Legislation intended to give women opportunities on the playing field has been hijacked by radical feminists bent on destroying men’s collegiate sports.
The Subtitle in Title IX
Thanks to Title IX, more than 350 N.C.A.A. programs involving nearly 21,000 male athletes have been terminated since 1991.
Last summer’s U. S. Women’s Soccer Team’s World Cup victory triggered a virtual media lovefest. Mia Hamm and company were fawned over by Letterman and Oprah and showered with glory in countless magazine cover stories and profiles. Teary-eyed TV commentators, standing before sellout stadium crowds filled with screaming, face-painted girls, gushed over the “coming of age” of women’s sports. Along with an army of pundits, the reporters dutifully sang unequivocal praises of Title IX, the 28-year-old federal legislation that has fostered opportunities for women in sports. No one dared spoil the party by broaching the ugly truth: The misapplication of Title IX, a law designed to protect women against discrimination, is decimating men’s college sports.
Simply stated, the effect of Title IX on men’s college sports has been catastrophic. More than 350 National Collegiate Athletic Association programs involving nearly 21,000 male athletes have been terminated since 1991. That’s roughly ten percent of the male athletes participating in that period in N.C.A.A. programs, and program prestige has counted for little in the bloodletting. U.C.L.A. eliminated the men’s swimming and diving programs that had brought 16 Olympic gold medals to the United States. Boston University played its last set of downs after 91 years of gridiron glory. Providence College baseball got the ax after 78 fabled years. More than 100 wrestling teams-including such erstwhile championship schools as Syracuse, Princeton, and Notre Dame-are history. Golf is gutted. Track is hobbled. Reduced to a mere 26 teams, men’s gymnastics hovers on life support.
And statistics don’t tell of the human toll. “I’ve known coaches and athletes who were almost suicidal when they lost their programs,” says wrestling coach T. J. Kerr of California State University at Bakersfield. “Some fight, but few coaches or athletes can afford to launch a legal challenge.” Kerr and his team chose to fight. When C.S.U.B. moved to cut the team in 1995, the coach and his wrestlers sued. A restraining order has kept them alive while their case winds through the courts. One of the wrestlers who would have been dumped, Stephen Neal, went on to become a two-time undefeated N.C.A.A. National Division 1 heavyweight champ and a gold medalist at the Pan American Games and the 1999 World Championships. Neal is now looking to pin Olympic gold. Kerr, Neal, and the C.S.U.B. wrestling team have survived, but at a cost. Ten wrestlers had to be cut, wreaking a heavy emotional toll. “One kid was so angry he ripped up the locker room,” Kerr recalls. “Others were so depressed … “ The coach searches for the right words. He can’t find them. “The entire team had to compete at N.C.A.A. finals each year without knowing if they would have a team the next year, not knowing if they would have their scholarship, [or] if they could land at another school.” Despite a string of championship seasons, Kerr must now operate on a shoestring. Team meals are often paid for out of his own pocket, or by parents. The team drives long distances, takes the cheapest flights. Kerr works in a chilly atmosphere of litigation, threats, and counter threats. “Only one administrator has been cordial to me,” says Kerr, “and he retired last year. This has had far-reaching effects on everyone. It has taken its toll. And it’s not right.”
A complicated tale, the dire impact of Title IX of the Higher Education Act on men’s collegiate sports is the result of misinterpretation of the law by the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, aggressive litigation by feminist lawyers, and a number of bad court rulings. Passed by Congress and signed into law by President Nixon in 1972, Title IX simply states that “no person shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance.” Certainly it was needed. At the time, many schools didn’t even have athletic programs for women. Since the bill’s passage, female participation in intercollegiate sports has increased fourfold. By the 1990s, however, Title IX had evolved into a gender quotasomething never intended by Congress. In consequence, while 5,800 athletic opportunities have been added for women since 1991, 20,800 men’s positions have been eliminated.
