Women's Sports Blog

Adding A Sport Just To Recruit Men- Fine, But Title IX Compliance Is Too Expensive?

Small, selective liberal arts colleges have been whining for years about their gender imbalance.  Turns out that young women have, shockingly, bought the message that they can do anything and that includes becoming extremely successful candidates for college.  Yet after years of exclusion and missed opportunities for women, the natural correction of some schools running, say, 60-40 women to men is being treated like the threat of the century.  The problem?  Well, oddly enough that imbalance allegedly makes it harder to recruit more men.  Don't worry, you're not the only one to whom that reasoning seems circular.  The second issue disappears if the first issue isn't considered a national emergency.  There's no real threat that these schools will go all-female, after all.  Plus there are still universities that skew the other way (and there's always Deep Springs, Wabash, Hampton-Sydney, etc, to keep the old order safe).  Now that the federal government's civil rights wing is back to doing its actual job rather than investigating enemies of the Republican party, it's looking into the various ways the admissions process at certain schools discriminates against women.  The aspect that's interesting for WSB's purposes is that one of the ways some of the colleges involved have considered recruiting more men is adding more men's sports teams.  But since pesky Title IX isn't going anywhere that would mean adding more women's sports teams as well, dammit, which is just so costly.  Never mind that the cost actually comes from a morally shaky ploy to further a morally shaky end.  Adding a team in itself is fine, but think about extra recruiting for, say, whites, and see how you feel about it.  The Title IX requirement is just a way to make it slightly less sketchy by forcing schools to consider the consequences of their actions.  It is a real problem that some groups of men are not going to college in the numbers we would hope.  These are not the groups who would be applying to Williams, anyway.  And the problems are systemic, not to be solved at the admissions end.  But as usual, it's much easier to blame Title IX than to address that. 

Derartu Tulu: What Sports Are About

Good lord, there have been a lot of Big Important Stories on the blog recently.  I promise some light-hearted banter next.  But I have to relay the amazing tale of yesterday's New York Marathon winner, 37-year-old Derartu Tulu.  The first black African to win Olympic gold in the 10,000 meters, she retired from racing when a comeback attempt faltered after the birth of her second child.  She certainly hasn't been running at the elite level at the marathon distance recently, with her only victory coming in 2001.  But not only did she accomplish another first, becoming the first Ethiopian to win the New York Marathon, she did so with an astonishing display of sportspersonship, at one point slowing to wait for the injured Paula Radcliffe, whom she supported with words of encouragement throughout the race.  Tulu's ethic is one of the purest example of how sports can bring out the best in the human spirit. 

Photos: Don Emmert/AFP/Getty.

 

Is Twitter A Woman Thing?

There's been a lot of posting recently among the Women Talk Sports crowd about the power of social networking for women's sports.  My contribution is an observation I made early on in my Twitter tenure that has continued to cross my mind from time to time.  I had always sworn never to use the service, thinking of it as the last frontier in self-absorption and oversharing, until the day I found out that a friend, a smart, balanced friend whom I respected, loved it.  She saw the 140 character limit as a challenge in creating pithy and interesting updates.  I checked her feed.  It didn't sound like 'woke up, ate a muffin, brushed teeth, caught BART.'  She mused and asked questions.  This challenged the part of Facebook I'd never liked, the idea that you have to write a status update about something you're doing rather than something you're thinking.  I signed up. 

I quickly discovered the other, more popular and more unexpected (by the developers) aspect of Twitter: the presence of people in the public eye whom one might follow.  Twitter became an important blogging resource by enabling me to follow pro athletes and sports journalists.  Also politicians, Web 2.0 theorists, and Sarah Haskins.  From at the beginning I noticed that my numbers were skewed heavily toward women.  Even now when things have become more balanced, 48 of the 72 people I follow are women (two-thirds).  Initially I wondered if it was just my own selection bias.  But Kara Swisher reported back from a tech conference that users of Twitter were running female in large percentages.  I also found a graphic representation on a sports social media site, that aggregated the tweets of pro athletes and showed their pictures in a grid.  Ten-ish for Major League Baseball, ten-ish for the NHL..then the page exploded with images for the WNBA.  There is no question that more female athletes are tweeting than male athletes. 

