Ivan Maisel penned a thoughtful, fair-minded piece last week on ESPN.com about the Knight Commission — whose motto he tongue-in-cheek describes as “Tilting at Windmills since 1989″ — and the increasingly difficult challenge of advocating college athletics reform in an age when more money is flowing into big schools and major conferences than ever before.

The Knight Commission has picked up a number of allies along the way, including Title IX activists who still insist that football, in particular, is draining resources from women’s sports. Maisel points out that the body put the NCAA on its toes with such things as improving graduation rates for athletes. And yet:

“John Cheslock, the director of the Center for the Study of Higher Education at Penn State, told the Commission that television revenue has increased from $55-75 million in the mid-1980s to about $1 billion last year, an increase of more than 1,000 percent.

“In other words, the Commission knows how to defend the wishbone, and intercollegiate athletics is running the spread.”

This has been the case for many decades, even before the battle over television revenues between the NCAA and the Lords of College Football that led to a 1984 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that created the current climate of wall-to-wall games spread out over multiple outlets on fall Saturdays. And many Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday evenings this time of year as well.

Indeed, the real story of the rise of college athletics since World War II is centered around that saga, and so very well-told by Alabama sportswriter Keith Dunnavant in his excellent 2004 book, “The Fifty-Year Seduction: How Television Manipulated College Football, from the Birth of the Modern NCAA to the Creation of the BCS.”

Sports Illustrated’s Andy Staples wrote a terrific piece along these lines back in August, updating the timeline with new TV contracts, the realignment that has ensued and the entrepreneurial ethos of Pac 12 commissioner Larry Scott now driving the commercial landscape of college athletics.

Reformers have always been at least several steps behind what they’re trying to rein in, usually for deeply philosophical reasons. But the advocacy of pure amateurism and education-first pushed by the Knight Commission, the NCAA, gender equity leaders and others forlorn about rampant commercialism in college athletics belies their own conflicted realities with money, prestige and competitive ambitions.

While it’s not surprising for Brit Kirwan, the chancellor of the University of Maryland system, to sound the alarm bell about higher and higher finances in college athletics, there’s a puzzling lack of a larger perspective about rampant spending in the rest of the higher education structure.

The Chronicle of Higher Education cited research this summer showing that nearly half of the nation’s colleges and universities are close to, or are headed toward, an “unsustainable financial path.” (That analysis, by the way, was prepared by Bain & Company, the consultancy where Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney made his fortune.)

While that may sound alarmist, higher education leaders who wring their hands about paying $5 million a year for a football coach are just as tone-deaf about runaway tuition costs and the inability of many families to afford college. The risks of taking out hefty student loans and the crushing debt obligations that can hound graduates for decades are becoming too great for many young people and their parents to bear, especially with an uncertain economic future.

Before we can have an honest discussion about being prudent in the athletics department, this conversation must first take place in the main administration building.

Women’s sports advocates fought bitter battles with college football leaders three and four decades ago, at the dawn of the age of Title IX, just to squeeze out a few dollars to pay for new programs demanded by the law. Those fights sowed the seeds of distrust that remain, even though the commercial growth of college football and men’s college basketball has helped women’s sports to flourish at the highest levels. As former Stanford athletics director Ted Leland told Maisel, referencing the success of American women Olympians in London:

“The BCS schools are 25 percent of Division I, and they are providing about 100 percent of Olympic-level athletes in women’s sports. It’s a by-product of the huge influx of money from football.”

But for Title IX leaders to admit this would mean minimizing an “enemy” they need to further their advocacy. There’s plenty of red ink produced by football, as The Birmingham News recently reported about the public subsidies handed out to non-BCS athletics programs in the state of Alabama (including Troy, my alma mater). But women’s advocates would rather use that data to continue to demonize “King Football” than to acknowledge where the money comes from to pay for women’s programs — and basketball coaching salaries are the notable examples here — that will likely never be close to revenue-producing.

As for the NCAA, its decision on Monday to withdraw five national championship competitions from New Jersey because of that state’s new sports wagering law speaks volumes about what many will claim are its numerous hypocrisies.

The dispute involves legal action against the state from not just the NCAA, but professional sports leagues as well, and it figures to get even uglier.

