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J. Steven Svoboda is a member of TheMensCenter Advisory Council, an Independent attorney active in human rights law and Executive Director of Attorneys for the Rights of the Child (ARC).
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By J. Steven Svoboda... |
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
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