narratives in Marketing and Promoting Women’s Sports”

“Images of Women, Sexuality and Nationalism: What’s (Olympic) Sport Got To Do With It?”

“Confronting the Triad of Violence in Men’s Sports”

To be fair, the Tucker Center also researches issues involving youth sports, sports and aging and sport-related health issues like concussions. Kane and her colleagues are professors of kineseology, which appears to have supplanted the traditional physical education curriculum as a hothouse for what they refer to as “sport scholars.”

But when it comes to media issues, this “scholarship” descends into insufferable, incomprehensible dogma. Here’s most of the background paragraph on the first title mentioned above, of which Kane was a co-author and which was presented in 2009:

“Past research in intercollegiate sports connects heteronormativity (i.e., societal and/or institutional assumption that heterosexuality is the norm) and heterosexism (i.e., prejudicial and discriminatory practices and beliefs toward any non-heterosexual identities and relationships) to the creation of privilege for the dominant group. Sport media scholars contend that coverage and framing of athletes and coaches present females in heteronormative ways in print, broadcast and new media. To date, research examining heteronormativity and heterosexism on university-sponsored athletic websites is scarce. . . . . Online biographies of NCAA Intercollegiate Head Coaches were examined for textual representations of dominant ideologies documented in sport media research — specificially heteronormativity and heterosexism.”

What the H?

Apparently, this is considered legitimate academic research.

‘A divine nimbus exhales from it’

This report came amid an outcry over the cover of an online media guide featuring players on the Texas A & M women’s basketball team dressed in — ahem — dresses.

The picture of heteronormativity?

Some of the same Aggies obviously felt so exploited by this that they went out the next season and won the NCAA championship. There was nothing in the way of what we in the South call “nekkidness” to this pose. It was along the lines of a James Bond theme. The fuss here was about all that heternormativity and heterosexism that’s supposed to signal a pivot away from lesbianism, all through mere representation. Some have even called it “drag” for women athletes.

Former Vanderbilt basketball star Chantelle Anderson begged to differ:

“It’s not about sexuality at all. It’s a photo shoot. As women, we want to show both sides. I don’t understand why it has to be us trying to prove we’re not gay.”

The official website for the Florida State women’s basketball team also got caught in the crosshairs two years ago when the players were depicted in senior prom photos — and sneakers. No nudity was involved here either, and there was nothing distasteful, except to those who think too much “beauty” is being peddled to attract new fans to the women’s game. The only plausible concern is that these are college athletes being made to represent their team in such a way, instead of pros able to make their own decisions.

Interestingly, the Seminoles had a rather rather unexpected defender in former National Organization for Women president Patricia Ireland:

“We didn’t fight against dresses, but did fight against the fallacy that said if you wore a dress, you couldn’t be a competitor. To now suggest the opposite — that if you play sports you shouldn’t wear a dress — is the same kind of backward thinking that in the past attempted to block women from full equality.”

As someone who hasn’t worn a dress since, oh, high school graduation, I have just one question:

What the H?

There will always be feminist scolds to scream that women athletes are participating in the marginalization of their sisters. But iconic figures like Candace Parker understand better than most that sex and the body cannot be separated, and what’s more, this is a good thing. They are defining their own brand of femininity for themselves. Isn’t this what the movement was supposed to be about?

If a “Second Wave” feminist diehard like Ireland can come around on a subject like this, than anything’s possible, right?

Whitmanesque.

There wasn’t much of an outcry last fall when WNBA star Diana Taurasi featured on the cover of ESPN The Magazine’s body issue, with not even basketballs as props. I mean, honestly, how could you not marvel at all this, for aesthetic, athletic or sexual reasons?

The Mary Jo Kanes of the world want women athletes to be portrayed only as that, as hollow one-dimensional figures who reflect only a strict feminist visual ideal of what’s permissible to them. Judging from her comments and writings over many years, what Kane is suggesting is at the water’s edge of a certain kind of body fascism, but that’s a highly charged word and I’ll stop there.

Women’s sports, sexual expression and glamor do not have to be mutually exclusive, and I’m encouraged that the women who actually play the games, instead of those who theorize about them, are embracing that and ignoring the fusspots. They are athletes, and they are women. Thank God for that.

Sports historian Allen Guttmann, who’s admiringly chronicled the history of women’s sports, wrote in the mid-1990s that not only were feminist claims of “sexualization” passé, but the link between sports and eroticism can no longer be denied, especially where women are involved:

“Complaining that the media have portrayed Katarina Witt ‘as a sexy female’ rather than as ‘a serious, committed athlete with a discipline and desire for athletic excellence,’ Mary Jo Kane and Susan L. Greendorfer fail to acknowledge that Witt — like thousands of other women — is a serious athlete and a sexy female (who is very obviously aware of her attractiveness). . . . it is time to recognize that most of today’s journalists are more than willing to acknowledge the strength, endurance, toughness and skills of women like Witt.”

