After Atalanta

This post is inspired by the 38th anniversary of Title IX which occurred last week. Actually it's "inspired" by this column by a sportswriter, blogger, and basketball fan. Wendy Parker believes it's time to get beyond Title IX. Me, too. But not in the way she means. She means it's time to move beyond enforcement. Because she doesn't like the proportionality prong. And all those men have suffered at the hands of us "dogmatic" activists with our "life-and-death rituals." Who knew we were all satanists, too? I thought I was the only one! Clearly Ms. Parker's editorial triggered the snarky button (not that it takes much). Seriously, though. the day we get to move beyond Title IX is the day after we've gotten beyond patriarchy. So in the vein of Ms.* Parker's piece I bring you some reasons about why it might be a good idea to move beyond patriarchy--in a sporting context. I could of course go on and on about patriarchy and things lik...

Indeed it is, Mother. Indeed it is. That was my mother's response after Christmas dinner to the news (as told by me) that two horses made the AP's list of the top female athletes of 2009. Plenty has been written about this already and even feminists have taken note. (The italics refer to the sometimes contrived strained relationship between feminism and sport.) The feminists over at Feministing had something to say about it. And so did a lot of other people. I don't feel the need to add anything else substantial. I don't have some kind of new angle on this story. The highly problematic comparisons between female athletes and horses and the ones between Serena Williams and the horses are obvious and dismaying. We could talk about how the people who created the list, the sports editors at AP affiliated newspapers, are predominantly men and predominantly white and middle class. But that's not a big insight either. And it's disappointing any way you look at it. If...

Hard to believe that once upon a time, the National Organization for Women was considered radical. That a lot of the popular sentiment that said the American women's movement of the late 60s and 70s as man-hating and radical came from the very visible actions of NOW. But today, and even back then to a certain extent, it's just a lot of the same liberal status quo junk; the "you go, girl" empowerment rhetoric that has not a lot of substance behind it. So my disappointment upon reading Patricia Ireland's (former NOW president) opinion piece on Florida State University women's basketball team's new snazzy website was palpable but not surprising. A few weeks ago, there was some chatter on teh internets about said website with people weighing in on the potential homophobia and certainly heteronormativity that underlies this website which features players dressed in evening wear. Blogger and sports writer Jayda Evans wrote about the FSU site as well as the overa...

Almost passed over yet another article about the bad economy and the effects on women's sports. You know, the one that invokes almost immediately the folding of the Houston Comets and the shaky pitch the WPS finds itself on. Though much later in the article it is noted that the WPS needed to average 4,000 attendees per game to remain sustainable and in the first weeks of the season is averaging 6,000. It is the LPGA actually that seems to be hit the hardest among women's sports and that is probably because they appeal to a different clientele. The hope among other women's sports is that the low cost of attending a game, tournament, or competition will draw people who are no longer willing to spend well over $100 for a family of 4 to attend a baseball game. The LPGA does not have those same advantages. And professional golf has always relied on high-end sponsorship because it is said to appeal to higher end customers--hence sponsorships by Rolex, Cadillac, etc. But in tough ...

So it's over. We can all get back to our lives now that March Madness has ended. But before I put an end to blog posts about collegiate women's basketball, I have a few things to say about...yes, feminism. I will start with what I am sure many would call the nitpicky: an article in the NYT about last night's championship game, the Big East, and the surprising appearance of Louisville. The men's team at Louisville, of course, did not make it to their Final Four as expected and so that meant, according to one player, that star Angel McCoughtry had become "the man"--a term she had no problem with because, as the writer notes, she's no "raging feminist." And she understands that men's basketball gets more attention, though she believes it's because men's basketball "has been around since the Stone Age." I don't mean to pick on McCoughtry here. My point is that a smidge of feminist leanings, or heck just a little bit of women...

Greta van Susteren of FOX News interviewed former MA governor Jayne Swift about Sarah Palin and the attacks on her by the "feminist left." That same feminist left that has allegedly hijacked feminism. Note though that some feminists from various chapters of NOW and a former Ms. magazine editor have supported Palin and those are feminists who, at least once upon a time, would have been considered part of the feminist left. Hard to believe that some women left NOW in the 60s and 70s because it was considered too radical in its stance on abortion and reproductive rights. So Swift gets on van Susteren's show to say how feminists exist at all points on the political spectrum and all feminists believe in fairness in a campaign, yada, yada. So van Susteren asks her well, "what is a feminist" and Swift replies: I think a feminist is someone who believes that women should have equal opportunity to men. I think it is someone who understands that Title IX allowed girls to...

It's me! Generally I dislike the phrase "good feminist" because it doesn't say much without an explanation of what one means when using the term feminist and it also is pretty judgy. But I'm not going there today. I simply want to point out that sometimes just sharing some facts can make a difference. Because when one of my tennis teammates emailed the group about the gift we were getting for our team captain, I felt the need to point out a problem. The plan was to purchase two gift certificates: one to the local spa, the other to Tennis Warehouse (so she could get some more animal print outfits--I won't even go there). So I responded that maybe we should consider the fact that TW still retains Justin Gimelstob as an endorser despite his recent misogynistic rants and that the company's recent apology didn't really cut it. And I was listened to. It could be that going with a local store is more practical (though the local place has lousy selection). But...

