Few domestic policy initiatives proposed by the Bush Administration have stirred sharper debate than the decision in June of 2002 to form a 15-member commission to consider revising Title IX, the Federal law enacted in 1972 widely identified as the reason for the dramatic growth in women’s sports in recent decades. Largely because compliance with this law — which mandates equal expenditures for male and female athletics — has forced many universities and colleges to terminate programs in non-revenue male sports such as wrestling and gymnastics, the Bush Administration asked commission members to weigh possible adjustments to the law. But this commission immediately found itself besieged by feminist groups zealously defensive of the original egalitarian formulation of Title IX. These groups vehemently asserted that only such a formulation could ensure that women’s legitimate desires to participate in athletics would be satisfied. Journalist Welch Suggs marveled in July 2002 at “the heat of the rhetoric,” as aroused feminists told the administration in no uncertain terms to keep “hands off Title IX.” Suggs pointedly remarked that the commission did not include even “a single person who could be described as an advocate for the men’s sports that have suffered substantial cutbacks since Title IX was enacted. One would have thought that fact would satisfy women’s groups, but no.” No, indeed. For feminist groups, “the very existence of the commission” constituted “evidence of the administration’s lack of commitment” to upholding a law they regarded as essential in “the fight for equality.”1

Those who have resisted any reformulation of Title IX have often relied on legal arguments. “[Any] change would violate fundamental notions of civil rights law,” asserts Jocelyn Samuels of the National Women’s Law Center.2 But more fundamentally, they have framed their defense of a strictly egalitarian version of Title IX in moral terms. They sermonize on how much lawmakers must do to honor “a nation’s promise” to young women athletes and on how “much work remains to achieve gender equity in athletics.”3

From the high ground of moral purity, these defenders of athletic egalitarianism pour scorn on those who assert that men’s athletic programs deserve higher funding than women’s athletic programs simply because more men than women are interested in sports. “There is,” asserts the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), “no shortage of interest by women and girls,” dismissing the belief that men are more interested in sports than women as an “archaic stereotype.” When pressed on this point, however, the sports egalitarians resort to ideological equivocation. “Interest and ability rarely develop in a vacuum,” they argue. “Women’s lower rate of participation reflects women’s historical lack of opportunities to participate in sports.”4 Such reasoning predictably leads to strong opposition to proposals that Title IX compliance be based not on simple egalitarian formulae, but rather on interest surveys. “What interest surveys tend to reflect,” declares an NWLC spokeswoman, “is the amount of past discrimination, not the interest that would be manifested if women had been given more opportunities in the past.”5

It is in such speculative justifications for their agenda that Americans can discern the true objective of many sports egalitarians. For they seek not to satisfy women’s desires for athletic programs, but rather to change women’s desires through athletic programs. Close scrutiny of the changes many of these feminist activists seek reveals that they are precisely those changes that turn women away from marriage and family life. And the morality they invoke in crusading for such changes springs from sources very far removed from the moral traditions reinforcing wedlock and family life.

Discerning the true intent of advocates of women’s sports programs is particularly important because of the success of such advocates in dramatically expanding the size of these programs. In 1972, fewer than 300,000 high-school girls participated in competitive sports and fewer than 32,000 women competed in intercollegiate sports. In contrast, during the 2000-01 academic year, 2.78 million high-school girls participated in sports and over 150,000 women participated in college sports. Champions of women’s athletics see only good in this dramatic upsurge, asserting that women’s athletics fosters “physical and psychological health...and increased personal skills” and that the growth of women’s athletics has translated into “significant health, emotional, and academic benefits for women and girls.”6 Unfortunately, such crusaders for women’s sports often hide the downside of the remarkable success of their cause. More specifically, they often hide the way women’s sports fit within a larger cultural pattern that has been highly corrosive of marriage and family life — and likewise hide the high social costs of that weakening of marriage and family life. Americans who care about the health of our social life may even suspect that the lack of candor among advocates of women’s sports reflects indifference, if not outright hostility, to wedlock and family life.

A balanced assessment of women’s sports must begin with an acknowledgement that women’s low levels of participation in sports in the pre-Title IX world reflected far more than blind and unjust prejudice. The morality of any social pattern, philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre reminds us, depends ultimately upon a “teleological view” defining each person’s “true end” in life. Only confusion and incoherence, MacIntyre warns, can come out of a morality consisting of “a set of injunctions deprived of their teleological context.”7 In the pre-Title IX world, most Americans found their telos, their “true end,” in marriage and family life. A man’s “true end” was that of husband and father; a woman’s, that of wife and mother. Traditional moral imperatives helped guide men and women toward successful realization of their “true end.”