The problem began with a 1979 O.C.R. policy interpretation, driven by a “gender-feminist” or quota-oriented ideology, which established a three-prong test for compliance with Title IX. Though it never was approved by Congress, O.C.R. has enforced this interpretation as if it were law. The first prong under such enforcement, “substantial proportionality,” requires that an educational institution have approximately the same percentage of female athletes as its ratio of female undergraduates. In short, if a school’s population is 57 percent female (now the national average), then at least 57 percent of that school’s athletes must be female. “Proportionality” presumes that women want to compete in sports as much as men do. It also presumes that colleges can afford to create as many new women’s teams as necessary. The reality, of course, is that most institutions cannot get proportiona I-or even come close-without eliminating certain male sports.
O.C.R. policy also allows an institution to show compliance by demonstrating a “continuing history of expansion” for female programs (prong two of the compliance test) or by “fully accommodating the interests and abilities” of female students (prong three). But these are only holding patterns on behalf of proportionality. The recent adition of a female team does not protect an institution from lawsuits. And if a single student files a complaint, it is presumed that the school has failed prong three. The only safe and sure way for administrators to comply, then, is to get proportional. For most institutions, the only affordable way to do that is by cutting men’s teams. So far, the courts have ruled this to be okay, so administrators keep chopping away.
Ironically, in forcing universities to come into compliance by cutting men, O.C.R. and the courts are actually freezing opportunities for women. If a school has 500 male and 300 female athletes and it cuts the athletic opportunities of 200 men, then 200 women who might want to participate in the future might never have the opportunity.
Title IX also makes no allowances for “nontraditional” undergrads (those older than 23), who today comprise more than half of this nation’s college students. Among today’s female undergraduates, 29 percent are 30 or older and have children, 11 percent are single parents, and 79 percent have jobs. At a “commuter school” like California State University at Northridge, for example, fewer than 20 percent of the females are “traditionals.” How do you get a 27-year-old mother of two who has a part-time job to play field hockey ? You can’t. Still, C.S.U.N. must achieve “proportionality.” How? By proposing to cut its championship men’s baseball, soccer, and swimming. Los Angeles-area sportswriters and university insiders predict that C.S.U.N.’s football team will be the next to face elimination.
Football, with its large all-male roster, presents a special challenge to proportionality seekers. Three to four female teams-without any male counterpart are needed to offset football. A dozen universities have already axed the sport, but most administrators are loath to follow suit. Without the gridiron tradition, what happens to the marching band? Drill teams? Homecoming? Where do they invite alumni for fund-raisers? What other event can unite the campus or get comparable media attention? Instead, most colleges and universities have chosen to savage Olympic sports like wrestling, swimming, and gymnastics. And yet every nonrevenue-generating football team-an estimated 80 percent of the current total-now has its neck on the chopping block.
The quota-based witches’ brew of Title IX proportionality marks yet another victory by “gender feminists” over “equity feminists,” a crucial distinction made by Dr. Christina Hoff Sommers in her landmark 1994 book, Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women. Equity feminists champion equal education and opportunity, but acknowledge basic gender differences; they allow that some women may chose to stay home and raise children, a factor that makes job quotas unfair and unrealistic. Gender feminists, however, make no allowance for gender differences, advocating that males and females are interchangeable. They champion outcomenumbers and quotas. To achieve equality with men, gender feminists believe we must have the same number of female police officers, soldiers, oil riggersand college athletes-as their male counterparts.
While mainstream America is just now awakening to this ideological chasm, the gender-feminist agenda has become entrenched in our government bureaucracies and universities. This belief system is promulgated by a massive, well-funded, and relentless campaign of “advocacy research,” P.C. propaganda, and demagoguery. Opposing the gender feminists at this point is like fighting the tide-as more than 20,000 (and counting) male victims of proportionality have discovered firsthand.
The foremost gender-feminist groups are the National Organization for Women, the Women’s Sports Foundation, and the National Women’s Law Center. These groups deny responsibility for Title IX’s unintended consequences, insisting that O.C.R. and the courts are to blame. True, but those groups give marching orders to O.C.R., a bureaucracy run by one of their own, Clinton-appointee Norma Cantu. A Harvard-educated civil-rights attorney, Cantu, once described by the
Wall Street Journal as one of “Clinton’s Quota Queens,” is renowned as a fearsome and aggressive gender feminist.