Now more than ever.

Coming Monday: Next week I’ll begin offering some ideas on what I call “The Next Frontier for Women’s Sports,” starting with the need to rework Title IX.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

This is the fourth in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

Women’s sports leaders had long done battle with college football figures over financial resources, with University of Texas women’s athletics director Donna Lopiano famously lambasting the “golden goose” of the gridiron that had become too fat and needed to share with women’s sports.

By the early 1990s, Lopiano had become the head of the Women’s Sports Foundation while a wave of sports-related Title IX litigation ensued, highlighted by the landmark Cohen v. Brown dispute.

But the animus over gender equity on legal grounds was compounded by a fiery charge from a new breed of sports feminist fulminating with deep cultural resentment against men and the games they play.

Former Stanford and pro basketball player Mariah Burton Nelson earned plenty of mainstream media attention for her unrelenting 1994 polemic “The Stronger Women Get, the More Men Love Football,” for which she was also deemed a cultural authority on women and sports.

What she didn’t receive was much scrutiny of her sweeping claims that the male sports culture in America was limiting the progress for women in sports and becoming an unchecked breeding ground for violent male athletes who were a danger to women off the field.

The pigskin as patriarchy

With American football at the metaphorical and literal core of her argument, Nelson advanced a dreary narrative that initially surfaced during the women’s movement of the 1960s. The Catholic theologian Michael Novak, in his classic “The Joy of Sports,” writes that the century-old American gridiron game collided head-on with the ideology of feminists determined to rip apart the pillars of mainstream culture:

“They have wished to feminize the male, in order to ‘humanize’ him. They will extirpate, they say, machismo, militarism, fascism. Football has become for many the symbol of everything they loathe.”

Nelson’s scornful prose follows the path of feminist legal advocate Catherine MacKinnon, who waged various anti-pornography crusades and asserted that heterosexual sex was tantamount to rape. This deepened divisions with American feminists committed to the First Amendment and skeptical of gender and cultural wars. The legendary New York journalist Pete Hamill, among many others, lamented the warped views of “The New Victorians” whom MacKinnon embodied.

A seamless blend of the toxic ideas of MacKinnon, “Backlash” author Susan Faludi and feminist academic theory, “The Stronger Women Get” was Nelson’s attempt to bring sports into the “airless, sunless” world that Hamill described. In that, she succeeds quite well.

But a few pages in, open-minded readers are smothered by this dour absolutism as Nelson states in her thesis that sports are not communal experiences shared by Americans of both genders. Instead:

“They unite American men in a celebration of male victory.”

This is the first of dozens of one-sided, unprovable, ludicrous and even mean-spirited claims Nelson makes, as she ditches intellectual rigor to traffick in cheap emotionalism and male-bashing. A few examples:

“Everything that happened a hundred years ago is happening today.”

“Men have culturally sanctioned rights to violence.”

“Sportswomen disrupt the manly sports lovefest.”

“Who will win, Team Macho or Team Feminism?”

Nelson was writing before the creation of the WNBA, the 1999 Women’s World Cup and the growth of television interest in sports like women’s college basketball. Her unremitting diatribe reflected a new, more virulent strain of women’s sports activism that went far beyond the realm of Title IX.

But American women weren’t buying it. At the same time, some the fastest-growing groups of football fans were women untroubled by the manly lovefest. If anything, they reveled in it, for many of the same reasons many men admit to loving the game.

Nelson, however, sees full-flush male genitalia even in the routine act of a football official measuring for a first down, with the yardstick the penis and the ball, well, a ball.

Did this imagery keep her awake at night?

By the time she’s finished, Nelson has vilified practically every male who’s ever put on shoulder pads and equated male participation in “masculinist” sports as license to commit rape, especially gang rape. She trumpeted debunked studies about increased domestic violence on Super Bowl Sunday, and hailed other advocacy research that exaggerated the levels of sexual violence committed by male athletes, in order to make her most scurrilous charge:

“Maybe the the question is not why so many sportsmen rape, but why more of them don’t?”

There is no element of this sports world in which women (many of them athletes) are not constantly being excluded, hounded, harassed, molested, beaten, raped and even killed by males sanctioned through their sports to do these things.

As loopy and ham-fisted as this was, Nelson has inspired her own adherents who perpetuate this gloomy pronouncement.

