“With the advent of Title Nine…”?

Psst, Concerned Women, Title Nine has been around for nearly four decades.

I bet Holly doesn’t discuss family and church time pulling girls away from their personal interests or male-oriented religious indoctrination designed to subsume your daughter’s personality to her relationships.

It’s true that sports turns us into lesbians—but not nearly as much as traditional feminine pursuits are capable of doing so.  Where else to meet other women than in clubs and organisations that pursue traditional feminine passtimes.

Did anyone say knitting circle...?

male-oriented coaching styles that force more masculine behaviors on girls without meeting girls’ needs for relationships, 
Need for relationships?! I am so very, very glad that my parents raised me without gender expectations. I can’t imagine what hell it would be to have parents like this if you were GLBT person.

Vomit.

Sorry, but that’s the most cogent thought i have in response to that drivel.

This really goes back to the pervasive trope in American culture that equates male homosexuality with femininity and female homosexuality with masculinity.  That there is no relationship between homosexuality and these attributes (I dare someone to accuse the ancient Spartans of being effeminate) has no bearing for these idiots who pontificate while reveling in their ignorance.

The Lesbitizing rays emitted by sports equipment do not work all the time, at least: The women athletes I know—yes even the ones with college scholarships—are straight.

Does she say what she things girls need in a relationship? Which relationships is she talking about? Do athletes do not form relationships with their teammates, and why do they not qualify?

I’m curious to know why taking time from family and church and hunting for scholarships is a concern for female athletes but not for male athletes. 

Oh.  Wait.  DUH.

You know better.  Females belong “in the home”.  Anywhere else and they get ideas.  Weird ideas.  Strange ideas.  Ideas that make men uncomfortable.

You’re right though, borefest.  Time for these chistianist geeks to alienate another group of women, any mother that played sports in high school or college.

Heckuva job churchie!

It couldn’t be that lesbians are possibly more likely to be interested in sports, or that lesbian athletes are more likely to be out.  Nope.  Clearly sports cause teh gay in women.

girls’ needs for relationships, the quest for scholarships, and lesbianism in college-level sports

Interesting angle for CWA:  “girls” need relationships; they need to quest for scholarship; and apparently they also need lesbianism in college-level sports.  Make Concerned Women happy and demand all three!

Also, being involved in musical theater totally makes men gay.  I saw it in a movie once.

You know, this time of night—or morning—-my brain just goes…“Is their name really Concerned Women of/for/whatthefuckever America? Really? I mean…Really?! How about bitchy fussbudgets of the apocalpse? How about Batshit Biddies of the Beltway?” They sound like they’re tut-tutting over their tea and crumpets about the neighbor girl who won’t date their son.

As a straight man, I always looked at the most “masculine” sports as being a bit, well, gay.  Football has showers with guys, butt-slapping, tight capri pants, all that grabbing and jumping on each other, and so on.  Baseball?  Tight pants.  Wrestling?  Unitards and dieting.  Of course I’m exaggerating, but any time men are on display in an approved way they tend to get ridiculous (and maybe a bit fabulous.)  I thought the Marines were pretty gay in that way, too.  Still do, to some extent.  Maybe it was my personal biases, but I never wanted to be surrounded by men.  Didn’t want to join a football team, the military, go to prison, or even drink at a sports bar because I really would rather be alone or among the women.  But I wouldn’t be so ridiculous as to form (or join) a group that suggests that men getting together in such ways is a step toward homosexuality, since that’s fucking absurd!  Many men just enjoy the company of (almost exclusively) men in a non-sexual way, just like not all gay men want to force their dicks in my mouth in lieu of another regular day at work.  (And even if they did, I could still decline their kind and heartfelt offer.)