The Title IX court decisions that have mandated proportionality have been triggered by gender-feminist lawsuits. In 1992 the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that damages could be awarded in Title IX cases, causing legal actions to skyrocket. Any female who feels her interests aren’t being met because, say, there isn’t a women’s synchronized swimming team at her school, can seek unlimited damages. And O.C.R. policy does not require that an involved party-a student-file a complaint. Any lawyer can do it by pulling statistics out of a newspaper. That’s what the National Women’s Law Center did in 1997 , filing O.C.R. complaints against 25 Division 1 schools. The N.W.L.C. and the American Civil Liberties Union have turned Title IX into a cash cow, using settlements to finance additional suits. (Some 200 O.C.R. complaints are lodged every year, with more than 100 major lawsuits filed since the mid-eighties.) Disingenuously, the groups that file these suits insist that “budgetary concerns,” not Title IX, cause administrators to cut male teams. Sure, budgetary concerns caused by O.C.R.’s interpretation of Title IX and the do-gooders’ own lawsuits.
Not only are these P.C. untouchables masters of propaganda and obfuscation, they are such accomplished bullies that nobody in Washington dares talk back. They own the president, having saved him with their silence during his impeachment. Congress is sympathetic to the plight of male athletes, but powerless to oppose the gender-feminist cabal. No less an opponent than Speaker of the House J. Dennis Hastert, a former wrestling coach, has led the criticism of proportionality. “The new [O.C.R.] interpretation undermines the original intent of Title IX,” Hastert wrote to Brown University officials fighting a Title IX lawsuit in 1997. “Current Department of Education Title IX policies could be viewed as promoting reverse discrimination.” But even the speaker can’t push this issue onto the congressional agenda without being branded “anti-Title IX” by the gender-feminist demagogues. “Unfortunately,” wrote syndicated Chicago Tribune columnist Clarence Page last summer, “emotions surrounding this issue have made it a ’third rail’ issue — touch it and you die-for many on Capitol Hill. Everyone seems to be reluctant to talk about it out of fear of being seen wrongly as an enemy of women’s sports.”
To the gender feminists, Title IX enforcement is about power, not truth or fairness. They are well organized, wellheeled, and well connected. They have President Clinton by the balls, Congress over a barrel, the Supreme Court cowering under its bench, the media buffaloed, and the public brainwashed. And they are giving male college athletes a terrible whacking.
Miami University of Ohio cuts men’s soccer, tennis, and wrestling? “Thank you, ma’am, may I have another!”
University of New Mexico cuts men’s wrestling, gymnastics, and swimming? “Thank you, ma’am, may I have another!”
Brigham Young University cuts men’s wrestling and gymnastics? “Thank you, ma’am, may I have another!”
“Opposing the gender feminists at this point is like fighting the tide — as more than 20,000 male victims have discovered firsthand.”
Ask Norma Cantu whether O.C.R.’s interpretation of Title IX is responsible for men’s teams being cut, and she’ll invariably cite statements made by college administrators about “budgetary concerns.” (Cantu declined to be interviewed for this article.) That’s blatant dissembling. College administrators usually cite “budgetary concerns” when male teams have to be shut down, fearful as they are of the wrath of the O.C.R. and the gender feminists. Coaches are worried about derailing their own advancement, or even losing their jobs, if they say anything that might be construed as “anti-Title IX.” According to Cal State at Bakersfield’s T. J. Kerr, outspoken coaches and those who, like himself, resort to litigation, are subjected to unreasonable new “performance objectives,” enabling administrators to deny raises or advancement, or to terminate the coaches’ employment. Some universities have clauses in their contracts stating that coaches cannot even discuss Title IX.
Anyone who still does not understand that “political correctness” is totalitarianism by another name should have attended the N.C.A.A. Title IX seminar at the Westin Hotel in Chicago last spring. Some 500 college administrators, mostly athletic directors, sat in on the two-day affair designed to educate them on how to comply with Title IX. The conference opened with statements by a panel of three student athletes who parroted the party line: Title IX proportionality is not responsible for killing male sports. Not a word of sympathy or concern was uttered for the 20,000-plus male athletes who had lost their teams. For the next two days, nobody dared mention the elephant in the room.
