This book, and its author, tilts to the right.Newsweek: Is Title IX Sidelining the Boys?
While federal law made sports more accessible to women, critics charge it works against male athletes.Jessica Gavora's at it again. This time on the pages of Newsweek magazine,
where she is described as "the vice president for policy of The College Sports Council and author of 'Tilting the Playing Field'". In reality,
Gavora is a former speechwriter for radical conservatives Newt Gingrich, John Ashcroft, and Alberto Gonzales. Five years ago when
Kathy Jean Lopez was reviewing Tilting the Playing Field on NRO, Gavora was described much more accurately: "Today, Gavora is chief speechwriter to attorney general John Ashcroft (and
wife of NRO editor Jonah Goldberg)".
[Yes, that's NRO editor Jonah Goldberg, the famous chickenhawk who, while exhorting soldiers to the killing fields of Iraq,
said he can't go because "I'm 35 years old, my family couldn't afford the lost income, I have a baby daughter, my a** is, er, sorry"; so Jessica Gavora, Title IX-attacker, is the mother of said daughter. Sad.]
Of course, Newsweek provides none of this biographical information. She's the vice president of
The College Sports Council. Doesn't that sound all even-handed and above-board? The fact that this is a group
advocating for the interests of wrestling, swimming and gymnastics (small, expensive sports that get cut so schools can have 85 or 95 or 105 man football squads) is not mentioned. That would have involved reporting rather than stenography.
But I digress. Back to Jessica Gavora. The wingers' first
attempt to dismantle Title IX failed miserably; public blowback ended their chances of eliminating equality by legislation. So the Bush Administration put out regulations that allow schools to say girls aren't interested in sports by administering a survey;
these regulations were roundly and soundly criticized, but
they're still in effect. They've only got 1 3/4 years left to attack Title IX, so they're trotting out the new tactics.
Jessica sounds so pro-equality as she attacks
Title IX. She's just a pal trying to make things even more equitable:
Do you advocate getting rid of Title IX?
I do think we still need title IX. I think that everybody in our educational institutions deserves protection against sex discrimination. I think that’s an important part of equality in this country. But we need to change the way we are judging schools. They need to be able to offer sports on the basis of student interest. That’s why we applauded the student interest survey, [which surveyed the student body based on interest in athletics, allowing for representative sports teams] because right now we have this very arbitrary numerical formula that we are applying and it’s hurting athletes. Not just male athletes, but female athletes on small roster squads. Women who play smaller roster sports don’t get the same opportunity.
Who's radical? It's all us equality folks, that's who! We're out there trying to brainwash women into thinking they're athletic or something:
What do the people on the other side of the issue argue?
The people on the other side of this believe that it isn’t the role of the university to accommodate the interests of women; they believe it’s the role of the university to create interest. They believe it is the role of the university to educate women on how athletic they are.
No one on the equality side of the ledger has ever said or advocated any such thing, but Newsweek lets it go.
Jessica blames everything on us old women (as
Gloria Steinem said, women may be the one group that grow radical with age):
What do female athletes say?
I know that I’ve heard from lots of female athletes who are starting to say that this law has outlived its purpose. They don’t understand what this law means because they’re seeing it limit the opportunities of the men they travel and train with and who make them better athletes. And they think it’s insane. There’s a big generational divide here. Some of the women who are of the “if you build it they will com”’ mentality are older women and they lived at a time and went to college at a time when women were being given the short end of the stick in a major way. But these women today have had a very different experience and they don’t agree with what this law is doing to their male colleagues.
See, from Jessica's perspective, these young women, they're being given the short end of the stick in a minor way, and that's all right. If only us old women would only shut up and know our place. We say it's all about football. What does Jessica think of this argument?
What about the big-money sports, like college football teams, that have 80 players [n.b., actually, there are Division I schools with over 100 men on the football team; the University of South Dakota has 113) when they only really need 30. Do you think they are taking up spaces for smaller men’s sports?
Some people like to say it’s all football, because schools are spending all their money on football teams, but that’s not what this is about. Those football players aren’t taking any opportunities away from females. The money they spend on football is not the reason they can only have 15 guys on their baseball team, when if they took their walk-ons they could have 50. Women don’t come out and play for the team without scholarships the way men do. Women have a lot more things they want to do. Look at the gender balance for every extracurricular activity and they’re all dominated by women, except sports. Women have more diverse interests; men are more maniacally interested in sports. Some people say that’s gender heresy but I don’t think that’s a bad thing.
"Those football players aren't taking any opportunities away from females." That's the crux of the Title IX haters argument: Just take football out of the equation, and you'll see that men are getting screwed. Like it isn't male athletes who are playing football. They're an alien race of large-boned androids, or something. That's what they'd like to have us believe, but football players are indeed male athletes, and get counted toward Title IX compliance.
"Women have a lot more things they want to do. Look at the gender balance for every extracurricular activity and they’re all dominated by women, except sports. Women have more diverse interests; men are more maniacally interested in sports. Some people say that’s gender heresy but I don’t think that’s a bad thing." Gavora used to call this "The sportsmania gap"; but she's abandoned that and other incendiary phraseology like "affirmative androgyny" for more palatable, but still sexist, words:
This mostly applies to college sports, but how is it relevant to high schools?
This proportionality has so far been pretty much confined to colleges and universities and it would really be a tragedy if it were applied to high schools. Like I said, look at who’s doing what extracurricular activity in high schools and then tell me we need to force equality of participation in sports. You’re going to hurt a lot of boys because a lot of girls are busy after school doing other things, so I think it would be terrible if we expanded this to high schools.
"[T]hen tell me we need to force equality of participation in sports...". That's what she's against.
She's against equality. Newsweek doesn't hear that dog whistle, but we do. Gavora is for Title IX, but against forced equality. But you can't have it both ways. Either you're for equality, or you're not. She's clearly in the anti-equality camp, and Newsweek should have called her on it. But that would have involved journalism. And this is just stenography, letting
another right-wing fruitcake have her say in the corporate media.
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