There’s always going to be some sort of fear at acknowledging that some groups of people divided by sex are going to include gays and lesbians who might actually like some of the team-building exercises and rituals for, uhmmm, personal reasons.  (And isn’t it odd how those hazing rituals gone wrong generally involve simulated or exaggerated homosexual rape?  But they’re never called that, which is to preserve the heterosexual image of “male” sports.)  That people check each other out in the shower is the height of homophobic fear for some people.  The idea that some would choose to engage in sports to appreciate the human form and also be gay or lesbian is the height of sinfulness and only a step away from raping the unwilling in some sort of recruitment drive.  For women’s sports, such fears are a new thing in a world where grandma didn’t even go to college or dare to sweat outside of the most controlled environments.  I don’t know what the equivalent fear is to the men’s admonition not to drop the soap, but I bet the Concerned Women for America do.  But I won’t subscribe to their newsletter to find out.

You know better.  Females belong “in the home”.  Anywhere else and they get ideas.  Weird ideas.  Strange ideas.  Ideas that make men uncomfortable.

Actually, it’s women discussing us and using hand gestures that does the trick way better than just having ideas.

I’m being purposefully sexist here, but I must ask:

Why do their husbands let those Concerned Women for America have access to computers, cars, and meeting places?  Do they approve of their actions?  When they meet, is there a chaperone present so they don’t go to the bathroom together?  Do the newsletters and public statements have to be approved by all the husbands, or just a majority?

Just curious.

I’m perversely a fan of these scary articles that invariably come out at back to school time. Is sports making your girls lesbonic? Will books and schooling send your girls screaming into the outer reaches of Lesbonica? Do school supplies themselves contain a hidden substance that religio-science hasn’t pinpointed yet? Is the zipper on the pack telling your girls lezzzzzzzzzzbefrenzzzzzz. (Boys, OTOH: Mass killers in training, but more in tech schools.)

Maybe these women should have their daughters do what I did:  Play on the men’s team.  There was no women’s soccer team in my high school.

Playing on a men’s team would totally make them lesbians, since some of the men would be emasculated.  Think of the (male) children!

Plus, women being on the same team as men?  Next thing you know, women might have confidence and poise and leadership skills and actually expect to have their opinions listened to and then they’ll be just like Hillary Clinton who is probably a lesbian because Bill is still secretly gay, which is obvious since he doesn’t hate them enough.

Which reminds me: Michelle Obama’s arms!!!!  I demand, after seeing Barack’s pee-pee, to see he and his “wife” arm-wrestle.  And the loser has to produce his birth certificate.

/wingtard

Psst, Concerned Women, Title Nine has been around for nearly four decades.

CWA is fighting cultural influences even older than that.  They’re not just refighting the 60s every day, they’re refighting the 40s and 50s.  Last year, I saw one of them doing an alarmist lecture on the pernicious influence of the Kinsey report on female sexuality, which was published in 1953.

As a straight man, I always looked at the most “masculine” sports as being a bit, well, gay. 

What’s going on is that homophobia disallows straight men to express affection for each other, or much emotion at all.  And contrary to claims being made in prior threads, men do have emotions and all that stifling is stressful.  So what they do is retreat to indisputably masculine environments, where they can let their guard down because there’s no question of their straight masculinity in the sports environment, and so they can express emotion.  A man crying over a dead pet or his girlfriend leaving him is a pussy; a man wearing a jersey and crying because his team lost some championship title is given a little space. 

This isn’t harmless in any way.  In order to maintain this space, men in sports environments tend to throw up “No girls or queers allowed” signs everywhere.  Not all, but the men who want a less toxic environment tend to get drowned out.  Gay men in sports feel an immense pressure to be closeted, and female fans tend to be marginalized. 

There’s also incredible anger about women’s sports.  Most people don’t realize Title IX requires equality in all educational spending, because the focus has solely been on sports, because so many sexists see equality in funding as a direct assault on American masculinity.  I would also argue that the reason that soccer gets so much disdain from so many American male sports fans is that it’s a sport that’s strongly associated with girls and women in America. Sneering at soccer is a socially acceptable if subtle form of sexism.  It’s also completely silly, since soccer is a highly masculine sports environment around most of the world, like football is here.