At an evening reception, when asked by a reporter about the right or wrong of Title IX, administrators bolted for the bar or a passing shrimp tray. Those who would talk did so while their eyes darted furtively about the room. Republican or Democrat, liberal or conservative, they could not be witnessed speaking out against the party line. Their statements might be brought up against them later on in lawsuits. Someone could tell the president of their university. They could lose their job. Certainly, their career would never advance. One athletic director, Dennis Raetz of Indiana State University in Terre Haute, finally apprised the reporter of the harsh reality: “Whether it’s good or bad really has become irrelevant. What we personally think doesn’t matter. This [seminar] is about our learning how to comply.”
Or else. The consequence most feared by everyone in attendance was an O.C.R. investigation, described by survivors as something akin to an audit by a special prosecutor or the gulag commandant. It begins when someone-anyone-drops a dime and calls or writes O.C.R. to complain. Four to six O.C.R. investigators show up unannounced on your campus. They don’t tell you what the complaint is or who made it. They spend two weeks interviewing everybody-students, coaches, janitors. They crawl on the floor with tape measures to compare shower and locker-room facilities. They count towels and sports bras and jockstraps. No joke. They have a “laundry list” of 13 areas in which the boys and girls have to rank equally: scholarships, equipment, scheduling, per diems, tutors, coaches, facilities, support services, etc. If the men get press releases, the women better get the same, never mind if nobody’s interested. (Presumably, when today’s coaches aren’t addressing equity problems, they can still do some coaching.) Then the O.C.R. goes away. You wait for 18 months, unable to make any decisions whatsoever about your sports programs until you find out where you stand. Finally, the O.C.R. calls and tells you how many male athletes you have to cut, or millions you have to spend, in order to get into compliance.
Officials at Baltimore’s Johns Hopkins University, after being subjected to an O.C.R. butt-probe from 1992 to 1995, called the investigation “a flagrant misuse of federal-agency money and manpower.” During a session on “How to Respond to an O.C.R. Investigation” at the aforementioned N.C.A.A. Title IX seminar in Chicago, two Wichita State administrators described how the O.C.R. made them pony up $5 million for new women’s teams and facilities, including $1.4 million for a women’s softball stadium. The school came up with the money by raising student fees. Otherwise it would have been chop-chop to athletic testicles. More often that not, of course, that’s what happens.
University of Chicago wrestling coach Leo Kocher is a rare exception-a college coach who refuses to be intimidated by the gender feminists. “I’m lucky, because the University of Chicago has a strong tradition in academic freedom,” says Kocher, who has emerged as a major leader in the growing battle to save men’s college sports. He is board president for the National Coalition for Athletics Equity, a Washington, D.C., group dedicated to ensuring fair sports opportunities for all athletes. The notion that cutting men’s programs is “the easy way out” for administrators facing “budgetary concerns” is ludicrous, he says. There is nothing remotely “easy” about it, and those “budgetary concerns” are caused by proportionality.
“Even when inexpensive, nonscholarship male teams like wrestling, tennis, or golf offer to become totally self-supporting,” Kocher says, “they are not saved from being cut. The reality is that they [administrators] face a huge risk of being sued if they are not proportional. They’re getting rid of men to fit a quota. Everything else they tell you is a lie.”
Gender feminists also insist that women are “as interested” in sports as men. But a mountain of evidence, including student surveys, shows that males and females clearly have a different level of interest in sports. Nearly four times as many males as females take part in intramurals, where anybody who wants to play can. There are also four times as many male “walk-ans” (students who are willing to commit to a college sport without benefit of a scholarship) as female. In fact four-to-one seems to be a recurring ratio. While more than two million boys play Little League baseball, fewer than half a million girls play Little League softball. And nobody today tells girls they can’t play.
Still, gender feminists insist these numbers are the result of “sexist stereotypes” and “social conditioning.” Their denial is as impenetrable as it is illogical: The reason why there are more boys playing sports than girls, they maintain, is because girls are discriminated against. And the reason why they know girls are discriminated against is because there are more boys than girls playing sports.
“These politically correct untouchables are such accomplished bullies that nobody in Washington dares talk back.”