From a sports perspective, this is women taking advantage of a niche that can't be exploited by men because the downside is too large.  Male athletes make a lot of money, have important sponsorships and are well-known worldwide. Many of them are also immature and volatile, which makes broadcasting their every thought to the world a problem. A number of men's pro sports leagues and college teams have already restricted or banned Twitter.  Meanwhile, women's sports are embracing it because what they need is exposure, and they thrive on the personal connection between athlete and fan.  They've thus far avoided any major controversy.  Although it's only a matter of time before a percentage of the athletes lodge foot firmly in mouth, the benefits outweigh the potential cost in this particular balance. 

I think there's another reason, though, which is more connected to the way our culture views women and the way we're taught to socialize (NOT inherent differences between the sexes, I might add).  'What are you doing?' is the question asked by someone who has called to talk, to be informed about what's going on at that moment in your life.  Prolix pronouncements, where you bang on about your personal philosophy, are impossible with the character limit.  The perception is that Twitter is chatty, which is a mode of communication linked with femininity in our culture.   I don't think men see it as acceptable to document their time in chatty ways.  The balance is probably shifting now, since it has become clear that Twitter is a useful PR and business tool (which is why, despite low rates of returning regular-person users, it's probably going to continue to be successful).  However its initial appeal was to the virtue of keeping connected, long the province of women.  It makes perfect sense that female athletes, as a subset of the population of women, would embrace this technology first: many of them travel away from family and friends and are looking for new, more immediate forms of communication, and they also understand the importance of building personal relationships with fans and athletes from other sports.  The small, quotidian aspect of the service would make sense to them since those are things women are taught to value.  They are certainly aspects of Twitter that I enjoy, getting glimpses into the daily world both of friends and of people I find inspiring or informed.  Most people I meet don't really get Twitter, but that's often a function of knowing the caricature rather than the thing itself.  There will always be a crucial place for long-form thought, but Twitter has tremendous potential to make connections. 

...Except For The President

So now the word is that not only does Obama not play hoops with women, he's also never golfed with a woman during his time as president despite having been out on the course many times since his election.  Helen at WHB, you know I love you, but applying the 'flip test' here doesn't make any sense.  Since women are the minority sports-wise, our concern is their inclusion particularly and not gender imbalance per se.  An all-female presidential basketball game* doesn't have any kind of historical overtones of discrimination, just like nobody should give a shit if the criticism were that Obama never played with any white folks (Rush might complain from his delusion bunker).  The official response was pretty annoying, as well.  'I am surrounded by strong women at the office and at home' begs for the response 'so what do you want, a cookie?'  It doesn't address the issue at hand.  Of course there are hundreds of more important things on the table, like the administration's ongoing wimpfest over the public option, but it shows an interesting set of assumptions that you'd not even think to go and find some women at the White House who were interested in pick-up basketball.  Daily life choices are more telling than big stage ones in this respect. 

*Val Ackerman?  For real? 

Photos of the Week: The White House Is Happening

Michelle Obama and friends including Valerie Jarrett and Jackie Joyner Kersee watch Dominique Dawes on the balance beam (photo by Samantha Appleton):

 

Ms. Obama takes part in the Healthy Kids Fair, having wisely lost the flats she was wearing:

The Head Cheerleader Paradox

Sorry about the lack of posting recently.  It has been a weird week, complete with a bizarre sleep schedule, which means I've had no time to keep up with sports.  You could tell me that Margaret Court won the WTA championship and I'd believe you.  So here are some things I've been musing about that aren't timely per se. 

