The third part of my new book “Beyond Title IX: The Cultural Laments of Women’s Sports” deals with what I refer to as the “representation obsessions” of so-called women’s sports advocates, and the portrayal of female athletes in the media.

When women athletes pose suggestively in magazines, with or without clothing, some of these ultra-feminist “sport media scholars” sound like your grouchy Aunt Betty. One such “expert,” espnW adviser Mary Jo Kane, is convinced that a 2010 Sports Illustrated Olympic preview cover photo of Lindsey Vonn etches out the shape of a male penis and somehow this is being done to objectify women athletes. I wrote:

“Now, I’m like a lot of Americans in that I don’t watch skiing except every four years at the Olympics. All I know about kinesiology is that it is the scientific study of human movement, a field in which Kane is a trained academic and a former department head.

“But as Vonn and other skiers flew down the Olympic courses of Whistler, all of them - female and male - were crouched just as she had been for Sports Illustrated with, to paraphrase Kane, their posteriors protruding and backsides arched. This was the gender-neutral, aerodynamically correct expression of the sport.

“This probably didn’t occur to Kane, who might as well have been Whistler’s Mother, feverishly imagining sexually incorrect poses whenever a female athlete is involved. Her reaction was not surprising, but hardly empirical.

“A male sportswriter friend said to me upon reading this excerpt: ‘Maybe my mind just isn’t dirty enough, but what does she see that I don’t?’

“Exactly.

“When a strident academic feminist can detect the male sex organ in a photo of a female athlete, fully-attired in the regalia of her sport, and an average guy cannot, then it’s entirely fair to wonder what’s really on her brain.”

This is part of a larger argument that Kane and like-minded advocates make that women athletes are being duped into disrobing for men and to make themselves “heterosexy” for general public consumption.

When they’re not condemning grown-up female athletic champions like Brandi Chastain and Amy Acuff they’re blasting the media for portraying Candace Parker and Katarina Witt in traditionally feminine ways.

But this isn’t a gender thing, as male athletes like Mark Spitz, Shep Messing and David Beckham can attest. They’re in this part of the book, too.

In another chapter, I take issue with another “sport media scholar” who insists that media coverage of the feats of female athletes is worse than ever.

As I explain, women athletes in America are on television and enjoy more high-profile status now than at any previous time (magazine spreads aside), and that emerging forms of digital media will be a boon for coverage of their exploits.

On Tuesday I excerpted from the first part of the book, “The Paradox of Equality,” which delves into Title IX matters, and on Wednesday it was all about “Tales from the Pink Locker Room.” On Friday, I’ll introduce you to advocates who want to break down the lines of sex-segregated sports, all in the name of equality.

If you like what you’ve read here, or the sample that’s on Amazon, you can buy the whole book for $3.99. If you’re an Amazon Prime user, it’s yours for no cost. I’d be honored if you give it a read, and I’d love to know what you think.

In my recent series on women’s sports, I introduced readers to the work of a self-identified “sport media scholar” who is anything but.

Mary Jo Kane of the University of Minnesota is one of the more relentless and joyless critics of portrayals of female athletes by the media, especially when they’re not wearing much clothes.

But even when they’re covered from head to toe, Kane sees things she thinks undermine the cause of women’s sports that virtually nobody else does. (Don’t forget that for people like her, women’s sports will always be a cause that must be fought with a trenchlike-notion of warfare.)

When she and her fellow feminist sports researchers at Minnesota’s Tucker Center that she directs got riled up over the cover of Sports Illustrated’s 2010 Winter Olympics preview, it became the latest — and most embarrassing — episode in their crusade to rid the sports media world of supposedly “degrading” portrayals of female athletes.

Do you see what I see?

In The Nation’s recent issue devoted mostly to sports, Kane rehashes the tired diatribe that “Sex Sells Sex, Not Women’s Sports.” (The identical article also is linked here by NPR.) As usual, she misses the point of why athletes — male and female — aren’t as afraid to display their bodies as Kane is to have to “analyze” them through her narrow and peculiar lens.

Naturally, I was surprised to see this article begin with a quote from a former women’s pro soccer player in a story I wrote while I was at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. I had almost forgotten about this, but Kane’s use of this I think is to illustrate her gripes that both women athletes and journalists are implicit in perpetuating “stereotypes” about sex appeal and sports. And then she renews her apoplexy over the Vonn cover:

“Even Sports Illustrated—notorious for its lack of coverage of women’s sports—couldn’t ignore this historic moment and devoted its cover to Vonn. SI’s cover, however, blatantly portrayed Vonn as a sex object and spoke volumes about the rampant sexual depictions of women athletes. Rather than emphasize her singular athletic talent, the magazine depicted Vonn in a posed photograph, smiling at the camera in her ski regalia. What was most noticeable—and controversial—about the pose was its phallic nature: Vonn’s backside was arched at a forty-five-degree angle while superimposed over a mountain peak.”

Now I’m like a lot of Americans in that I don’t watch skiing except every four years at the Olympics, so I’m not terribly well-schooled about the aesthetics of the sport. But when I did watch Vonn and other skiers fly down the mountains of Whistler, I noticed that every single one of them — male and female — was crouched just as Vonn was for Sports Illustrated, with their butts sticking out and their backs positioned as Kane describes. But this probably didn’t occur to Kane, who might as well have been Whistler’s Mother about all this.

A phallocentric pose?

When I linked to Kane’s tedious twaddle on my Twitter account this week, several males said to me: Maybe my mind just isn’t dirty enough, but exactly where is the phallic imagery here?

Exactly.