But later on Monday USA Today reported that the NCAA, which is paying its top leaders more than their predecessors, has around $500 million in net assets. Not bad for a tax-exempt organization that professes to uphold the highest values of amateur sports and higher education. While NCAA staffers I have come to know are hard-working, humble people devoted to ensuring positive experiences for “student-athletes,” the top leadership of the organization has never been more out of touch with what those values really are.

Money will do that do you, of course, and it’s richly ironic that the NCAA is under increasing pressure to share its vast sums with the uncompensated athletes whose exploits have created this wealth.

Those sounding the loudest calls for reform have been unable to reconcile their purist, for-the-love-of-it ideals with the commercial realities that have engulfed the entire higher educational and college athletics enterprise.

That’s because they’ve been engulfed by this predicament too, and that doesn’t appear to be changing anytime soon.

Rounding up some of the most intriguing reads I’ve come across this week, posted on Sports Biblio, my experimental Tumblr companion to this site, or that I have Tweeted and collected elsewhere:

• Pigskin Progessivism — George Will’s war on football, American-style, now seems to blame the political movement popularized by (an unnamed) Teddy Roosevelt for the rise and dominance of college football. Just the way the union-loving, high-tax, government-giveaway liberal majority down South likes it.
• Death Spiral — Online journalism guru and New York Mets blogger Jason Fry thinks his team’s lack of money to improve might be the last straw for his fandom.
• Stage Struck — The art of the sports profile, with an emphasis on top tennis stars, gets the profile treatment in The Paris Review from Scott Korb, who leans John McPhee’s way in identifying the master of the form.
• The Death of the Anna Kournikova Era — Was there one? Jay Caspian Kang says so at Grantland, where he wonders whether we’ve finally overcome our objectification of female athletes this summer. This is such a facile hot mess I don’t know where to start, so I’ll stop.
• Writing the Olympics — Nicolas Lezard agreed to write a thousand or so words a day every day during the London Olympics, which he wasn’t interested in. His words have become a book, “Nolympics,” just published by Penguin.
• Ajax, the Dutch, the War — Simon Kuper explains the difficulties getting information about and talking to Holocaust survivors while reporting his book, just now published in the U.S.: “Since finishing the book, I have found myself almost unable to read or hear anything about the Holocaust.”

Keeping tabs on which country is “winning” the Olympics — and we know which country this is — is one of the most jingoistic activities of an already jingoistic event, at least what is presented to American viewers.

Much has been made about the success of U.S. women athletes at the London Olympics, and there is quite a bit to celebrate. From gymnastics to women’s soccer and now boxing, the triumphs of American females at these Games were noteworthy.

Whether it’s Gabby or Alex, Missy or Candace, Sanya or Abby, they’re “our girls,” the newly-minted heroines of Olympic glory, as important to American medal collection as the men. The “Title IX Olympics,” some have proclaimed. In fact, this Tweet was making its rounds quite frequently:

“If US Women were a country, they would be ranked 3rd in Medal Count. Thank you Title IX.”

In the myopia of American culture, especially when it comes to the Olympics, this means that women have now become an integral part of the jingoistic narrative of how we will officially remember London.

This began early during the Olympics with the Stenographer of the Sisterhood, naturally, who clucked as only she can::

“The last grouchy anti-Title IX holdouts must have succumbed by now. Either that or they are hiding in their closets. Americans love to win more than anything else, and the nation’s greatest winners are now women.”

To not wax euphoric about what she does, of course, is to be “anti-Title IX,” and suggesting otherwise was implied repeatedly to those of us in supposedly resistant precincts by the American sports media herd in London.

None could be bothered to point out that Title IX has had absolutely no impact on quite a number of these sports, most notably gymnastics, tennis and boxing. Teen swimming sensations Missy Franklin and Katie Ledecky are where they are — just as Janet Evans was nearly 25 years ago — because of superb club training programs more than scholastic sports, which limits their time in the pool and access to world-class competition.

This is not to diminish what Title IX has produced, but to illustrate that it’s never been the predominant factor in some sports, contrary to the assertions of women’s sports advocates and journalists pandering to an easy storyline.

The second portion of the above quote is more to the point. The maturity of women’s sports in the U.S. is feeding into our “winning” culture, which attracts all-important media and corporate sponsorship attention that improves mainstream standing. Title IX has been an important vehicle to an end that, when you think of it, runs counter to what the law was supposed to be about.