This particular thought occurred to me when I was stuck in traffic with the radio tuned to the hits station that has inexplicably replaced San Francisco's dance channel (both have rotations that only contain about twenty songs, but at least the latter happily billed itself as music for the gay man).  For approximately the four hundredth time that day, Taylor Swift's latest single came on.  My brain must have been particularly empty of stimulation at this point, because it caused me to have an actual thought.  Yes, a Taylor Swift song.  Why is the head cheerleader so frequently the villain in these little dramas, be they on the radio, TV, or in the movies?  Cheerleaders are clearly the lazy writer's shorthand for cliquish popular girls, in which popularity is used as a proxy for mean behavior.  Yet why is there always also some innocent, good-hearted popular boy who is being corrupted by this heinous woman?  In other words, popularity is bad in these female-driven narratives only when it's an attribute of other women, not men. 

No surprise, I have a couple of theories.  The more benign one is that we're displacing our societal discomfort with cheerleading onto the participants. In the early days of college sports, cheerleaders were men, which makes a certain amount of sense.  They generally have louder voices and the goal of the cheerleader was to lead the crowd in cheers.  At some point, the decision was made that there should be young women involved.  Over the years the short skirt and tight top have accrued to the position, and also the weird corollary that cheers must take place in very thin, shrill voices, which may protect the vocal cords but also makes the sound fail to carry.  It's often unclear how a couple of enthusiastic students from the crowd couldn't do better than any but the most elite squads.  In the post Title IX atmosphere, there has been a certain amount of embarrassment about high school cheerleading.  Many teams have worked harder on competitive routines or morphed into dance teams, which contain the same amount of T&A but at least have a recognizable aerobic activity attached.  But watching the cheerleaders for professional sports brings the idea to its bare essentials, that breasts are provided as a sideshow for the straight male fans in case they get bored by the actual game.  How can we countenance such a thing for our teenage daughters, especially in an age when they could choose to play sports instead?  Thus it must be the fault of the participants.  The only people who rise to the top of high school cheerleading ranks must be beautiful but stupid, or deeply cruel to their fellows, or both. 

This leads to point number two: if that last sentence seems to tar with a pretty wide brush, why do cheerleaders keep getting represented this way while the most popular boy, the head cheerleader's erstwhile boyfriend, gets a free pass?  The narrative is always that this boy is a sensitive, kind soul trapped in a superficial world and must be stolen by our unglamorous but talented heroine.  Yet the high school sports culture for boys is just as likely to produce unpleasant products as the cheerleading culture.  What we're dealing with here is the classic problem of female solidarity.  As in, we're encouraged not to have any because we're supposedly in competition for the scarce resource of male attention.  It couldn't be that this boy is with the cheerleader because he shares the general view that only girls who look like models are desirable, or because he's equally stupid, or because she's the one who's aiming low.  Nope, the boy is the prize and she's standing in the way.  It's probably true that lots of cheerleaders are cliquish, shallow, and mean, because that's how they believe they can succeed.  Some of them aren't any of those things.  Likewise, plenty of male high school athletes are utter jerks and have no interest in having intelligent, talented girlfriends.  Plenty aren't.  But the other woman will always be the villain because that's exactly where she needs to be to prevent women from realizing that if they don't compete, they can turn their energies on the system and actually change things.  This is not a new insight.  It's fairly common, in fact.  But it's surprising to me how much the competition narrative persists long past the point when we should have abandoned it, and often from sources who, being perceptive, should know better. 

Forward!- An Expansion

Based on yesterday's post, readers may have taken away the following: a) since the group blog was created, WSB doesn't actually have to write about any other disabled feminist bloggers or b) WSB can discuss it for a paragraph and then move on to complaining about jerks in hockey.  The question may also have been raised 'why does a women's sports blog have to talk about disability at all?' 