The laws of physics — another subject that generally goes over my head — applied to the fundamentals of the sport of skiing have much to do with why these athletes crouch the way they do. Shouldn’t the director of Minnesota’s school of kinesiology, which Kane also is, understand this? She ignores the “study of human movement” because of her fanaticism.

Nor did I do well in biology and anatomy classes in college, but I’d like to know if Kane is aware that actual human penises, regardless of the state of engorgement, don’t really resemble crouching skiers (as we’ll “see” below).

When a strident academic feminist can detect the male sex organ in a photo of a hot babe fully attired in the regalia of her sport and an average guy cannot, then I have to wonder what’s really on her brain.

Another male friend properly took issue with Kane’s contention that Sports Illustrated doesn’t adequately cover women’s sports. It will never be enough for Kane’s liking, but since the early 1970s, from the time Title IX was passed and Billie Jean King hit the scene, that magazine has done more sophisticated and well-produced journalism about women and sports than most media outlets. (This cover piece from 1973 is a classic that helped open up plenty of critical media attention about women’s sports.)

But Kane marches on, because she has a theory to adhere to:

“Offensive as this portrayal may have been, it came as no surprise to sports-media scholars. Over the past three decades we have amassed a large body of empirical evidence demonstrating that sportswomen are significantly more likely to be portrayed in ways that emphasize their femininity and heterosexuality rather than their athletic prowess. Study after study has revealed that newspaper and TV coverage around the globe routinely and systematically focuses on the athletic exploits of male athletes while offering hypersexualized images of their female counterparts.”

“Femininity and heterosexuality.” Bingo. This is really the burr under Kane’s saddle. Her perspective is the product of a feminist/cultural studies mindset that is completely oblivious to the nature of how commercial media works, as well as human nature.

It disregards the reality that some women athletes do not have a problem with these poses (see the video of Vonn at the bottom). Kane is presumptuous in claiming to speak for an entire gender, and in lecturing to women athletes how they should “behave.” As for “hypersexualized” images of athletes, Kane truly is in the dark about how quite a few women and some admiring gay men regard male athletic bodies.

Kane’s references to “study after study” pertain to research that is hardly empirical. Much of what I’ve seen that is available publicly is rigged from the start, especially what she and her colleagues put together at the Tucker Center. Most is found in obscure academic journals that are expensive to access. A discerning reader outside of a university has little opportunity to examine her claims. They must be believed and accepted uncritically.

Properly-identified “scholars” do not close down avenues of inquiry with their work; they open them up and invite debate, but Kane is not interested in having her ideas challenged. Sadly, this is a standard operating procedure throughout much of feminist academia, including the study of athletics.

Finally, her argument that “sex doesn’t sell women’s sports, it sells sex,” is simply a flawed way to look at this. It does generate attention and visibility, which in some women’s sports is publicity that cannot otherwise be bought. Women’s sports cannot succeed in being marketed mainly as “wholesome” and “family oriented,” and I’ve long argued that broadening their appeal to adults, including young men, needs to be considered more than it has. If an appeal to sex appeal is part of that consideration, then fine.

Kane also doesn’t get why ESPN shows and promotes women’s college basketball as it does: It sees some commercial viability, however modest, that does not exist for most other women’s sports. To presume that other women’s sports will grow in viewers and corporate sponsors with a similar approach is to misunderstand that commercial media doesn’t create something like this out of the blue. It is a response to fan interest that developed organically, over many grueling decades. There’s something of an audience out there, if only for the Final Four weekend.

But this isn’t just about women.

Viva, viva voom!

In the early 1970s, New York Cosmos goalkeeper Shep Messing uncovered EVERYTHING in a Viva magazine spread aimed at women.

(Beware to feminists of Kane’s ilk: An actual phallus is on display here that leaves nothing to the imagination. You’ve been warned, but because of your delicate sensitivities I will not post any of those photos here. If you care not to peek, ladies, this phallus looks nothing like a skier. Trust me.)

These were the days before Pelé, and the fledgling North American Soccer League was desperate for attention. As he recounted in “Once in a Lifetime,” the terrific documentary based on equally terrific book about the saga of the Cosmos, Messing took it upon himself — literally — to follow his management’s desire to help gain more exposure for his sport.

Even though Messing was first American athlete of either gender to bare all in a mazagine, his contract was terminated because of a morals clause. Once upon a time, they used to have them for male athletes. He returned to the Cosmos two years later at the behest of Pelé, who along with Giorgio Chinaglia and Franz Beckenbauer were the obvious big draws. Messing remained one of the team’s most popular players and was a good goalkeeper. Being a “hottie” and a rare American star in that league ultimately did not work against him.

Nothing that Kane cites in her rant is a raunchy, tasteless portrayal of women athletes. Nothing comes close to the display of full-frontal genitalia in the Messing pictorial. Many of the women athletes she names clearly do not feel the way she does about this issue.

Unfortunately, Kane’s article in The Nation is all readers of that issue will learn about women’s sports. It is a dismal, one-sided screed that does not reflect the true status of women athletes in 2011. Her arguments will not be scrutinized by the same mainstream media that she denounces because it is the same mainstream media that for years has given her ample space to spew her invective. That she’s been an advisor to the new espnW venture is evidence of her entrenched status. I dare espnW or anybody in the media establishment to offer such a dissenting view as mine. I’d love to have the opportunity to engage the public on these subjects on such a high-profile media platform, when Kane clearly wishes to avoid it.

More than anything, it is an embarrassment to women’s sports that individuals such as Kane are regarded as experts on these topics. She gives women’s sports a bad name because she is not a “scholar” but rather an ideologue incensed with photographs that try to gain the attention of heterosexual men.

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.