Tales from the Pink Locker Room

Before she began the Title IX Blog that is often cited by the gender equity establishment and major media outlets, Erin Buzuvis was a visiting law professor at the University of Iowa. In 2005, she was horrified to discover that the visitors locker room at Kinnick Stadium was awash in light pink. Indeed, it was a very calming shade ordered up by former football coach Hayden Fry as a psychological ploy. It worked.

The late Michigan football coach Bo Schemechler hated that locker room for competitive reasons. Buzuvis hated it for cultural reasons, denouncing it as a symbol of misogyny and homophobia:

“With a pink locker room, you’re saying that ‘You are a girlie man. You are weak like a girl.’ That implies that girls are non-dominant, therefore, lesser. And that is offensive.”

With that, all hell broke loose in Hawkeye Nation, as Iowa football fans vigorously attacked her on message boards and blogs, with some regrettably making death threats and posting other vulgarities.

Sally Jenkins of the Washington Post couldn’t resist putting in a dig at this antiquated grievance:

“It’s so 1968. What’s missing from the picture is merely 40 years. What’s also missing is the recognition that male and female athletes alike have been deconstructing and subverting pinkness for years quite cleverly. Joe Namath put on panty hose. Roosevelt Grier did needlepoint. Herschel Walker took ballet and used moisturizers. Fry understood something Buzuvis apparently doesn’t: The people most likely to be undone by pink walls are not straight men, women or gays, but misogynists and homophobes.”

In 2008, after she had become a professor at the Western New England College law school, Buzuvis published a paper (PDF) about the Iowa incident that would have made Nelson and MacKinnon proud. Infested with academic feminist jargon, Buzuvis cites Marxist theorists in laying out a “cultural studies” framework for her argument that football indeed is the enemy of women in sports, the color pink does indeed signify its misogynist nature, and that there are serious Title IX implications to all this as well.

Her poverty of ideas is surpassed only by her pretentious and obscure use of language that few people outside the academic world even know about. Read this passage and weep:

“Interpellation can be accomplished by visual as well as verbal calls, which is to say that individuals’ relationships to ideology are often ’symbolically mediated.’ Analysis of ideology and hegemony thus incorporates semiotics, the studies of signs. Semiotics is incorporated into much of cultural theory because it positions the reader or consumer of cultural symbols as actively engaged in the construction of the meaning of symbols by producing symbols themselves.”

Diagram those sentences.

There used to be Bad Writing Contest some academics started to mock this. A professor Buzuvis approvingly cites in her paper is a previous winner. It’s too bad the contest ended before Buzuvis picked up her poison pen; she might have been a worthy honoree.

Buzuvis makes repeated references to “hegemonic masculinity” and phrases not commonly heard in everyday English. This is just the point: To make it indecipherable to all but a few “scholars” like herself. She finally gets to her point, at the end of 53 godforsaken pages of this:

“The conclusion I draw from the PLR is that cultural values must change before the equality guarantees of Title IX will ever be fully realized.”

But of course. How original.

Coming Friday: While the lords of college football gained more power and wealth as a new century dawned, women’s sports advocates continued to push themselves further down a cultural rabbit hole, obsessed with sexuality and media representation. Naturally, they blamed all of this on the “patriarchy.”

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.

This is the third in a series entitled “Women’s Sports Without Illusions” that critically examines the nearly four decades of the women’s sports movement, including Title IX, cultural and social developments, the growth of professional and international women’s sports and current challenges and issues.

All posts in this series can be found here.

The standard narrative script followed by women’s sports activists is that men are to blame for the slow progress of female athletics.

But it doesn’t take much digging to discover that women — female physical educators until the 1970s and politically-minded feminists since then — also have hindered what’s referred to now as the women’s sports “revolution.”

Starting in the 1890s, when Senda Berenson Abbott formulated a restricting first set of basketball rules for women, leading figures in women’s athletics wanted anything but a revolution. As much as any men, they expended decades’ worth of energy to prevent that from ever taking place.

The singular philosophical line running through organized women’s scholastic sports has been anti-commercial, and until the 1960s, largely anti-competitive. For the better part of 70 years, these women resisted efforts to expand competitive athletic opportunities, working especially hard to prevent varsity sports from trumping intramurals and “play days” on high school and college campuses.

That’s because for many of these women’s leaders, maintaining control of women’s sports — and keeping them out of the hands of men favoring a commercial, highly competitive model of sports the women reviled — has mattered above all else, even at the expense of increased opportunities for female athletes.