Donna Lapiana, director of the Women’s Sports Foundation, a leading advocate of proportionality, headquartered in Nassau County, New York, has stated in her many speeches and editorials that “sports are as important to our daughters as our sons.” During a “20/20” segment about Title IX, an incredulous interviewer John Stossel asked Lopiano three times if she really believed that women wanted to play sports as much as men. “If you build it, they will come,” she insisted.
Lapiana in an interview for this magazine says she does not understand why Stossel or anyone else finds her claims implausible. “You’re saying participation indicates interest. I don’t agree with that evidence,” she told Penthouse. “Schools that have 50-50 participation have it because they offer sports [women] want. You can’t participate if they don’t start a team for you.” Indeed, many believe the problem could best be resolved by instituting more sports that appeal to women, like figure skating and synchronized swimming. Schools that can afford it are adding such teams. But few schools have been able to achieve proportionality this way.
Lapiana says the problem lies with bad administrative choices, not proportionality. “No one is forcing anyone to drop a men’s sport,” she insists. “What’s happening, whether there is a quota or not-and I don’t agree that there is one-is that men’s [nonfootball] sports are being dropped to [save] football. Any increase in women’s participation is going to come at the expense of men’s minor sports because [administrators] are saying that football is more important than the guys who wrestle.”
By her insisting that we need more female-friendly sports and that all-male football is the problem, it would seem that Lapiana is acknowledging a difference between the sexes. Not quite.
Penthouse: Doesn’t the fact that women don’t want to play tackle football demonstrate a basic gender difference?
Lapiana: There once were people who said that people of color didn’t have the smarts to play quarterback.
Penthouse: Are you saying that women don’t play tackle football because they are being discriminated against?
Lapiana: I am saying that you are presuming a lack of interest.
Unfortunately, much of the public has bought this gender-feminist propaganda. Nobody stops girls from going to the park and playing touch-tackle football. But you don’t see them there. The public also often fails to recognize that “liking to play” sports is not the same as wanting to compete at an N.C.A.A. level, which requires far more devotion and sacrifice. “Anyone who coaches both men and women will tell you there’s a difference,” says Leo Kocher. “But the Women’s Sports Foundation has been able to put their spin out there and deceive the public.”
Lapiana claims college figure skating for women could be a big-revenue sport if administrators would pay as much for top coaches as they do in football. But skating fans follow elite Olympic contenders-high schoolers. And Lopiano’s critics counter that if the revenues were there, money for top coaches would be there as well. According to Kimberly Schuld, director of the Independent Women’s Forum, an equity-feminist group in Washington, D.C., the W.S.F.’s focus on football is a diversionary tactic. “Donna Lapiana is concerned”-i.e., upset-“that the University of Michigan football players get their own training tables,” Schuld says. “Well, the U.M. football team brings in millions of dollars to [the school’s] sports programs, while the women’s field-hockey team doesn’t bring in any. Male teams that get big perks are on TV every week. They all support women’s programs that don’t bring any money back in. It doesn’t have to do with sex, but with economics and marketing. [Lapiana] tries to pretend this is all just a matter of legislation, but it never is.”
The same is true, Schuld says, of the Women’s World Cup team. “If you buy [the W.S.F.’s] spin that Title IX is the sole reason for their success, then you really are brainwashed.”
There is no disputing that girls benefit from sports in many of the same ways that boys do. They gain confidence, self-esteem, and all the obvious health benefits. But studies also show that girls have a broader range of outlets and interests beyond sports. Nationally, high-school girls outparticipate boys 62 percent to 38 percent in band, orchestra, and chorus; and 60 percent to 40 percent in drama, speech, and debate. Females fill the rosters of more than 65 percent of nonsports extracurriculars, yet there is no hue and cry to reduce their numbers to achieve gender equity. “The fact is, boys are being punished for being more interested in sports,” says Leo Kocher. “Dance programs are 89 percent female. Can you imagine if they had to get proportional? It wouldn’t be fair to the women.”
Dr. Patricia Hausman, a Washington, D.C., developmental psychologist who specializes in the study of gender differences, says gender feminists simply refuse to deal with the facts. “What they don’t understand is that assertions are not evidence,” she explains. “In psychology, we have data collection, analysis, ways of measuring how interested people are in various things. When we do that, we find that males are vastly more interested in athletics than females. It’s one of the biggest sex differences measured on occupational and interest inventory tests. We are making policy based on the way [gender feminists] think the world should be and not the way it really is.”