...on the other side of gender? I teach classes in women's studies and sports studies and I am always talking about race and gender (and class and sexuality and (dis)ability and a host of other identity markers) and thus I frequently hear sentiments such as this: "we shouldn't look at the color of a person; we should look at the person" and "we don't need feminism anymore; women are equal." This editorial out of Colorado kind of combines these sentiments. The author, a mother of two youngish children says her kids don't see gender. I hate to break it to you--but unless you are visually impaired, you see gender--and race and a host of other things. Here's an exercise I learned in grad school in a critical race theory class: Close your eyes. [Just humor me and do it.] Now recall a person you met in the past couple of weeks. Someone who you met in passing, someone whose name you might not even be able to immediately recall. Now can you identify that...

Outsports has a nice piece on Jenny Fulle , the first girl who was officially allowed to play Little League Baseball in 1974. It recounts the history of her case against LLB and the many obstacles she encountered on a local and national level. When I was doing research last year on how Ms . magazine covered women's sports, I came across Fulle's story more than once. This, along with the help she received from the her local chapter of the National Organization of Women (NOW), is a good example of how mainstream or liberal feminism did see the importance of, and worked for, girls' access to sport and other physical activities--something that is not often discussed or even considered in historical accounts of this period. And what's Fulle been up since fighting her way onto the diamond? Fighting her way to the top in another male-dominated business--movie production. She's an executive VP and executive producer for Sony Pictures Imageworks. And she's coaching her s...

Guess who was cited at the Ninth Carnival of Radical Feminists hosted at unconventional beauty ? Yep, it's me. Blogger ladoctorita/lily liked my post, Viva Las Vegas!, about gender in the gym and included it in the carnival. I like to think it had something to do with my snarky writing that day which included the line that she pulled as a header "But hell hasn't frozen over yet, so I'll revert to my cynical explanation." Ladoctorita offers some gym anecdotes of her own--well actually those of her friends--and recounts the story of a man who goes to the gym, for hours, just to ogle. He never works out. He has been kicked out of one gym thus far for his staring and hitting on women but persists nonetheless. This situation seems more egregious and potentially dangerous than the one in my gym but since I have been irked by one particular guy twice already this week, I am going to take this opportunity to complain. "The Admiral" (nicknamed by RP) has been the...

I had a great opportunity to talk about gender equity this weekend when I was on a longish bike ride. One of the women in the group is a former PE teacher and current freelance educator who works with schools to provide equitable after-school opportunities. So while admiring the scenery and dodging angry drivers who did not appreciate our endeavors, we started talking about her past experiences with single-sex PE and sports activities. She noted that girls with whom she has worked really enjoyed, for example, learning sports skills in a single-sex environment and she would get comments from the participants like "It's so much better without boys around" and "I learned to do something I never thought I could do." And I supported this program and its outcomes. But it was only a one-time program. When biker friend was a teacher, she taught single-sex PE. A few times she and the male PE teacher tried joint activities, but they quickly abandoned them because they did...

Critics are being quite harsh about Kim Clijsters's retirement. In this month's TENNIS , which was put to bed long before her announcement, they deride her for then intention to skip the US Open. But this column from Selena Roberts of the NY Times (kindly sent to me by a reader because I do not have a Times Select subscription) is the harshest condemnation I have seen yet. Roberts suggests that Clijsters is turning her back--negating practically--all the work that pioneers in the sport, like Billie Jean King, Martina Navratlilova, and Evert (note that Evert was not initially on board with this whole equality thing) did in the 70s and 80s. She writes that Clijsters would make " a terrible bra burner." (Of course all feminists are terrible bra burners given that no bras were ever burned; it's just a (anti?)-feminist urban legend.) Yes, some of us are none too pleased with the married/having children discourse that Clijsters herself is putting forth, but this is not...

My usual gripe about young women and feminism is their denial of the need for feminism which sometimes manifests in the "I'm not a feminist, but--" syndrome. But I have found teaching women's studies or gender-focused courses is a helpful way of feeling like I was doing something to combat this. Lately though I have seen an interesting inverse of the "I'm not a feminist, but--" syndrome. It's more like "I am a feminist, but--". The but in the cases I have seen being "but I don't really like women's sports" or "but I think Title IX is discriminatory against men." The first case is from a student columnist from The Loyolan (in LA) who seems to get it initially. She talks about sport as male-dominated, the attention female athletes get only when they take off their clothes, and the failure of professional women's sports to really take off. Unfortunately she says she really can't blame the American public be...

Feminist scholar and activist Dr. Gail Dines has been receiving some vicious hate mail after her appearance on CNN's Paula Zahn Show. She recounts and analyzes the past few days in an article at Common Dreams . Dines, a sociologist, was asked to comment on the Duke lacrosse case and the media coverage of it (her area of research is racism and sexism in the media). Her five-minute segment has generated many emails from disgruntled men attacking her and her views and defending the members of the lacrosse team, presenting them as the victims of the black female "stripper." At the end of fall semester, a female student at University of New Hampshire (my alma mater) wrote a letter to the editor of the university's student paper, The New Hampshire , that a poster on safe sex, displayed in her dorm, was offensive.* It featured a male pitcher and a female catcher with the tag line: "whether you're a pitcher or a catcher, always wear a glove." The student made ...

Yes, that's the childish reaction I had to this "review" * by Larry Pratt of National Review editor Kate O'Beirne's new book on how feminism is ruining the country. In part because it contained this passage on sports: "The feminist attack has led schools to do away with entire sports teams because they were all male. The teams might have remained if standards could have been lowered for say, the wrestling team. But with not enough women interested in the team – either on a segregated or integrated basis, and if the offending teams violated the school’s overall politically correct gender ratios – the teams were abolished." Pratt seems to be referring to Title IX here but in a very abstract and, of course, incorrect way. Where to begin? Where to begin? First, "the feminist attack" is problematic in part because most of the complaints filed citing discrimination in athletics come from individuals who probably do not consider themselves feminists--...