Maiden Aunts don’t always know best

“When equal opportunity knocks,” posted on the NCAA website in January, chronicles the dramatic, contentious 1981 vote at the NCAA convention to sponsor women’s college athletics, which since 1972 had been governed by the female-led Association for Intercollegiate Athletics for Women. The story amply quotes two high-profile AIAW stalwarts who still believe that women’s sports was dealt a severe setback when the organization collapsed.

Said former Texas women’s athletics director and Women’s Sports Foundation CEO Donna Lopiano, the AIAW president during its last sports season of 1981-82:

“I think the NCAA takeover slowed down the development of women’s sports probably by a good five to 10 years.”

For most of its existence, however, the AIAW was short of money, and ambivalent about pursuing commercial options. The AIAW also was the defendant in one of the first Title IX sports lawsuits because it initially banned athletic scholarships, while the NCAA permitted them for male athletes.

Just let this sink in for a moment: Women discriminating against women, as the age of Title IX dawned. How many years did that set back women’s sports?

This policy, eventually dropped in an out of court deal, was a byproduct of the AIAW’s egalitarian philosophy but untenable in the wake of the new law.

From that point on, AIAW leaders were focused more on holding on to power and their self-proclaimed virtuous approach than catering to the competitive desires of female athletes. Within the organization there was disagreement about later revisions of the scholarship policy that prevented women athletes from receiving aid for anything more than tuition and fees, and other rules that banned schools from paying coaches for recruiting trip expenses.

According to data gathered by sports historian Ying Wushanley, the AIAW spent more than 20 percent of its overall revenues ($847,000) on legal expenses during its 10-year history, while allocating only eight percent ($315,000) on championship competitions for women athletes.

During its final three years (1979-82), as it battled for survival, the AIAW burned through $569,000 for lawyers, mainly to fight the NCAA.

But even well before the NCAA vote, top women’s coaches — including Tennessee Lady Vols legend Pat Summitt — were publicly saying that the NCAA was the way to go, as she reflected 20 years later:

“For me it was tough emotionally, but professionally it was clear cut. We felt emotionally tied to the AIAW, but there comes a time when you have to look at the big picture, opportunities for your sport and women’s athletics across the board.”

That the AIAW required schools to pay their own way to national tournaments also made it easier for athletics departments to cast their lot with the NCAA, which then as now foots the bill for those expenses.

Virtue or politics?

Also by this time, even some AIAW leaders had become disenchanted with the organization’s activities, including what women’s basketball writer Mel Greenberg described as a vendetta against schools and individuals supporting the NCAA move. Judith Holland, like Lopiano a former AIAW president, felt that women athletes were being shortchanged amid all this, and testified on behalf of the NCAA during the AIAW’s unsuccessful antitrust trial.

For that, Holland, then an associate athletics director at UCLA, was labeled a “co-conspirator,” as if she were the Whittaker Chambers of women’s sports. In a recent video interview posted on the Pac 10 website, Holland, now retired, affirmed her belief that the NCAA-AIAW merger was good for women athletes (picks up at the 2:50 mark):

“I don’t think you should have different rules for women than you had for the men. And the women couldn’t have an impact on the rules for the men unless they were in the same association.”

But in the same NCAA website piece linked above, former Iowa women’s AD Christine Grant, who preceded Lopiano as AIAW president, underscored the political animus of sports feminists like her:

“The whole decade of the ’80s was pretty much a whole downer. We just seemed to be losing one thing after another.”

She doesn’t define who she meant by “we,” but in truth it didn’t include female athletes. The AIAW was gone, and from 1984 to 1988 Title IX sports compliance was on the back burner thanks to the Grove City vs. Bell Supreme Court ruling, which exempted parts of educational institutions not receiving direct federal aid. (Congress pre-empted the decision by passing the Civil Rights Restoration Act, then overrode a veto by President Ronald Reagan.)

Concluded Wushanley in his 2004 book, “Playing Nice and Losing,” which culminated with the AIAW-NCAA dispute:

“Toward the end, the AIAW became more of a political agency for women leaders than a national organization devoted to the advancement of women athletes.”

But women’s sports were starting to flourish at the college level, especially basketball, in which iconic figures like Cheryl Miller and Teresa Edwards were competing. At the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, Summitt guided the powerful U.S. team to the gold medal. Two years later, the women’s hoops team at Texas, where Lopiano still presided, won its first and still only national championship in undefeated 35-0 fashion.

While basic Title IX compliance still lagged in far too many places, the superior resources and organization of the NCAA were beginning to pay off for women.

Coming Thursday: Longstanding complaints about football hogging financial resources took a darker, nastier turn in the early 1990s, when more radical voices in sports feminism demonized the sport on cultural grounds.

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Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.