Gender feminists like Lopiano, Dr. Hausman points out, are perpetually inconsistent. They invoke “socialization” only when it’s convenient, and their precepts are not only untrue but backward. Schools, for example, do not “shortchange” girls. “Schools clearly favor girls,” says Dr. Hausman. “It’s much easier for girls to sit still at an early age. They have the kind of verbal and study skills favored by education. Our system does not deal with hands-on type things where boys excel. A lot of [the gender feminists’] claims of discrimination simply make no sense in the context of real facts.”
Indeed, a flurry of recent books and reports suggest that it is men who are under assault in our culture. A PBS documentary, “The War on Boys,” reported that boys are six times more likely than girls to commit suicide and 50 percent more apt to fail in school. They comprise 90 percent of the kids diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder; many are drugged simply for acting like boys.
Feminist author Susan Faludi’s Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, based on hundreds of interviews, portrays contemporary males as distressed, unappreciated, marginalized, obsolete, no longer useful to society, devalued by employers and families, confused about their roles, and ultimately “in crisis.” And in her much-anticipated, soon-to-bereleased book, The War on Boys, Christina Hoff Sommers details how men have been deliberately undermined by the feminization of our social and political institutions.
Meanwhile, the future of thousands of young men is being jeopardized by the misapplication of Title IX. For them, sports may mean the difference between success and failure in life, between a place in society and a place in prison. Study after study confirms the effectiveness of sports at channeling aggressive behavior. Boys Clubs of America and Police Athletic Leagues have been saving lives for years by addressing the need for sports in the positive development of young men who might otherwise become crime statistics.
For those in the trenches, the threat is clear and present. “Clinton says he plans to put a bunch of money into extracurricular activities in high schools, hoping to reduce violence and gang activities,” says T. J. Kerr. “But he’s allowing Title IX to destroy opportunity in college.” Kerr points out that it is from the ages of 18 to 22 that boys fully develop into men. It is also the time when some begin to emerge as athletes. “Stephen Neal wasn’t heavily recruited out of high school,” says Kerr. “He was fourth in the state at 189 pounds. Since then, his growth has been phenomenal. Five years later he’s six foot four, 270 pounds, a two-time undefeated N.C. A.A. champion and Pan Am gold medalist. And his development as a student and a person has been just as phenomenal. What a waste if that guy had not had the opportunity to wrestle.”
“Sports are a tremendous gateway into schools for minority at-risk kids,” adds Leo Kocher. “It supplies them with a support network, coaches who watch out for them. So where are these boys going to go, now that the programs that could keep them out of gangs and prisons are being eliminated?”
At this writing the N.C.A. A. has 7,796 sports programs for men and 8,315 for women. There are 19 N.C. A.A. sports for men and 26 for women, including eight “emerging sports” for womenrowing, water polo, equestrian, synchronized swimming, bowling, archery, ice hockey, and precision skating. Yet men’s programs continue to be cut. In the effort to get proportional, some administrators are blessed with easy solutions. Bob Driscoll, athletic director at Boston College, found plenty of female-club crew teams on his campus, so he just made them varsity rowers. “When you’re talking about saving football, you have to find something with big numbers,” says Driscoll. “We’ve got 80 girls out there rowing.”
But not every school can instantly find so many competitive female athletes. Some grant varsity status to female intramural or club teams that are woefully inadequate. Women’s programs often have to lower their expectations-one training session per day instead of two, no weight training, a more casual attitude about competition. Women often refuse to play if they have to sit on the bench or don’t make the traveling team.
Patricia Thomas (not her real name), a junior at a major eastern university, spent her first two years on the Division 1 crew team. She eventually realized that 20 hours of weekly training and 4 A.M. wake-up calls left time for little else. “It’s not until after you start doing it that you realize how nuts you really have to be to keep doing it,” she says. Thomas wanted a broader training and social experience in college. She wanted to shoot pictures for her college paper. But extricating herself from the program, she found, “was like trying to leave a cult.”