That’s an irony that will always be missed by the celebratory American media. What also isn’t being written is how truly gargantuan the gap between U.S. women athletes and female athletes around the world has become. The London Olympics revealed that the American Olympic industry — for men and women — is as strong as it has ever been. That’s the real difference, as much, if not more, than the long-term effects of Title IX.

Meanwhile, for female athletes in other countries, who in some cases were trotted out as tokens for Western media consumption, or were seen as victims of the “gender police” for other cultural reasons, their prospects don’t appear to be all that brighter with the London Games complete.

Outgoing IOC president Jacques Rogge hasn’t exactly been a paragon for gender equality in his tenure. But he is a realist, as he showed Sunday when asked about the next steps for the progress of women in sports, at least outside the United States:

“We are going to continue to discuss with the local authorities and sports ministries and try to find strategies and solutions to improve the situation.

“It will take time. The ideal situation will not be found tomorrow. This is work for probably a decade at least to see major improvements.”

In the understandable excitement over the female American exceptionalism demonstrated in London, these comments will be utterly forgotten — if they were noted at all — on these shores.

Today’s excerpt from my new book: “Beyond Title IX: The Cultural Laments of Women’s Sports,” details a prominent Title IX blogger’s first bout with media attention not that many years ago. But the national notoriety surrounding the Pink Locker Room at the University of Iowa is something that Erin Buzuvis does not mention these days, and it’s easy to understand why:

In 2005, while serving as a visiting law professor at the University of Iowa, Erin Buzuvis was horrified to discover that the visitors’ locker room at Kinnick Stadium was awash in light pink paint. Indeed, it was a very calming shade ordered up in the 1980s by former football coach Hayden Fry as a psychological ploy. It worked very, very well.

The late Michigan football coach Bo Schembechler hated the locker room for competitive reasons. Buzuvis hated it for cultural reasons, and on a blog furnished for her by the Iowa law school, she denounced it as a symbol of misogyny and homophobia (the post was soon deleted). As she later explained to an Associated Press reporter in Cedar Rapids:

“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.”

Hawkeye Nation went berserk, as Iowa football fans vigorously attacked her on message boards and blogs, with some regrettably making death threats and posting other vulgarities.

The story went nationwide, as the protests of Buzuvis and Jill Gaulding, another Iowa law professor, became a laughingstock. “Research shows brains pick up stereotypes like sponges soak up water,” insisted Gaulding. “One solution to reducing stereotypes, especially negative ones, is to not have them around.”

Buzuvis continued to insist that the pink locker room “belittles every female athlete out there,” although it’s doubtful she polled even one to reach her conclusion.

Iowa football coach Kirk Ferentz was at a loss for words: “I wish I had enough time to think about it. . . . But I really haven’t burned a lot of brain cells on it.”

This section of the book details the origins of the “football as the enemy” complaints by some women’s sports advocates that later led to a more general broadside against the “hegemonic masculinity” that rules American sports culture. Another Title IX legal expert, Deborah Brake, has alleged that the law is about more than “the place of women in sports” but also “the meaning of gender.”

Title IX is not what really gets her cracking in the morning, but a means toward a narrow cultural ideal.

Buzuvis, who now professes law on the East Coast, has ditched the worst of her academic verbiage on her blog. On Monday, her sidekick posted this about regarding calls to drop football from the Title IX calculations:

“Judy Dixon has said she’s tired of fighting football. A lot of us are tired of fighting football — or heck patriarchy in general — but it doesn’t mean we just capitulate.”

This a classic example of a sports feminist establishment whose ideas are hoisted as mainstream and are therefore considered unassailable. Peel away a layer or two, and you will find something very different.

The deluge of celebratory media coverage in recent weeks over the 40th anniversary of the enactment of Title IX has been remarkable.

I’ve commented on this blog about the flood the zone coverage of espnW, and what has been missing from its narrative.

On  Saturday, ESPN Classic filled in some of that gap with a substantive documentary, “The Battle of Title IX,” that did more than cheerlead about the women’s sports revolution and airbrush away controversy over how the law is being enforced. It tackled the issue head on, treating the concerns of displaced male athletes with respect, instead of using it to blame “King Football.”

