Tilting the Playing Field:
Schools, Sports, Sex and Title IX.” By Jessica Gavora. San Francisco:
Encounter Books, 2002. 181 pages. $24.95 US, $37.50 Canada.
www.encounterbooks.com.
Jessica Gavora, herself a former
college basketball player, has written a virtually perfect book about
how America’s Title IX law has been cynically manipulated to
drastically limit men’s (and sometimes also women’s) college athletic
options and toward other comparably destructive purposes. This book is
so good, it hurts. It hurts to learn of the thousands of university
sports teams that have been terminated, including Olympic powerhouses
like the UCLA swimming and diving teams, but also including countless
guys who played for the love of it, often without any scholarship aid
at all. It hurts to learn about how US tax dollars are funding an
Office of Civil Rights that has issued “non-binding” legal position
papers on the eve of several of the most critical Title IX federal
court cases, and how every such decision then followed the OCR
position.
It hurts to learn in such
painstaking detail about all the lost opportunities suffered by
dedicated, talented, passionate athletes to expand their skills while
simultaneously obtaining an education. What hurts the most is that
men’s losses did not result in women’s gains, except on paper and in
the minds of a few radical feminist activists.
It gets so ridiculous sometimes
that it is ALMOST funny. In some cases, even when outside fundraising
meant that the university would not have to contribute a penny toward
a sports program, it still was not allowed to continue. Suits are
brought by outside activists even when not a single aggrieved woman
can be found on campus to bring a complaint.
It is truly depressing to realize
the extent to which the women’s movement has abandoned all but the
flimsiest pretext of seeking equality and has transformed a number of
different battlefields into identity politics contests between men and
women. Feminists succeeded in playing the woman-as-victim card, over
and over again, until they convinced courts to directly contradict
Congress’ crystal clear insistence that the law not be used to promote
a quota system. At the same time, with the exception of rare folks
like California Congresswoman Maxine Waters, who lauded the law as “a
big fat quota” (a good thing in her mind), feminists told the
bald-faced lie that they were not imposing numerical sports
participation requirements on universities.
It is bitterly amusing to learn
how most of women’s gains in sports PRECEDED activists’ use of Title
IX, pointing up the utter fallaciousness of the tiresomely common
claims that any successful sportswoman owes her victories to the law.
Another merit of this book is it highlights how clearly feminists have
worked things out to have their cake and eat it too. Man-hater par
excellence Mary Daly considers it her right to exclude men from her
college classes since their presence might be uncomfortable for some
women. Women are every bit as good as men and must be able to compete
on an equal scale, and when they cannot, as with combat or sports, the
rules must be changed. Separate but equal schools are wonderful for
girls but terrible for boys. Girls can compete in boys’ sports but not
vice versa. And so on. As Gavora dryly comments, “Disregarding the
illogic, they assert the equality of interests and abilities of men
and women while at the same time demanding special protection for
females.”
What should be of greater concern
to anyone who cares about equal opportunity for females is the notion
“that young girls aren’t worthy of respect and admiration unless and
until they act like young boys.” Some activists have gone so far as to
assert that if women don’t want to play sports, they probably don’t
really know what they want. It is the universities’ duty, not to meet
demand, but to CREATE it. In fact, if a school has the same number of
men and women in its student body and gives all interested male and
female athletes an equal chance at playing varsity sports, it will
almost certainly be found in violation of Title IX!
But wait! It gets worse. Four
Texas cheerleaders sued under Title IX—AND WON—after they were kicked
off their cheerleading squads for being pregnant. When parents of
players on a boys’ high school baseball team volunteered their time
and money to build a nice stadium for them (which was higher quality
than the girls’ softball field), the court ordered that the facilities
had to be equal regardless of the source of funding. “So the boys’
baseball “Home of the Mustangs” sign had to be painted over since the
girls didn’t have one.” Similarly, a men’s team that is successful at
fundraising and alumni support is not allowed to spend the money it
raises on itself. Sadly, the National Collegiate Athletic Association
(NCAA), which originally fought to exempt athletics from Title IX and
later struggled to exempt the money-making sports (football and men’s
basketball), now collaborates with the Department of Education in the
assault on men’s athletics.
Since Title IX activists are so
focused on numbers, here are some figures they don’t often mention:
NCAA member universities sponsor 553 more athletic programs for women
than for men. Today the average female student-athlete receives more
scholarship aid than the average male student-athlete. NCAA schools
spend more on the average women’s basketball player than the average
football player. And female athletes in sports other than basketball
(which is women’s “glamour” sport) cost more than males in sports
other than football. Over half of NCAA Division II and III
institutions (schools with more modest athletic budgets) now find
themselves in violation of Title IX for giving TOO MUCH financial aid
to female athletes. Typically, football and men’s basketball keep the
other men’s teams AND all the women’s teams afloat financially. And
still the claims of women’s victimization continue.
Football is the Big Evil as far as
Title IX activists like the National Women’s Law Center are concerned,
largely because of its association with untrammeled masculinity. Now
the NWLC is advocating to expand the reach of Title IX even further
beyond its intended scope, using a similar theory that certain
school-based activities must exactly reflect student-body composition
or else something wrong is happening. In March 1999, in what Gavora
aptly terms a “breathtaking expansion of liability for schools,” the
US Supreme Court decided that school districts could be held liable
for damages from student-on-student sexual harassment. In 2001 the
NWLC filed a complaint charging the New York City school system with
violating Title IX because participation in the city’s vocational high
school programs did not mirror the sex breakdown of the schools. As
Leo Kocher, wrestling coach and assistant professor at the University
of Chicago, asks, why isn’t this same approach being used to target
disproportionate female university enrollment, which would seem to be
the most fundamental inequity? Or why not apply Title IX to reduce
high numbers of women in dance? In theater? In nursing? The answer, of
course, is that in those cases it is women who participate more than
men, and there seems to be no political will to invoke Title IX to
these situations. What is next? Applying Title IX to force the
departure of “excess” male physicists?
If there is hope to be found here,
it is located in the growing awareness of the manifest wrongheadedness
of applying Title IX preferences as a means of social engineering.
Television networks such as the Public Broadcasting System and ESPN
are starting to broadcast reports which are bringing to the public
news of these gross distortions of a law intended not to create
preference but rather to outlaw discrimination on the basis of race or
sex. As Gavora writes, feminists’ “delicate balancing act—insisting on
special treatment for women at the same time as they insist on the
sameness of the sexes—reflects the increasingly tenuous position of
feminism in American public life today.” In her closing chapter of
practical suggestions for the future, Gavora notes that Title IX
quotas should be honestly labeled and fairly debated for what they
are, a discussion which the feminists movement has to date
successfully prevented but which cannot be held back indefinitely.
Sooner or later, thanks in no small part to Jessica Gavora’s superb
book, equal sports opportunity for all will again be the law in the
US.
©2000 J. Steven Svoboda