Even a moment’s reflection on the traditional responsibilities of a wife and mother will reveal why traditional moral imperatives encouraged men to participate in sports, but did not particularly encourage women. Around the world and throughout time, fatherhood and motherhood have meant very different things. “Mothering and fatherhood,” explain family scholars Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Blankenhorn, “[entail] sharply differentiated (and complementary) activities. Fathers protect the vulnerable infant from physical harm by defending the perimeters of the domestic realm. Mothers provide emotional nurture to the child and sustain the domestic realm as the center of nurturance.”8 It was thus not bias against women that kept women out of sports in the pre-Title IX world. Rather, it was a simple recognition that sports would not help young women to learn or to perform the domestic tasks of nurturance. In contrast, once it is acknowledged that — as British philosopher John Gray remarks — “the rivalry of sport and the mortal combat of war” have “long been linked,”9 then it is quite obvious why men have traditionally been encouraged to participate in sports: they needed to prepare themselves for their role as “defenders of the perimeters of the domestic realm.”

Because of men’s traditional responsibilities to defend their wives and children in war, there is a fundamental naturalness to women’s watching and encouraging men as they participate in the mock warfare, a naturalness that is lacking in men’s watching women in sport. For in sport and combat, men fight on behalf of women and children. For whom do women athletes contend? The small crowds at most women’s sporting events underscore a fundamental reality: although self-absorbed egotists are easy enough to find among male athletes, the inescapable disconnection between women’s athletics and traditional family roles inevitably makes women athletes self-regarding, self-absorbed. (In any case, when significant numbers of men can be attracted to a game featuring attractive female athletes such as Ana Kournikova [in tennis] or Lisa Leslie [in basketball], it is typically not women as athletes that they are really watching.) Television cameras covering men’s athletics frequently pan over the wives and children of the male athletes who are competing; camera shots of athletes’ spouses are rare and shots of their children virtually unheard of at women’s athletic events. After all, while athletics create no particular obstacles to successful marriage and fatherhood for a man, a serious commitment to sports makes marriage very difficult for a woman (as women’s soccer star Mia Hamm acknowledged at the time of her 2001 divorce10) and makes motherhood virtually impossible. To wipe out a nation in one generation, nothing more would be required than simply to give it the completed fertility rate of the Women’s National Basketball League!

Of course, if social activists care little about the family or the traditional gender roles that reinforce it, they see nothing wrong with an egalitarian approach to women’s sports. It matters very little to them that egalitarian athleticism can never foster the attributes that make women good wives and mothers. In fact, moving women away from such attributes appears to be one of their prime objectives. Consider, for instance, the slogan used by promoters of women’s basketball on both the college and professional levels: “A Woman’s Place ... Is in the Paint.”11 Lest anyone miss the point, this slogan appears on a poster for women’s basketball showing a stereotypical Fifties-era homemaker above the words “A Woman’s Place” and then, beneath the words “in the Paint,” a much larger picture of an aggressive female center muscling her way into position beneath the basket.

Advocates of women’s sports talk a great deal about how much women are getting out of athletics. Clearly, what matters at least as much for many of these advocates is what such sports are getting women out of — motherhood, domesticity, family life. Authorities in sports medicine see women athletes’ movement away from domesticity in focus when they characterize the burgeoning of women’s participation in sports as part of a cultural dynamic in which “traditional gender roles have loosened.”12 Journalist Susan L. Morse uses stronger language in describing the rise of women’s sports as part of a “social revolution” responsible for “transforming the workplace, the family and education.”13

In that social revolution, the trend lines for women’s sports need to be viewed in the context of other trend lines. Although down from the record highs of the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, the divorce rate is still a third higher than it was in the pre-Title IX world, while the marriage rate is down by over 40% and is apparently still dropping. Meanwhile, the percentage of children born out of wedlock has risen 300% since 1970, even though the completed fertility rate for the nation as a whole remains stagnant, languishing below replacement level since roughly the time of the passage of Title IX. 14