Since then, Thomas says she has noticed what she hadn’t seen beforethe high-pressure salesmanship used on college women today. “Aggressive recruitment is rampant on campuses everywhere,” she tell Penthouse. “You’ll see coaches recruiting right out on the quad with a beautiful, brand-new rowing shell. They’ll bring it out and use it to attract people, like a conversation piece. If you’re a big, strong girl, you can count on being targeted.” Indeed, tales of “cafeteria recruitment” and “instant scholarships” for women who can show their stuff on a rowing machine are commonplace.
Asked for her opinion regarding the increasing pressure on women to compete, Donna Lapiana says, “There are coaches who create unhealthy educationa I sports situations for boys and girls. I do not think women athletes have a corner on that market.” She makes a good point. To equity feminists, men and women alike, it seems somehow ironic that a women’s movement born of a sixties culture and consciousness has been commandeered by jocks. There was a time when both sexes felt women had a more sensible attitude toward athletics. Jocks were derided as dunderheads for according such inordinate importance to sports. The couch potato and bleacher animal were negative cliches-grown men playing games, guys who needed to get a life. Today, moms beam with pride over all those screaming girls at the Women’s World Cup game. A decade ago, those girls might have been dancing in tutus, taking art classes, watching Shakespeare in the park. Now it’s “Fight! Fight! Kill! Kill!” Soon perhaps as many female soccer hooligans will be arrested as men, and we’ll reach the final frontier in gender equity-the prison population. Why should only 15 percent of our nation’s prisoners be females? Because girls aren’t as interested in criminal activities? That’s just social conditioning, a sexist stereotype. We can fix that!
Many critics of proportionality cite the tremendous and highly inappropriate amount of interaction between the O.C.R., the National Women’s Law Center, and the Women’s Sports Foundation. Administrators tell of O.C.R. meetings where representatives of N.W.L.C., an advocacy group, were dictating and explaining O.C.R. policy. Bakersfield wrestling coach Kerr recalls speaking before a congressional subcommittee hearing on secondary education in 1995 when Norma Cantu was on one of the panels. “Not one woman in that room clapped when male athletes or coaches were introduced to speak,” says Kerr. “But when they introduced female athletes, everyone clapped. They applauded when one female athletic director stated, ‘I really don’t care about the men who’ve lost their opportunities in sports.’ It was an eye-opener for me. I didn’t realize there were women who hate men and who have an agenda with money and power behind them. I had no idea this kind of thing was going on until I went to Washington, and I don’t think the common man or woman knows. It’s pretty scary.”
“Let’s face it,” declares Leo Kocher, “These are militant advocacy groups that have a lot of power, and they only care about one half of our kids-the female half. They shouldn’t be setting our government’s education policy, but they are.”
Says Patricia Hausman, “To talk the way they do about males and claim [they] are for humanity is inconsistent. What they’ve done to male sports with Title IX is obscene. It’s a deliberate bureaucratic subversion. Congress specifically did not intend this”
Washington lobbyist Dale Anderson, a former Michigan State wrestler, has ongoing meetings and dialogues on Title IX with our nation’s lawmakers. He has also met with Norma Cantu, whom he has found unmovable on the issue of proportionality. “If she would change, everything would change,” says Anderson. “And because she won’t change, nothing changes.”
Getting help from the man who appointed her, Bill Clinton, isn’t in the cards. “The gender feminists are getting a big payoff for keeping their mouths shut during his Zippergate problem,” says I.W.F.’s Kimberly Schuld. “And Bill Clinton is just like the public. He’s bought all of their marketing. He thinks Title IX is a wonderful thing.”
Relief from our next president also looks unlikely. Nobody expects Al Gore to stray from the gender-feminist party line: Tipper Gore, a national spokeswoman for the W.N.B.A., sings unqualified praises of Title IX. Democratic challenger Bill Bradley, himself a former college basketball star, has indicated he would not alter current policy on Title IX. And Republican candidate George W. Bush has given no indication that his “compassionate conservativism” includes remedying the ultraliberal, quota-based misapplication of Title IX.
“We plan to at least make all the presidential candidates address the issue,” says Anderson. Good luck. (Penthouse’s repeated requests to the Gore and Bush camps for their positions on proportionality went unanswered.)