The same goes for a package of articles from “Only a Game,” NPR’s weekly sports program. “Title IX’s Impact on Men’s Sports” is the second most popular link on the website of WBUR, the Boston NPR affiliate that is “Only a Game’s” home base.

These are longstanding issues that will not go away, no matter how much the Title IX establishment wants to ignore them.

But as I wrote last year in my blog series “Women’s Sports Without Illusions,” there’s so much more to women’s sports than Title IX. Producing that series inspired me to expand on those ideas, and I’m proud to announce I’ve just published an e-book on the subject.

“Beyond Title IX: The Cultural Laments of Women’s Sports,” explores, as the title indicates, more than just the controversial application of the law.

These issues include fairly recent complaints about a pink football locker room at a Big Ten university and a Sports Illustrated cover photo of a fully clothed champion female skier as an unwitting phallic symbol, as well as cries of media “invisibility” as women athletes are seen on television more than ever.

There are also continuing denials of undeniable physiological differences between men and women, and as a result, growing calls for the wall of sex-segregated sports to be torn down completely.

This litany of grievance gives women’s sports a bad name, far more than protracted battles over Title IX ever have. You may not have heard much about this, since many of the individuals I profile in this book are regarded by the mainstream media as “experts” in Title IX and “scholars” of women’s sports. In truth, they are ideologues who peddle dubious theories based on women as an oppressed class, rather than as individuals making their own decisions about how they experience sports in their own lives.

In that sense, these leading figures of women’s sports have flouted the spirit of a movement that has lost its way. I will have excerpts from the book posted here the rest of the week, starting with the first part of the book, “The Paradox of Equality,” which explains how even leading women in sports have struggled over the years to define what equality in sports is supposed to mean:

“The continuing problem with Title IX isn’t that there is a law, or a need for enforcement. It’s about how this is to be done, 40 years after its passage, and three decades after the creation of sports compliance regulations that have largely done their job.

“Title IX was never meant to exact a numerical result. The stalwart work of activists and friendly courts has flouted the true intent and spirit of the law, with the Brown case serving as a tipping point.

“Instead of abiding by what Congress had in mind when it passed the law, activists today condemn any suggestion of reworking the sports regulations — not the statute — as heresy, as an attempt to ‘weaken’ Title IX and set back women’s sports. They are hysterical, they are loud, they get mainstream media outlets to do their bidding and they dial up a slew of lawyers as they did when they were fighting justified battles two and three decades ago.

“But American society has evolved more than they will acknowledge. The most powerful entities in college athletics know that women’s sports is here to stay, and our history of social progress has always included a re-evaluation of laws and regulations.

“After all, the civil rights, feminist and gay rights movements in America have fought to strike down laws and court rulings that were unjust and immoral and treated individuals in those groups as second-class citizens. Revising the Title IX sports regulations to reflect where women athletes are now, and not the 1970s, is a needed step firmly with the future in mind, while activists remain stuck firmly in the past.”

For the price of an iced double tall frappa-foo-foo coffee whatever, you can buy the whole book. If you’re a member of Amazon Prime, it’s free. Regardless, I would like to know what you think.

I haven’t benefitted from Title IX in a sports context, and readers here certainly know I’ve got problems with the way the sports compliance provisions are being enforced by the courts.

But this terrific video compiled by World Team Tennis is the perfect tribute to a woman who has done so much more than to advocate for Title IX. Billie Jean King’s impact on women — and men — is far greater than a law will ever be. This certainly has been the case for me.

She questioned why things were the way they were for female athletes and for women in society, and did something heroic about it.

It’s perfectly understandable to go back down memory lane with the 40th anniversary of Title IX approaching and recall what women’s sports were like in the 1970s.

I know this, because I was playing in fledgling youth sports leagues at the time, limited to slow-pitch softball and six-on-six basketball. That was all we had, but those memories — and they were blissful ones — have been on my mind a lot not just in the last few weeks, but as I have gotten older and tried to understand what they have meant to my life.

I understand why there have been so many accounts of the women rowers at Yale who stripped down to nothing in the mid-1970s to protest the lack of facilities and resources that their male counterparts took for granted.