No one would suppose that women’s sports alone caused this dramatic national retreat from family life. To a significant degree, the rise of women’s sports is surely the consequence, not the cause, of family disintegration. But what was initially an effect can easily become a subsequent cause for the intensifying of a cultural cycle destructive of family life. Journalist Cathy Young clarifies the problematic character of this cycle plainly when she acknowledges that “women’s sports do have revolutionary cultural implications,” implications coming out of “a vision of womanhood that includes sweat and strength, competitiveness and even ferocity.”15 Americans may well wonder how ferocity could ever prepare women for successful marriages or motherhood. It is no accident that those most relentless in advocating equal opportunities in sports for women are also those who reject military restrictions on women’s roles in combat. They are likewise those most adamant in resisting any restrictions in the availability of abortion for all women and contraception for unmarried minors. Rather than rely on men to protect motherhood, these activists seem bent on protecting women from motherhood. Indeed, though these activists indulge frequently in moralistic rhetoric in advancing the rights of women, the only telos, the only “true end” toward which their radically individualistic and androgynous morality seems to shape young women appears to be that of belligerent warriors, antagonists in a Hobbesian social war of “each against all.”

Not surprisingly, commentator Benjamin DeMott sees women’s sports (notably basketball, water polo, and hockey) as part of an increasingly dominant “tough-guy feminism” led by “kick-butt extremists” enthralled by a “women-becoming-men fantasy.” DeMott complains that in their pursuit of that fantasy, the new brand of feminists is embracing “stereotypical male standards of self-expression — even of animal ferocity.” Reveling in “the freedom of brutality and cynicism,” these new “killer women” sneer at the traditional “pretty bride dream.” Their ethos is one defined by a “hard-nosed egocentricity” and “a taste for pugnacity” entirely at odds with “the tasks of nurturance” traditionally discharged by “woman as caregiver, as incarnation of mercy, tenderness, and generosity.” DeMott fears that in the newly masculinized culture of hard, assertive women that women’s sports have helped to shape, no one will develop the traditionally feminine “care for and sensitivity to others.” Such a social development, he warns, would prove potentially “catastrophic for the human essence.”16

To be sure, most women who participate in sports do steer clear of the kind of extremism DeMott deplores. Many high-school female athletes even find in sports a way to avoid the early sexual involvement that can endanger later successful marriage and family life.

In a hyper-sexualized culture, parents of daughters quite understandably pay attention when advocates of women’s sports promise that participation will translate into a lessened risk of sexual activity and pregnancy.17 And solid data do back up that promise. Nonetheless, when sociologists at the State University of New York investigated the reasons that participation in sports reduces sexual activity, they reached conclusions that might give parents second thoughts. For what the researchers discovered was that participation in high-school sports significantly decreases sexual activity among young women precisely because it weakens their attachment to traditional gender roles. (In marked contrast, the researchers found that participation slightly increases sexual activity among young men by strengthening their attachment to traditional gender roles.) “Sport resources...,” explain the researchers, “allow girls to discard aspects of the traditional gender script that prioritize heterosexual appeal.” They further remark that the “exposure to a nontraditional, androgynous gender script” that sports give female athletes “might lead one to predict same-sex sexual activity among female athletes.”18

Because the effects of premarital sexual activity can be so extremely psychologically and morally harmful, parents seeking to protect their daughters from those effects often view high-school sports as a support to family life. But how many of such parents have considered the possibility of a lasting bias against traditional gender roles that could prejudice their daughters against committing themselves to marriage and motherhood as young adults? And how many parents are looking for activities that will lead their daughters into same-sex sexual experimentation? The issue of homosexual experimentation becomes even more salient for daughters who move on from high-school athletics to college-level and eventually professional programs. For in such programs, female athletes are quite likely to learn, as one sports reporter put it, “what it means to play for a lesbian coach and play alongside a lesbian athlete.”19

As journalist Mike Fish acknowledges, the question of “sexual orientation lurks under the surface in women’s athletics.” And on the college level, more than a few observers have alleged that lesbianism in women’s athletics is “pervasive and extensive.”20 When, for instance, Rick Majerus, the coach for the University of Utah men’s basketball team, complained in 1989 about the ubiquity of lesbians in women’s basketball, progressive commentators roundly criticized him for his lack of political sensitivity. No one questioned his eyesight.21 Indeed, in the vehemence with which they attack “homophobia in women’s athletics”22 and the bitterness with which they complain about how “focusing on sexual orientation denies women opportunities in sports”23 feminists betray the undeniable reality: lesbianism is a large part of women’s athletics, especially on the college and professional levels.

