I’ve not found many more refreshing athletes to cover than Brandi Chastain.

And I’ve never been enamored with Republican politicians whose voting records are a predictable laundry list of all the issues, economic and social, that I couldn’t be more opposed to.

But when California Assemblyman Chris Norby expressed his concern this week over court interpretations of Title IX, it became a national story, and for all the wrong reasons.

With Chastain in the House chamber for a 40th anniversary Title IX recognition ceremony, Norby soured the celebrations with some rare public candor:

“We need to be honest about the effects of what I believe are faulty court interpretations or federal enforcement of Title IX, because it has led to the abolition of many male sports across the board in [California’s public universities]. And that was never the intention of this, to have numerical equality. It was never the intention to attain equality by reducing opportunities for the men.”

Chastain couldn’t say anything because Norby was not speaking at a public hearing. Instead, she winced, in an image that was widely reproduced in news outlets all across America.

A sampling of the breathless media response to someone saying something so terrible about Title IX:

Chastain “managed not to blow her top.” She even “kept her cool.” On the other hand, she “bristles.”

Can someone actually be all those things at the same time? Especially if there’s wincing involved? Ah, I digress.

According to the OC Weekly, Norby “inserts soccer shoe in mouth.”

ESPN.com: “Brandi Chastain winces at Title IX flak.”

Poor Brandi! Muzzled! By Flak!

The San Jose Mercury News wrote that Chastain “had to endure” Norby’s remark, adding that “it’s shameful that there are still people out there who think Title IX was a bad thing.”

Except that Norby neither said nor implied such a thing. He made it clear he objected to compliance methods that call for numerical provisions to achieve “equality,” which he accurately pointed out was not the original intent of the law, or the sports regulations that came later.

(If you want to get an idea of the absurd ramifications of a 1993 California NOW Title IX consent decree affecting sports programs at public universities in that state, here’s a recent example.)

Norby didn’t say anything about scuttling the law. But he learned that if you question the Title IX establishment at all, you’re in for a snoot full of blowback.

The Title IX blog: “Brandi Chastain witnesses backlash.” The predictable gender feminist term, trotted out right on cue, and reflexively used to describe any dissenting response to the party line.

Norby is a Republican from the conservative hotbed of Orange County, where he was a supervisor before being elected to Sacramento. I could not imagine ever voting for the so-called “wonk of the right,” especially with so many elected officials of similar ilk in my midst in the Deep South. But I share enough of a libertarian bent to see that he was able to get to the heart of the argument often made by critics of Title IX:

Title IX is a good law, with a bad interpretation.

This is my complaint; not the statute itself. The need for the law remains, because inequities do exist. The way it is being enforced has had a harmful effect on some male athletes in some sports. Not all, and not across the board. But the impact has been strong enough to warrant a closer examination that the Title IX powers-that-be simply will not tolerate.

Norby was condemned not just for what he said, but for saying anything at all.

Later, Chastain was interviewed by The Daily, explaining that her response to Norby would have been this:

“I think there’s missed perspective on what Title IX is. It’s not men’s sports against women’s sports. Let’s be honest about this — men’s football is a big money machine and so there’s a lot of money spent and other sports don’t have the luxury of spending it.”

Unmuzzled, at last!

Of course. It’s all football’s fault. The “other sports” don’t make the money; I invite Chastain or anyone else still clinging to this narrative to check out the high cost of non-revenue sports, for men and women, just at the University of Minnesota. This is where real “arms race” in college sports gets alarming.

The Daily story closed out with an interesting observation from Chastain about the need to “revisit”  the law “on a regular basis, [since] there will be people who don’t understand the history or where it comes from and that’s dangerous.”

I’ve been calling for that for a good long while, making specific suggestions about reworking Title IX here and here that might get the compliance methods back to what the law had in mind in the first place.

For Title IX absolutists, however, “revisiting” the issue isn’t about giving it a critical look. It’s about having another chance to restate their talking points about the law, and daring anyone to disagree.

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.

—

Women’s Sports Without Illusions: The Series.