The war against boys - collegiate women's sports

Women's Quarterly, Spring, 2003 by Jessica Gavora

How Women Beat Men at College Sports

Jessica Gavora reveals why schools must abolish men's teams to comply with Title IX.

COLLEGE SPORTS are required--by Title iX of the 1972 education amendments to the Civil Rights Act of 1964--to provide equal opportunities for men and women. Although enacted as an anti-discrimination statute, Title IX has quietly become a quota system that has decreased sports opportunities for men while demanding endlessly expanding opportunities for women. What's more, the losers from Title IX are not limited to the now familiar angry white male. Pursuit of "gender equity" in college athletics is alienating key parts of the affirmative action constituency--black males and liberal college administrators--while minority women see little benefit. The only clear winners, for the time being, are middle- and upper-class white women.

Because men tend to participate in sports at higher rates than women, university administrators--under pressure both to comply with Title IX and balance their budgets--resort to simply cutting men's athletic slots to avoid the charge that women are "under-represented" in sports. But when men's opportunities are cut in sports such as basketball and football--which have high concentrations of minority athletes--"gender equity" often supplants racial equity, spelling trouble in the world of race and sex bean-counting. Last year the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) voted to cut men's basketball scholarships while leaving women's untouched, raising howls of protest from black coaches. At many universities, non-scholarship slots on large men's basketball, football, and track squads are being trimmed-- taking opportunities for black male athletes with them. At some schools, these sports are being eliminated altogether.

And who benefits? The women's teams most often added to achieve Title IX compliance are in sports like tennis, rowing, and soccer--not the stuff of heated competition in the inner city. NCAA statistics bear this out: The women who participate in these sports (that is, sports other than women's basketball and track) are eighty-six percent white, five percent black, and two percent Hispanic.

Autumn 1995

Boys Should Be Boys

Anne Roche Muggeridge defends the little savages.

IT'S NOT A GOOD TIME to be male. Prevailing sociology now thoroughly regards young men as social invalids and blames their parents. The fashion in education for the past three decades has been to try to make boys more like girls: to forbid them their toy guns and rough play, to engage them in exercises of cooperation and sharing, to involve them in dolls and courses in the domestic arts, to denounce any boyish roughness as "aggressive" and "sexist." And boys rebel at their peril.

Yet the educational methods now forced on boys exhibit a fundamental misunderstanding of male nature. Modern educators believe that the sexually based distinctions made in the past were arbitrary inflictions by a theologically based culture whose claims have been exploded by modern research. The latest, very cautious (and politically fraught) studies reveal what instinct tells us--that boys show distinct behavioral differences from girls early in infancy, well before they could be socialized otherwise. Yet the governing organs of society still persist in thinking that boys, if caught early enough, can be feminized.

A kind of madness has taken over. My own four boys went through the school system at the zenith of experimentation in the 1970s and early 1980s. The old Home Economics class, designed for girls, was turned into Unified Arts. Boys were supposed to learn to cook and sew, girls to fix cars and weld. My preteen son refused to make a cake or sew a piece of clothing. Under pressure, he asked me, "Mom, could you help me crochet a hockey net?"

Of course, it's good in a pinch to know how to sew on a button, or make a meal, or change a baby or a tire. Boys are quite willing to babysit their sisters or wash a few dishes. But that isn't what the reformers have in mind-and the boys know it.

Summer 1995

The Missing Persons of Domestic Violence

Richard J. Gelles shows us how men are victims too.

THE MOST controversial finding [in my research], as it turned out, was that the rate of female-to-male intimate violence was the same as the rate of male-to-female violence. Not only that, but the rate of abusive female-to-male violence was the same as the rate of abusive male-to-female violence. When my colleague Murray Straus presented these findings in 1977 at a conference on the subject of battered women, he was nearly hooted and booed from the stage. When my colleague Suzanne Steinmetz published a scholarly article, "The Battered Husband Syndrome," in 1978, the editor of the professional journal published, in the same issue, a critique of Suzanne's article.

The response to our finding that the rate of female-to-male family violence was equal to the rate of male-to-female violence nor only produced heated scholarly criticism, but intense and long-lasting personal attacks. All three of us received death threats. Bomb threats were phoned in to conference centers and buildings where we were scheduled to speak....