Feminist groups mock “parents [who] worry that athletics might influence their daughter to become lesbians.”24 But, as one recruiter for women’s athletics has frankly admitted, the influence of lesbianism in some women’s athletic programs is so strong that parents “would be shocked if they knew.” “You either walk away or accept it,” the recruiter told the Milwaukee Journal. “It’s not about the coach being gay; it’s about whether your teammates are and whether they’re going to come after you. If you’re around this four years nonstop, there is a certain amount of pressure. It’s one thing to come out [as a homosexual], another to have a gauntlet of lesbians leading you down the path.”25 Even if lesbian teammates do not try to seduce them, young women going into college-level or professional athletics may well find themselves accepting lesbianism as normal and morally acceptable.

While it is far from clear that women’s athletic programs actually cause young women to become homosexual and while it is unfair simply to assume that collegiate or professional female athletes or coaches are lesbians, the effects of women’s sports programs in undermining traditional gender roles do raise legitimate questions about whether they foster bisexual or homosexual experimentation. And it is all too clear — and no unfair assumption—that many of those who champion women’s athletic programs fiercely reject the “heterosexist belief that lesbianism is unacceptable.”26 These activists are in fact doing all they can to use women’s athletics as a cultural wedge for making homosexuality acceptable — and to make homophobia a social offense.

Progressive modern thinkers will see nothing but good in the way women’s athletics normalizes homosexuality. But those who care more about the family than about political correctness will recognize a grave threat in the rising cultural acceptance of homosexuality. The character of that threat has been clarified by Dennis Prager, a prominent scholar of Judaic culture. Writing in Public Interest, Prager judges it “impossible” for him “to make peace with homosexuality” because of what homosexuality denies: “It denies life; it denies God’s expressed desire that men and women cohabit; and it denies the root structure...for all mankind, the family.” Affirming “the centrality and purity of family life” as “the bedrock of this civilization,” Prager warns that accepting homosexuality can only bring dire cultural consequences. “Accepting homosexuality as the social, moral, or religious equivalent of heterosexuality,” he writes, “would constitute the first modern assault on the extremely hard-won millennia-old battle for a family-based, sexually monogamous society.”27

Evidence that Prager has not drawn the antithesis between homosexuality and the family too sharply comes not from others like him who openly oppose homosexuality, but rather from those who vocally advocate gay rights. These advocates speak candidly of their desire to break sexuality out of “non-individualized settings” in which it is “typically bound to the heterosexual family and defined in terms of reproduction.” They do not hide their desire for “a transformation in sexuality” through which sex loses its ties to “family reproduction” and “increasingly serves to pleasure individualized men and women.” The transformation in sexuality that they seek develops most easily in a pattern of “general cultural individualism, in which individuated persons act as sovereigns over their own lives” and in which “the process of individuation” makes “women and men...free and equal entities.”28

Among those who insist on gender egalitarianism in athletics, many deny any intention of advancing a homosexual agenda. However, what these sports egalitarians almost always share with homosexual activists is a focus on “individualized men and women.” The “health, emotional, and academic benefits” they promise to girls and women who participate in athletics are always individual benefits. The effects of women’s sports programs on marriages and families receive no attention. The morality egalitarians invoke in advancing women’s sports invariably defines women’s telos, their “true end” in life, entirely in terms of individual desires and ambitions. But the morality millions of Americans still live by defines their telos in terms of marital and family commitments, even when those commitments entail individual sacrifice.

Consequently, a balanced perspective on women’s sports would acknowledge both the individual benefits and the potential risks to the family. Such a balanced perspective would allow young women to realize the benefits of participating in athletics. However, such a balanced perspective would repudiate the egalitarian dogmatism now at work in Federal policy, a dogmatism that refuses to acknowledge that men’s family responsibilities as protectors of “the perimeters of the domestic realm” dictate greater participation in the mock warfare which is sport, while women’s family responsibilities as nurturers necessarily require a lesser degree of participation. Informed parents, not egalitarian bureaucrats or feminist ideologues, can best draw the lines.