Neither a or b are true despite the impression the post may have created.  There are lots of bloggers still to highlight and issues still to investigate at length.  Why?  Because, most simply, disabled women are women and their sporting endeavors count in the title.  Less apparent but no less true, sports are centered around the body: our aesthetics of the body, our hopes and fears about the body, our bodily aspirations, etc.  Yet too often we assume that they are about the best a temporarily-abled body can achieve.  Look at the controversy it creates when the 'wrong' sorts of additions are made to that body.  When that body is not, then, what is stereotypically defined as normal or ideal, it further upsets our notions of what sports do or are.  Remember the case of the disabled golfer, Casey Martin, who earned a tour card because he could play fine, but needed a cart to get around the courses?  The result was the revelation of the absolute non-comprehension of his fellows and the PGA, who whined that it wasn't fair, that walking was an integral part of golf and they might as well allow him to swing with mechanical arms, and forced him to go all the way to the Supreme Court to plead for his job.  By the time he won, the stress had ruined his game.  This is the kind of issue that is only illuminated by a radical disability perspective, and these issues crop up again and again in our contemporary sports landscape.  It's the kind of issue WSB and the rest of the women's sports blogosphere, we who are all too often guilty of plucking the latest 'inspiring' 'disabled athlete overcomes blah blah blah' narrative off the wire, should pay more attention to.

Forward!

Update- please also see the companion post. 

I had been planning a post about the score of awesome disabled feminist bloggers out there, but several of them beat me to the punch and established a group blog: FWD/Forward.  Whether you are temporarily able-bodied (think about that one for a minute) or currently disabled, you will find something thought-provoking on this site, something to challenge your preconceptions.  Contributors include the ever-awesome Amanda of Three Rivers Fog, who occasionally comments on the world of sports from a feminist perspective: she is a serious Penguins fan and can't stand Steelers culture. 

Viz. the Pens, it continues to strike me how incredibly soft-spoken Sidney Crosby is for a pro athlete (some other blog once wrote about how he also refused to play the 'I get lots of chicks' game), and of course if I had a dime for every time a hockey fan said he was a pussy, I would be able to retire to Bermuda.  The most shocking thing about hockey for me as an adult is how incredibly boorish the male fans are, especially given that hockey attracts more female fans at the games than any other Big Four sport.  It's sad how oblivious* many people, including many professional commentators, are to the fact that hockey fights are incredibly stupid-looking and unproductive, that they have nothing to do with the skills of the game and don't prevent more dirty play as their proponents claim.  The dirty play argument is a total canard: if anyone inveighs against headshots or tries to clean up the use of sticks, one of the few good things Bettman has done for the league, the cries of 'go play women's hockey' get even louder.  Yes, that specific 'insult.'  The league then abets this attitude by including fights in its highlight reels.  I had to lean on the fast-forward button to get through the Oilers-Flames last night.  First solution would be to have refs step in right away rather than waiting until the players fall to the ice, when the fight is effectively over.  Second is to stop putting fights in the highlights and also cut away from coverage on TV.  Would it outrage the jerks?  Sure it would, but let them leave the game to its actual fans. 

*I wrote "blind" and almost called the fight fans "idiots," and then my consciousness-raising from FWD kicked in.  Thanks, y'all. 

Stop Making Us Look Bad, Danica

Nascar hates women enough already, both in structure and culture, without you coming in and asking for a million dollars a race.  It's a privilege you'd even get to drive, given you're not a stock car professional.  Certainly you should get paid, and commensurately with the interest you'd bring back to the track, but showing some cognizance that there's a serious financial crisis going on in the sport, plus some humility, wouldn't hurt.   

ESPN's Body Issue: Poor Start

ESPN has put all six covers on the website, and two out of the three women are presented in a sexualized, passive, swimsuit edition type way (including a deliberately unthreatening photo of Serena), whereas none of the men are.  Two out of the three men are only photographed from the waist up, for instance.  They look like 'bodies' as one might see on a weight machine ad.  The Gina Carano image is at least actively engaged in sport, but her being topless doesn't make sense in context.  The most interesting image is Adrian Peterson's, because he's photographed in a non-typical pose for a male athlete.  It's reserved rather than aggressive.  But even he, who is photographed full-form, is wearing shorts!  In other words, the mens' sexuality gets to be implied whereas the women's must be on display and available to the viewer.