Even if these happy media chroniclers haven’t written at all about the female athletes who fired the first shot across the bow for their rights under Title IX, I understand. Three years before the Yale rowers, several young women college tennis players sued other women, those leading the first intercollegiate athletic governing body for women, but who thought that women athletes shouldn’t be allowed scholarships.

Not a word about any of this has been uttered during this “celebratory” time, but I understand why. It would dash the familiar narrative of men — and only men — standing in the way of progress for women in sports. The fuller history of women in sports is more than pock-marked with decades of resistance from women sports leaders, but there is no room for any of this now. Or ever.

Aside from that, the memories and recollections and perspectives from so many individuals — athletes, coaches, administrators, activists, parents and others — have been useful in helping those of younger generations appreciate how much progress has been made in such a short amount of time.

What’s becoming almost unbearable are the shrieks from the Title IX establishment — including some prominent media types — that we must continue to “fight” as though this were still the 1970s.

On today’s espnW — the official benefactor of the Women’s Sports Foundation — columnist Johnette Howard has continued her employers’ continuing stenography on this issue.

In particular, Howard fumes about the recent decision by a conservative Catholic school in Arizona not to play in a state championship baseball team because its opponent included a female player:

“That happened in 2012 America. The same 2012 America that has a pretty roiling political debate about whether there’s a ‘war on women’ over everything from birth control to workplace rights to, well, you name it.”

Of course. The “war on women.” I may be more liberal than Howard, and I deeply despise the gender politics of the right, but this is ridiculous. Title IX has always been about politics, and the flawed way in which it is being enforced in sports reflects the political agenda of the Title IX establishment.

I understand that, too.

But Howard points to the example of Paige Sultzbach to conjure up a phony existing “war” on Title IX, a law she says has amazingly endured “given the sustained, occasionally ingenious, sometimes mean-spirited, sneaky and downright cynical attempts to roll it back or scrub it from the books completely.”

While there were stalwart opponents of Title IX and its sports regulations in the 1970s and into the 1980s, those foes — the NCAA and the lords of college football — were conquered long ago. All that’s left are a few individuals and groups who want to revamp the regulations and change the current interpretation of the law away from one that places an emphasis on proportionality, on numbers.

They’re not talking about scrubbing it from the books. They’re not being “mean-spirited” in pointing out that the focus on numbers has been at a great cost to some male athletes in some sports. Critics of the interpretation — not Title IX — are talking about making it work to reflect the intent and spirit of Congress when it passed the law (without any mention of sports) that President Nixon signed 40 years ago on Saturday.

It’s one thing to remember the past, and to learn from the examples of women’s sports pioneers, and to appreciate what exists now. I may never agree with some of them on Title IX, but I do respect their passion and their tenacity for their cause.

It’s another thing altogether to continue to fight the past, as though we were still living in it. I’m sure Howard remembers the 1970s, as I do. To be honest, I had almost forgotten about disco music until the recent deaths of Donna Summer and Robin Gibb.

I’m not trying to be flip here, but to point out that perpetual indignation can work against your own best interests. Too many high-profile women’s sports leaders, such as former Women’s Sports Foundation CEO Donna Lopiano, remain stuck in the 1970s, still bristling about what they didn’t have, as she reiterated again this week:

“I don’t think anyone could have envisioned the kind of reality we have today. It’s hard to envision a future you never had.”

And she’s regarded as one of the true visionaries of women’s sports. I didn’t have much more in the ways of opportunities than Lopiano did, but this is a perfect example of why the present tone of advocacy, as well as the Title IX regulations, have to change with the future in mind.

I tried to shake some cobwebs loose about this a year ago in my series “Women’s Sports Without Illusions.”

I’ve updated those posts in a new project that I will be unveiling here very soon. So please stay tuned.

Both espnW and Sports Illustrated have compiled lists of the Top 40 women athletes of the Title IX era, and they’re both revealing in their approaches.

First of all, SI’s list is already done and available on one link, in a very compelling photo gallery. There are some notable omissions. No Dot Richardson, softball gold medalist and a key ambassador in her sport’s growth in the 1990s. No Cammi Granato, who in 2010 became one of the first two women inducted into the Hockey Hall of Fame.

