The reaction to Jeré Longman’s story on American Olympic hurdler Lolo Jones in The New York Times Sunday was as swift and harsh as his piece that slammed her for waging “a sad and cynical marketing campaign” around her sex appeal, in lieu of what he claims are any significant athletic accomplishments:

“Women have struggled for decades to be appreciated as athletes. For the first time at these Games, every competing nation has sent a female participant. But Jones is not assured enough with her hurdling or her compelling story of perseverance. So she has played into the persistent, demeaning notion that women are worthy as athletes only if they have sex appeal. And, too often, the news media have played right along with her.”

This is one of the most sexist things I’ve seen written about a female athlete in quite a while, and it comes from a journalist who professes to care deeply about women’s sports. Unfortunately, Longman doesn’t seem to respect the individual choices of female athletes to do, and be, as they damn well please.

Deadspin’s Isaac Rauch jumped all over Longman in a flash, pointing out that he “pretty explicitly calls her a traitor to her gender” for risqué magazine poses, including ESPN The Magazine. More than that, however, the Times writer — whom I first met covering the Women’s World Cup in 1999 — is guilty of missing what has made Jones a hot media commodity. It’s not necessarily her body, or her looks. Writes Rauch:

“As it has with many other athletes, the media has allocated attention to her because she’s more interesting than most of her peers. She’s comfortable talking about a troubled childhood in public; other athletes aren’t.”

This is the most surprising thing to me about the diatribe by Longman, a talented reporter and storyteller who specializes in the kind of human interest profile that’s tailor-made for the Olympics.

However, his complaints about the alleged “sexualization” of female athletes are nothing new.

As one of the few mainstream journalists in the country exploring the cultural parameters of women in sports, Longman has fallen under the spell of a small handful of women’s sports “experts.” They are mostly academic feminists, lawyers and activists he approvingly cites in stories that rail against the “stereotyping” of female athletes. Some of them he quotes repeatedly, without any critical eye at all.

(I examine them, and his stenography of their arguments, in my recent e-book, “Beyond Title IX,” specifically chapters 11, 13, 15 and 19.)

Longman has parroted their singular critique often, on topics ranging from college basketball star Brittney Griner punching an opponent in a game; a female college soccer player, Elizabeth Lambert, getting in a fight with a foe; and Alex Morgan, a rising star of the U.S. women’s soccer team, who has no qualms about displaying her attractiveness for cameras.

In that last piece, published in April, he takes Morgan to task for posing, like Jones, in Sports Illustrated’s swimsuit issue:

“Presumably, Morgan wanted to show that she was strong and feminine. Instead, she reinforced the unfortunate notion that to be successful, female athletes must position themselves as sex objects. And endure more undercoating than a Toyota Corolla.”

Yet that all seems tame compared to his hatchet job on Lolo Jones, who, by the way, won her first heat in the 100 meter hurdles Monday morning.

Who made Jeré Longman the arbiter of what’s a sex object, and what’s a “persistent, demeaning notion” about how female athletes make themselves worthy?

Why is a middle-aged male sportswriter taking it upon himself to instruct a younger generation of female athletes how they should portray themselves?

He’s succumbed to the same impulse that has driven his “experts” to assume they know what’s right for female athletes. When they reject that patronizing, as Brandi Chastain, Lindsey Vonn and Amy Acuff have done, among others, these young women are then declared either to be brainwashed by the spotlight or powerless victims of a sexist media culture. But Longman’s breaking new ground here with his heavy-handed allegations against Jones.

I don’t like writing this. Longman’s a nice guy, has always been kind to me, is mild-mannered and funny. But he’s really gone off the rails here, following the tiresome sports feminist line that female athletes should not be about themselves, but the greater cause of women’s sports.

And the cause cannot be advanced if they take their clothes off, play to the desires of heterosexual males, or present themselves to the public as they choose.

For women athletes to be scolded this way is to defy everything that the women’s movement was supposed to be about: Allowing them the legal and cultural freedom to be themselves, and to direct the courses of their own lives. Nothing more, certainly not a brain-dead devotion to a cause.

What Longman and his “experts” represent is a new kind of sexism, feminist style, that dismisses women as individuals, and the choices they make.

My post yesterday about female athletes and posing nude for magazines prompted Laura Taylor, one of my Twitter followers, to dust off a 12-year-old open letter she sent to USA Today columnist Christine Brennan, the now-defunct SI for Women magazine and Gary Miller, then of ESPN (!).