Even if Americans concerned about family life cannot persuade policymakers to base their policies on athletics on explicit consideration of marriage and the family, they should at least be able — in the name of simple liberty and self-determination — to argue, as some libertarians have, that “the state shouldn’t be in the business of furthering change in attitudes toward women’s sports.”29 In a democracy, government officials should be responding to citizens’ existing attitudes toward women’s athletics, not hiring cadres of elitist social engineers to change those attitudes.

But in the broader cultural debate over women’s athletics, the short-term challenge of those who care about the family may simply be to help young women and their parents to see that even from the morally and culturally deficient perspective of individualism, an egalitarian commitment to sports may entail undesirable negative consequences. For instance, even those who do not recognize divorce or out-of-wedlock births as evils in and of themselves can come to recognize that these events typically impose adverse psychological, economic, and health effects on individuals — especially women and children. The data are even available to demonstrate that maternal employment, delayed marriage, and cohabitation expose individual women and children to harm. A 2001 study by researchers from the University of Colorado and Boston College found that as a rising number of women enter the paid-labor market, a rising number of young people kill themselves — or others.30 Family disintegration may not count as an evil with determined individualists, but surely suicide and murder should. Consequently, if young women can be alerted to the ways in which sports egalitarians incubate these problems for individuals by weakening the cultural supports for family life, they will be well prepared to resist the ideologues’ one-sided advocacy of women’s athletics.

Doctrinaire individualism may further give way to balance and sobriety when young women learn more about how sports egalitarianism can expose them to risks entirely unrelated to home and family. Sports officials have recently reported, for instance, that as more and more women have made sports their passion, more and more have resorted to steroids to enhance their performance. And unfortunately, medical authorities are just now learning that the harmful side-effects of such drugs do not neatly coincide with egalitarian doctrines: “In males,” researchers now report, “many of the side effects [of steroid use] appear to be reversible, yet many are irreversible in females.”31 Do young women really want an ugly replay of the false liberation that made “You’ve Come a Long Way, Baby!” a slogan for addicting women to the tobacco products that had been killing men for decades?

Nor is steroid use the only medical problem growing disturbingly more common among female athletes. First recognized in 1992 by the American College of Sports Medicine, the Female Athlete Triad is now being diagnosed in tens of thousands of female athletes. Associated “specifically with the overzealous female athlete,” the Female Athlete Triad is defined by the conjunction of disordered eating, amenorrhea (loss of or pronounced irregularity in the menstrual cycle), and osteoporosis. Medical authorities regard this Triad as “a serious syndrome,” potentially “devastating for the female athlete.” Medical authorities theorize that this Triad is triggered by an “energy deficit — when a woman expends more energy than she takes in — [that] triggers amenorrhea by slowing the production of estrogen.” In other words, the Female Athlete Triad so disrupts the body’s normal biochemistry that the overzealous female athlete actually becomes less biochemically female. Treatment predictably enough entails a decrease in exercise and an estrogen replacement regime. In any case, the nature of this Triad raises new doubts about the prudence of gender egalitarianism in athletics. There is, after all, no Male Athlete Triad. As one specialist on the Female Athlete Triad has explained: “Males can go to 1 percent body fat with very few medical side effects. Once women drop to below 17 percent on average, they stop menstruating and that’s your Female Athlete Triad.”32

Regrettably, sports egalitarianism may be exposing young women to an evil even worse than Female Athlete Triad. Sociologists Edward M. Levine and Eugene J. Kanin argue that a major reason that date rape has grown more common is “the attenuation of the traditions and norms that [formerly] protected adolescent and adult females against sexual aggression.” The role that women’s sports may have played in attenuating these traditions and norms becomes quite clear in Levine and Kanin’s observation that “male aggressiveness appears to become more prevalent the more closely the females’ way of life and degree of sexual freedom approximate those of males.”33 The restraints of chivalry and deference simply may not make much sense to young men who have learned to regard young women as co-competitors in life’s games.

But then it is not just when dating degenerates into an animalistic contest of strength that young women do poorly in physical contests with males. Sports regularly remind us of the gender imbalance in strength. And the inherent disadvantages women face in sports, relative to men, define yet another reason that even thoroughgoing individualists may turn a skeptical eye on sports egalitarianism. If, as some feminist theorists assert, men and women’s physical abilities are not sharply different, but rather form a smooth continuum, then Cathy Young is quite right to remark “women will [always] be stuck at the lower end.”34 Social scientist Martin Van Creveld gives numerical precision to how biology skews the continuum of strength, reporting that “if the hundred strongest individuals were to be selected out of a random group consisting of one hundred men and one hundred women, then ninety-three would be male and only seven female.”