And Diana Taurasi as the top basketball player, ahead of even LPGA legend Annika Sorenstam? I’ve always been a big fan of Taurasi, but to put her ahead of hoopsters Cheryl Miller, Teresa Edwards and Ann Meyers? Hmmmm.

Sports fans love to argue about lists like this, however, and perhaps this list will create some passionate discussion as the 40th anniversary of Title IX approaches next month.

But espnW’s Top 40 list figures to create discussion for the athletes it is including — even women athletes whose careers have not been affected by Title IX at all. This list is being added once a day, and today’s No. 37 pick is Granato. But she’s the first athlete profiled who competed in college athletics. And this is just the problem.

The others thus far: Mary Lou Retton, jockey Julie Krone and Chinese Olympic diver Fu Mingxia. The disclaimer says”an industry-wide panel of journalists and women’s sports experts have cast their votes, which were tabulated by an independent, outside agency.”

That’s all good and well, but to declare that Title IX is a “law whose ripple effects extend far beyond the U.S., creating a women’s sports culture awash in opportunity” is more than a stretch, even for the purpose of this list.

The SI list contains no tennis players, no figure skaters, only two golfers — Sorenstam and Nancy Lopez; and just one gymnast, former Georgia All-American Courtney Kupets. No Mary Lou. No Venus. No Serena. No Martina. No Chrissie. No Steffi. No Nadia. No Picabo. No Kristi. No Lindsey. No Danica.

And this is as it should be. SI’s disclaimer noted that athletes on the list had to have competed at least one year in college sports, and that its list was compiled by its staffers.

By clicking through the SI photo gallery, you begin to see where Title IX has had its greatest impact — on women’s team sports in particular, and in some individual women’s Olympic sports, such as swimming and track and field.

But even then, there’s no acknowledgement that non-scholastic competition and development played much of a hand in the rise of these athletes. Mia Hamm was a member of the U.S. women’s soccer team before she ever stepped on a college soccer field. Sorenstam gave up college eligibility at the University of Arizona to join the LPGA Tour. Marion Jones cut short her basketball and track career at the University of North Carolina to pursue Olympic glory. Janet Evans, a teenage gold medalist in Seoul, later found the practice and competitive limits of college swimming too restrictive.

Even the LPGA Tour that Lopez and Sorenstam graced with their presence is becoming more global, with Koreans and the Taiwanese star Yani Tseng dominating. The American pro Natalie Gulbis bypassed a college apprenticeship, playing just one season at Arizona.

These matters cannot be pointed out during a time of “celebration,” of course, except by skunks at a garden party like me. But they are important to note.

For all of the marvelous things Title IX has done, it does have some significant limits. Its true cultural impact around the world isn’t as broad as the espnW disclaimer. To cite one very immediate example, Saudi Arabia is flat refusing to send women athletes to the London Olympics.

Brazil has a female head of state and the best female soccer player in the world in Marta, but its soccer federation and its society treats the distaff side of the sport with utter contempt. Indeed, America’s embrace of women’s soccer is not the rule, but the exception.

It’s fine to honor and point out the accomplishments of women athletes around the world, and those American women who did not compete in college athletics. But not on a list designed to commemmorate Title IX.

For the women’s sports that are the most popular, lucrative and commercially viable are those that have not been dramatically affected by the impact of the law. Most had decades of a head start on basketball, soccer and hockey.

I’m hopeful this will change in my lifetime, but it is not the case now.

The Amateur International Boxing Association is now saying skirts are optional for competitors in the first women’s Olympic boxing tournament in London.

Another first-world crisis has been averted.

This optional position is probably the best, given the mixed opinions from the boxers. Some were incensed about what might have become compulsory; others were not.

In free Western societies this shouldn’t regarded as be the greatest indignity, although there has been plenty of serious squawking from the usual suspects about this affront to equality.

For female athletes in Afghanistan, just getting in the ring is a miracle. Especially those few participating in combat sports who are defying the remnants of harsh Taliban proscriptions against their very participation in society.

Sadaf Rahimi, 17, is training for the London Games near a stadium in Kabul where women were once stoned for adultery:

“I hope the Taliban don’t come back and take over. But if they do, I urge them to let women engage in sports and go to school.”

There’s no mention what she was wearing. As if that mattered. But it’s not hard to guess.

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.