And don’t count on Congress for assistance. “Just talking with them about this, you can feel the tension in the room,” says Anderson. “Their staffs don’t want them to touch it.” Jesse Krebs, a former wrestler and recent graduate from the University of Minnesota, has started a group called Simply Common Sense to lobby for legislation to end proportionality. S.C.S. has sent letters to every senator and congressperson, but only a handful have expressed support. “They’re all too terrified of being labeled antifemale,” says Krebs. “We’ve told them, ’Fine, we’re going to label you as antimale.’ “
The best hope for a solution may lie in the courts. Title IX, like sexual harassment, has become a major growth industry for the legal community. While women initially brought all the suits against universities, men now are filing Title IX discrimination suits. Most of these have been unsuccessful, but legal experts say a few pending cases might prevail. Foremost is the suit brought by the C.S.U.B. wrestling team, which has won three favorable rulings so far and is now in the appellate court. A victory there, conflicting as it would with previous appellate decisions, could trigger a review by the Supreme Court.
Attorney Mark Martel, who represents the C.S.U.B. wrestlers, believes the Supreme Court will eventually declare proportionality unconstitutional and in violation of Title IX. “What is going on today is outrageous,” he says. “You would be hard pressed to find a law in this country that has been more distorted and completely turned around by people with a certain agenda and world view.” Martel stresses that Title IX is a good law. “We are suing under Title IX. The reason we are winning is because of Title IX. Quotas violate the letter and spirit of Title IX. We are fighting the blatantly illegal current administrative interpretations which have evolved under Title IX.”
The bad news is that nobody expects the Supreme Court to act soon. The N.C.A.A. has resigned itself to compliance with O.C.R. “I think [the Supreme Court] will avoid getting involved with this issue as long as possible,” says N.C.A.A. General Counsel Elsa Cole. Some legal experts doubt that the Supreme Court will touch Title IX at all; they maintain that proportionality will continue until schools are in compliance across the board. Still others believe many college administrators will hold out for another year in hopes that a new U.S. president will shake up the O.C.R. or a decison will be set down by the Supreme Court. But if somebody doesn’t rule soon that equality doesn’t mean numerical equivalence, the 20,000 cuts will turn into a bloodbath.
According to N.C.A.A. statistics, there are currently 200,000 male and 125,000 female college athletes. “If the present trend continues,” says Anderson, “national gender equity will be achieved at 140,000 athletes apiece by cutting another 60,000 males and adding 15,000 females.” That’s if the ratio of four males cut for every female added continues. Some believe it will be worse-as many as 80,000 men cut. “All Olympic male sports will be extinct in five to ten years,” says Anderson. That is, unless administrators decide to turn college football into a fond memory of a bygone era.
Kimberly Schuld predicts they’ll both be scuttled. “Only revenue-producing football teams will survive,” she says. “Olympic and nonrevenue male sports won’t be played at the collegiate level at all. Some colleges will just eliminate athletics completely. There’s nothing in Title IX that says you have to have an athletic program.”
Schuld says there is no silver bullet. “We need a new head of O.C.R., action by the Supreme Court, and grass-roots momentum to break the public-relations gridlock on this issue.” Most antiproportionality activists agree that the Title IX problem has been compounded by an aggressive and highly effective 20-year P.R. campaign by gender-feminist interests, many of which are major corporations eager to court feminist support. The well-funded N.W.L.C. and W.S.F. both put out pamphlets instructing women on how to file lawsuits and complaints; they orchestrate massive media campaigns to get out their spin. “Women in [the I.W.F.] are very cognizant of the war on men and boys,” says Schuld. “But there’s no money on our side to fight fire with fire.”
Unfortunately, it may already be too late to stop the Title IX runaway train. Many activists feel a sense of impending doom. Others live in a state of perpetual disbelief. “I just can’t believe they are going to keep ripping the hearts out of all these athletes,” says Leo Kocher. “This is a case of some powerful women behaving badly,” says a college administrator who asks not to be identified. Some hold out hope that the ideologues who hijacked Title IX will end up buried by their own wreckage, their mania for proportionality finally discredited and discarded. But that offers scant consolation to the tens of thousands of men who have been forced to assume the position. “Thank you, ma’am, may I have another!”