Van Creveld further stresses that athletic training does not fundamentally change this pattern: because of the “superior ability of men to add muscle to their bodies, intensive training, far from diminishing the physical differences between the sexes, tends to increase them further.”35 Stating the obvious for an age befogged with feminist ideology, Young points out that “women simply aren’t as strong or as fast as men: In a unisex competition, track superstar Marion Jones would not have won an Olympic Medal; indeed, she wouldn’t even have made the finals.” Driving home the point, Young adds, “despite the hype about the closing gap between male and female runners — which, actually, has widened again in recent years — the female winners of the New York City Marathon invariably come in behind more than 40 men.”36

What this gender imbalance in physical strength inevitably means is that women’s achievements in athletics will always be discounted: Marion Jones will always be a great runner — for a woman. Sheryl Swoopes will always be a great basketball player — for a woman. Venus Williams will always be a great tennis player — for a woman. Young women may want to pause before committing themselves fully to an egalitarian athleticism that — unintentionally or not — delivers the message: “Women Are Just Like Men — Only Less So.” Consider, by way of contrast, the status of Emily Dickinson as a great poet, of Georgia O’Keefe as a great artist, of Willa Cather as a great novelist, of Erica Morini as a great violinist, or Dame Ninette De Valois as a great dancer. No one ever adds “for a woman” to the superlatives applied to these great achievers.

Reflection upon the transience and artificiality of athletic achievements should give young women — even the thoroughgoing individualists — further reason to pause before committing themselves to sports egalitarianism. A century from now, people will still be reading the poetry of Emily Dickinson, contemplating the paintings of Georgia O’Keefe, listening to recordings of Erica Morini. Who will be thinking about the races run by Marion Jones or the games played by Sheryl Swoopes — or the races and games of their male counterparts? Interest in games depends upon collective pretense (let’s pretend that it matters how many times the ball goes through that hoop or who crosses this painted line first); interest evaporates when the pretense ends. How much did sports viewers care about the score of the event they were watching the moment they first heard about the Kennedy assassination? For good reason, “Cut the game-playing!” is a perfectly idiomatic way to tell someone to stop trifling and start dealing with reality.

Thinking of that phrase may in fact give us a new perspective on the promotional poster for women’s sports in which a Fifties homemaker is unfavorably contrasted with a modern female athlete. True, a crowd cheers the athlete; no crowd cheers the homemaker. But one might wonder whether the fundamental realities at the heart of homemaking do not wear better than the pretense of game-playing: How does the end-of-life satisfaction of a woman who has raised children in a secure and loving home compare with the end-of-life satisfaction of the woman who has provided diversion for idle spectators watching her shoot a leather spheroid through a net? And although very few people of either sex can succeed in the highest level of sports, ordinary people — ordinary women—can touch the very deepest realities by creating lasting marriages and happy families. As much as the great literature of a Cather or the music of a Morini, and far more than the fleeting vanities of sport, these realities of home and hearth command our deepest reverence. Children travel from around the world to gather round the deathbed of a dying mother. Fans pay little attention to the death of former stars — and only the deaths of the exceptional stars of either sex even get mentioned — announced below the fold of the sports section. Because of the ultimate triviality of game-playing, women’s sports advocate Christine Grant may be revealing more than she realizes when she defends an egalitarian enforcement of Title IX with this language: “It’s too late in the game to go back to where it started.”37 Is it too late to cut the egalitarian game-playing now discouraging young women from committing themselves to the enduring realities of marriage and family life? We can only hope not.

Endnotes

1 Welch Suggs, “Can a Commission Change Title IX?” Chronicle of Higher Education 12 July 2002, 38, Academic Universe, 14 March 2003 http://search.lexis-nexis.com.

2 Quoted in Michael A. Fletcher, “NCAA ponders alterations to Title IX,” Washington Post 24 January 2003, A1, Academic Universe, 10 March 2003 http://search.lexis-nexis.com.

3 “Title IX and Women’s Athletic Opportunity: A Nation’s Promise Yet to Be Fulfilled” (June 2002), National Women’s Law Center, 10 March 2003 http://www.http://www.nwlc.org.