Ginmar!  Coffee up my nose!  “Bitchy Fussbudgets of the Apocalypse” should totally be a band name.  BFA are just concerned, after all.

jon, their menfolk allow their women to join the Bitchy Fussbudgets b/c CWA is actually run by a man, and the women are just doing the work of shaming other women into behaving womanly.  “Womanly” is defined as being homophobic, bitchy prudes and fussbudgets who fetishize fetiii.

I’m perversely a fan of these scary articles that invariably come out at back to school time.

My wife is pretty sure a friend of hers was actively discouraged from going to college because her parents had similar fears.

I would also argue that the reason that soccer gets so much disdain from so many American male sports fans is that it’s a sport that’s strongly associated with girls and women in America.

Do you mean that it’s a sport played by girls and women?  Maybe that’s been added to the prevailing American view of soccer, but in my youth (the ‘70s) soccer wasn’t strongly associated with girls and women as players, and yet it was still viewed with disdain.  It may have been considered effeminate, but not because girls actually played it, if that makes sense.  IMHO its primary association with women is with moms:  overprotective ones who insist that their child play a sport where he’s less likely to get injured, and, later, overinvolved ones who manage their children’s lives too closely.  I think it’s that former idea, that soccer is a sport played by the coddled children of worried mommies, that suffuses American anti-soccer attitudes.

Also the fact that foreigners are much better at it than the good ol’ USA.  Anything ruled by South Americans and Europeans must be inferior.

I think that soccer is the team sport that actually is better when women play it.  Having an attractive team to watch doesn’t hurt, but the actual play is more wide open, there isn’t as much nastiness associated with the playing, and it’s got more scoring.

Women’s basketball at the professional level is pretty unwatchable, but not for the same reasons professional men’s basketball has gotten unwatchable.  I enjoy women’s tennis more than men’s, since there are fewer boring matches between ace servers where all the drama is about whether or not someone will have more double faults than the other player.

And yes, I agree that putting men into a place where they can only be emotional at (some) funerals and at sporting events is a sad effect of homophobia.  Men’s sports are supposed to be some sort of refuge from otherwise stoic lives, which sometimes makes us non-fans and non-participants have an even harder time than the traditionally-stunted men around us.  Working at a prison has shown me all sorts of reactions to living in a (mostly) all-men environment, and it’s not pretty.  I could say that a man hasn’t lived until he’s been called a faggot by a man who made lifestyle choices that keep him from ever having even an opportunity to date women, but it’s best not to point that out to their face.  They don’t like it.

[women’s soccer has] got more scoring.

The lack of scoring in the men’s game explains part of its unpopularity in the US. Watching an entire game played without a goal is not satisfying. (Penalty kicks are not the same.) But in most of the world, soccer is the only team sport (even though basketball and baseball are played here and there). Thus fans do not know what they’re missing.

College women’s basketball is satisfying because they are always hustling. The men’s game tolerates a lot of passing back and forth among players static on the three-point line.

male-oriented coaching styles that force more masculine behaviors on girls without meeting girls’ needs for relationships, the quest for scholarships, and lesbianism in college-level sports.

This is fascinating to try to parse. What relationships do these girls need that they aren’t getting? Presumably not lesbian relationships, since that’s the whole problem. Are the coaches working them so hard that they have no time to spend with their girlfriends? How are the coaches expected to meet the need for the quest for scholarships, and how are they managing to deprive high school girls of lesbianism in college-level sports?

I do have to say, if you’re watching high school girls play soccer and hearing porn music in your head, you need to develop other interests.

Amanda:  You are spot on with the “men’s space.”  I was referred to as The Heidelberg Bitch by my soccer coach when I wasn’t at practice one day (my family had just moved back to the states after my dad retired from the Army.  We were stationed in Heidelberg, Germany).