The essential point in this sharply written missive (and I mean that as a compliment) is this:

“When female athletes sell sex, it can be a step backward for all women in sports. But this is not a new phenomenon, and it is not the root of the problem. That lies in society’s perception that being a beautiful athletic woman is an oxymoron. That is not the athletes’ fault, nor should they be bound by such arcane limitations.”

Boldface emphasis mine. Thank you for saying so long ago what I couldn’t quite articulate the way I wanted in my book “Beyond Title IX” about this subject.

The perception, though, isn’t the larger society but with a small band of sports feminists who lack any of the nuance or sophistication to understand how some of these athletes see themselves.

The scolds are so convinced that expressions of traditional femininity and sexuality are incompatible with their desire to overhaul the male sports culture that they don’t have a proper response when some of the women they claim to represent have different ideas.

Taylor reports that Brennan and the others receiving her letter didn’t respond, which isn’t a surprise. Taylor concludes, again years ago better than I just have, that:

“Those who seek to protect these women from having to submit to these horrible prurient photo shoots instead place them squarely in the sexist box they so loudly decry.”

You would think, given the fanatacism fomented then and now on this topic, that the only acceptable pose for women athletes would be this one.

This week I’m bringing back some of my favorite posts from the year, and especially those that generated some good conversation. Issue pieces in sports always seem to do the trick, and these were no different.

In June I posted a 10-part series I called “Women’s Sports Without Illusions,” a critical examination of the movement and where it stands as Title IX turned 39.

For years I have found much of the dogma coming out of the gender equity establishment to be indignant and tone deaf to the world that women athletes live in today. It’s as if activists refuse to leave the 1970s, which thankfully have ended. We might have gone from disco to hip-hop, but I’m more concerned about the cultural grievances that many of these so-called “experts” hold that are out of step with the reality on the ground.

Especially when the slow progress for women in sports over the decades can’t always be chalked up to men.

I offered some starting points for revising the Title IX sports regulations that are outdated, and not surprisingly they drew most of the reader comments.

Also not surprisingly, most of the readers were men, and not women who side with the Title IX diehards. This blog is part of the Women Talk Sports network that includes the Title IX Blog and two sex-and-gender standbys, After Atalanta and One Sport Voice. There was virtually no reaction. We’re talking about people who don’t like their ideas challenged, some to the extent that they don’t permit comments on their blogs at all.

What’s more troubling are the grudges that some hold against football and how they rail against portrayals of women athletes in magazines and elsewhere that the athletes themselves see very differently.

These cultural grievances form the spine of an expanded writing project, based on this series, that I will complete in early 2012. It’s less about Title IX and the controversies over compliance with the law and more about the future of women’s sports, and how such absolutist views disrespect the individual choices of girls and women and are out of step with the mainstream.

I’ll have more details about that project shortly. All I’ll say for now is that if you’ve got a problem with the Women’s Tennis Association’s “Strong is Beautiful” presentation, then take it up with Billie Jean.

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 a topic I wanted to examine in my recent series “Women’s Sports Without Illusions,” especially after a perceptive reader brought it up. I pledged to address it in a new phase of my inquiry that continues on this blog and elsewhere. So here’s a little bonus coverage.)

* * * * * * * *

SLAM Online contributor Clay Kallam points to some uncomfortable biological truths about women athletes when ruminating off the likely season-ending injuries to Candace Parker (knee) and Lauren Jackson (hip), two of the WNBA’s most visible stars:

“The rate of ACL tears, arguably the most devastating knee injury and arguably the one with the greatest chance to have long-term impacts on knee health, is four times greater for women than men. Anyone involved in the sport for any length of time has seen far too many players go down in pain, from WNBA all-stars to freshman girls trying the game for the first time.

“And at some point, we all have to come to terms with this painful sacrifice that so many women and girls make for the sport. Yes, women are tough and strong, but it’s also true that a variety of factors make them much more vulnerable to crushing, debilitating injuries.”

Kallam, who has coached girls high school basketball in California for many years, is raising a taboo that women’s sports would rather not acknowledge, and that author Michael Sokolove found quite revealing while researching “Warrior Girls,” his 2008 book about female youth sports injuries. (Here’s the article in The New York Times Magazine that led to the book.)

Difference = Unequal?

For example, Sokolove was surprised to discover that the Women’s Sports Foundation did no physiological research into the topic. The WSF has since teamed up with the University of Michigan to create the Sports, Health and Research Policy Center that will open this fall. Its mission is to “generate interdisciplinary research on issues related to women’s sports, health, gender issues and kinesiology.” And here’s the real kicker:

“As a result of the collaboration, the new center will generate a variety of information and tools central to the foundation and university’s educational role of supporting evidence-based public debate that informs public policy and encourages elimination of the obstacles girls and women face in sports participation.”

