After Atalanta

Laura Pappano and Eileen McDonagh argued in their book, Playing with the Boys: Why Separate is Not Equal in Sports , that the continued separation of the genders (for the purpose of this post we'll go with the rather simplistic construction of gender as a binary system) harms women's athletic participation. Note that their argument is more nuanced than that one-line synopsis as they compare the historical and ongoing separation of boys and girls and men and women in athletic endeavors to the cultural and political separation of races in the United States and discuss the damage done by failures to integrate, by gender, sports. This is an ingoing debate in the study sport, gender, and culture and I myself haven't come down on any particular side (shocking, I know!). What worries many, myself included, is that we just don't know what will happen if sports that have not been integrated (and some certainly have and some certainly should be--hello, billiards??) begin to move ...

Laura Pappano and Eileen McDonough, authors of the recently released Playing with the Boys: Why Separate is Not Equal in Sports ,* have an editorial in the Christian Science Monitor this week. They are good writers and they make compelling arguments. But they also make generalizations followed by asterik-like comments that we have to take a little more seriously than they seem to. For example, they go through all the arguments and possibilities for co-ed sporting experiences. And they are right. Professional golf could have co-ed tournaments. It would be good sport and good entertainment to watch the top female and male players go against one another in a pairs competition. (Of course you might actually have to start paying the women similarly which is probably a larger impediment to that prospect than women's alleged physical inferiority.) And it's true that not every man can outperform every woman--no matter the skill in question. But their asterik--that it is likely that th...