4 Ibid.

5 Quoted in Fletcher.

6 “Quick Facts on Women and Girls in Athletics” (June 2002) and “Title IX and Women’s Athletic Opportunity,” National Women’s Law Center, 10 March 2003 http://www.http://www.nwlc.org.

7 Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 2nd ed. (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984), 54-55.

8 Barbara Dafoe Whitehead and David Blankenhorn, “Man, Woman, and Public Policy: Difference and Dependency in the American Conversation,” Institute for American Values Working Paper, Pub. #WP#, Feb. 1991.

9 John Gray, Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals (London: Granta, 2002), 182.

10 See Jere Longman, “Hamm’s Success Comes at a Price,” Arizona Republic 22 July 2001, C17, ProQuest, 10 March 2003 http://search.proquest.com.

11 See Walt Sheperd, “Watching WNBA,” Syracuse Times 13 August 1997; 10 March 2003 http://newtimes.rwcy.com.

12 See William P. Ebben and Randall L. Jensen, “Strength Training for Women,” Physician and Sportsmedicine May 1998, 86, Academic Universe, 10 March 2003 http://search.lexis-nexis.com.

13 Susan L. Morse, “Women and Sports,” GC Researcher 6 March 1992, 195-211, SIRS Renaissance, 10 March 2003 http://search.SIRS.com.

14 See U. S. Bureau of the Census, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2000, 18 Dec. 2002 http://www.census.gov/prod/ www/statistical-abstract-us.html.

15 Cathy Young, “Despite continuing Title IX controversy, women are having a ball,” Reason, Nov. 2001; 10 March 2003 http://pub135.czboard:com/bcathyyoung.

16 Benjamin DeMott, Killer Woman Blues: Why Americans Can’t Think Straight About Sex and Gender (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2000), 7-8, 50-53, 134.

17 See “Title IX and Women’s Athletic Opportunity.”

18 Kathleen E. Miller et al., “Athletic participation and sexual behavior in adolescents: The different worlds of boys and girls,” Journal of Health and Social Behavior 39(1998): 108-123.

19 Mike Fish, “Sexual orientation lurks under surface in women’s athletics,” Milwaukee Journal 27 September 1998, Sports 1, ProQuest, 10 March 2003 http://search.proquest.com.

20 Ibid.

21 Mike Hall, “Unfair Branding Has Gone on for Many Years,” Albuquerque Journal 8 February 2003, D5, ProQuest, 10 March 2003 http://search.proquest.com.

22 “Empowering Women in Sports” (1995), Feminist Research Center, 10 March 2003 www.feminist.org.

23 Ibid.

24 Ibid.

25 Quoted in Fish.

26 “The Girls Report: Chapter Two,” National Council for Research on Women, 10 March 2003 http://www.ncrw.org/research/girlsrpt.htm.

27 Dennis Prager, “Homosexuality, the Bible, and Us — A Jewish Perspective,” Public Interest 112(Summer 1993), Academic Search Elite, 10 March 2003 http://search.epnet.com.

28 David John Frank and Elizabeth H. McEneaney, “The Individualization of Society and the Liberalization of State Policies on Same-Sex Sexual Relations, 1984-1995,” Social Forces 779(1999): 911-944.

29 Young, emphasis added.

30 Fred C. Pampei and John B. Williamson, “Age Patterns of Suicide and Homicide Mortality Rates in High-Income Nations,” Social Forces 80(2001): 251-282.

31 Karla Hill-Donitsch, “Chemical Use and the Woman Athlete,” GWS News 31 Dec. 1986, p. 1, Gender Watch, 14 March 2003 http://search.proquest.com.

32 See Julie A. Hobart and Douglas R. Smucker, “The Female Athlete Triad,” American Family Physician 61(2000): 3357-3367; see also Michael Dobie, “Female Athlete Triad: On Thin Ice,” Newsday 28 July1997, SIRS Renaissance, 29 May 2003 http://sks18.sirs.com.

33 Edward M. Levine and Eugene J. Kanin, “Sexual Violence Among Dates and Acquaintances: Trends and Their Implications for Marriage and Family,” Journal of Family Violence 2.1(1987): 55-65.

34 Young.

35 Martin Van Creveld, “A Woman’s Place: Reflections on the Origins of Violence,” Social Research 67(2000): 825-846.

36 Quoted in Greg Garber, “Title IX Advocates Speak Out” (20 June 2002), ESPN, 14 March 2003 www.espn.go.com.