That last part is a reference to legal, sociological and cultural barriers that figure to prompt calls for more gender equity measures; there’s no specific mention of female sports injuries being part of SHARP’s research efforts that I could find. This think tank will be housed within Michigan’s Institute for Research on Women and Gender, so there you go.

(Update: In this recent interview with espnW, WSF chief executive officer Kathryn Olson said the SHARP Center will indeed address injuries, including ACLs and concussions. This is encouraging; and it bears watching as the center holds a conference next spring.)

But the real heat Sokolove received for his book came from sports feminist academics at the University of Minnesota who went on an all-out offensive to refute his claims.

The Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport entitled its response “Anatomy Isn’t Destiny,” marshalling perspectives from the public health, sports medicine, orthopedic surgery, sports psychology and sociology faculties at the university. Read as one, this is an attempt to diminish real physical differences that get in the way of larger political gender equity aims:

“Sokolove skillfully links the sport ethic—striving for distinction, accepting risks, playing through pain and not accepting barriers in the pursuit of goals—with a Mars-Venus dichotomy whereby females are routinely portrayed as different from (and inherently inferior to) males. He seems determined to create a moral panic for already overly concerned sport parents who are understandably trying to do what is best for their daughters.”

The Tucker Center was decent enough to give Sokolove space to reply to its criticisms, which he keenly understands:

“The overall concern of your scholars seems to be that my book – as well as any overt discussion about injuries among women athletes – is going to drive women off the playing field. I’d say it is injuries that takes athletes off the field – not information and discussion. And not one of the hundreds of emails I’ve received from female athletes, or parents of athletes, have said the book had induced anyone to leave their sport.”

But wait, there’s more:

“There’s a problem out there, and I believe that advocates of women’s sports – those at the Tucker Center and elsewhere who have done important work in advocating for Title IX and its rigorous enforcement – have a responsibility to take it on as a cause.”

Bemoaning the body electric

The Tucker Center does indeed look into these matters, but it hardly amounts to a cause. Tucker Center associate director Nicole LaVoi, one of Sokolove’s biggest critics, spends far more time writing for the center and on her blog about the “sexualization” of female athletes in media, almost to the point of obsession. Last week, Time magazine quoted her in a story about the Women’s Tennis Association’s latest provocative portrayal of its most attractive players, and comments like this have become her stock-in-trade:

“Yes, these women are beautiful, but we see lots of cleavage and legs, and it’s set to music that is reminiscent of soft-core porn. That might be interesting and titillating, but it isn’t going to make me turn on Wimbledon.”

So will only Whistler’s Mother do?

I shouldn’t revive the old saw about beauty being in the eye of the beholder, nor should I elaborate that this isn’t about what LaVoi would watch. But I just did by way of arguing that there’s nothing tasteless in any of this. She apparently wants her muscle without even a hint of glamour (a staple of women’s tennis since the marvelous Suzanne Lenglen dared to bob her hair, among other 1920s taboos). This is typical of the legion of sports feminists who disdain any association between female athleticism and aesthetics. As I wrote in my women’s sports series, they prefer an androgynous ideal that trumps sex in favor of gender. We all know which is more fun, and which is decidedly not.

In the same Time piece, Penn State sports journalism professor Marie Hardin complains that such imagery revolves around homophobia:

“There’s this idea of the lesbian bogeywoman, the predatory lesbian in sports. Unfortunately there’s a real fear mongering that doesn’t help women’s sports at all.”

But her rhetoric actually marginalizes women’s sports, especially by implying that women athletes shouldn’t get all Hester Prynne about themselves:

“There’s a real tension there. What female athletes choose to do to empower themselves personally does often times chip away at the collective power of female athletes and of women’s sports.”

Is this what she teaches her journalism students? That women athletes should not make their own choices if those choices offend The Sisterhood?

“The collective power of female athletes” is the abiding cause of sports feminists, and anything that interferes with that objective as they define it is emphatically denounced or shunted aside. Individual preferences or experiences do not fit in this dogmatic, airtight narrative, as I also wrote.

If LaVoi, Hardin, et al, were less concerned about how women athletes look in pictorials than with what happens when they get hurt, they might better justify their credentials as “experts” on topics about which contrary points of view are rarely allowed to enter the public discourse.

You don’t have to be an academic to understand that what they’re postulating isn’t scholarship, but pure advocacy.

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.