Only one guy on the team stood up and said something, and he was also the only one who told his mom, who was teaching with my mom in the school district at the time.  The team was then subjected to a “What happens on the field stays on the field” speech by said coach, which I and my one team friend duly reported to our mothers.

I was also required to play through excruciatingly painful injuries (I had a hematoma the size of two dollar bills set side-by-side on my shin from a guy on another team taking out some of his frustration on me.  Socks hurt when they barely touched it.  Oh, and this was also the same leg still recovering from a spiral fracture of the tibia) while if any guy on the team even whined about being tired, he was immediately subbed out.

I was singled out and made to feel stupid for finishing my laps one day and seeing that another player (who happened to be female and had come out when she saw me and another girl trying out) was really struggling to finish her laps and went back to jog beside her.  I was made to feel stupid for talking to anybody in line while waiting for drills.

The general attitude from most of the school/parents was I deserved all this due to the temerity of my wanting to play soccer for my own school.

All this did was engender an endemic bitchiness and refusal to lay down and take it from anyone.

The lack of scoring in the men’s game explains part of its unpopularity in the US. Watching an entire game played without a goal is not satisfying. (Penalty kicks are not the same.) But in most of the world, soccer is the only team sport (even though basketball and baseball are played here and there). Thus fans do not know what they’re missing.

I’m sorry but this is BS - a 0-0 tie isn’t that common, most games that tie involve an equal number of scores by each team (I do think the tie-breaker system in soccer suck though, so they need to fix that.  And the tiebreaking in college football is just retarded wrt scores - it ought to be reported as a tie with the winner indicated by asterisk; instead two teams with a 14-14 tie will play an incredibly restricted game and be reported as a 56-54 win.).  And socccer isn’t that different in score than football once you get over the inflated football scoring.  21-14 isn’t that odd a football score, and yet it is no different than a 3-2 soccer score, since the same number of scoring plays occurred.  When people complain “soccer scores are low”  it is solely based on the numerals on the scoreboard.  Football awards 7 points compared to soccer’s 1*; it isn’t like football teams actually score 7 times more than soccer, just that the rules award more points per score.  If soccer started awarding 90 billion points per goal, half the detractors would talk about how football sucks because of the low scores, even though no actual gameplay was changed in either game.

Also, unlike you evidently, many people can enjoy many sports; they don’t have to choose one or the other.  I, for instance, enjoy both soccer and football; and I have grown to enjoy cricket without having to stop liking any of the sports I have enjoyed before.

*Yes, I’m ignoring field goals, because field goals are the wussy score in football; “we aren’t good enough to actually score, so we’re gonna do a manuever that’s different than the normal game because we suck” - they are the PKs of soccer, but at least a PK is because the other team broke the rules, not because a team just feels like being lazy.

The lack of scoring in the men’s game explains part of its unpopularity in the US.

I think the sexism and xenophobia are a much more satisfying explanation that corresponds more closely to reality.  Sports fans don’t even give soccer a chance, for fear they’ll break out in vaginas.  But if you’re interested in reforming your ways, I give you Pandagoal, Pandagon’s English Premier affiliate blog.

I dare someone to accuse the ancient Spartans of being effeminate

Sure that’s rare, but calling Spartan women overly masculine - in that they played sports, read and wrote, ran businesses and had the utter temerity to actually speak their opinions in public - was something of an Athenian pastime.

*Yes, I’m ignoring field goals, because field goals are the wussy score in football; “we aren’t good enough to actually score, so we’re gonna do a manuever that’s different than the normal game because we suck” - they are the PKs of soccer, but at least a PK is because the other team broke the rules, not because a team just feels like being lazy.

No no nononononono.

You do not get to dis the Chicago Bears defence just b/c you don’t like kicks.  You can’t get 7 points without a PAT.  The field goal is simply a PAT without the T(ouchdown).  Touchdowns are only worth 6.

Blocking field goals and PATs are routine skills.

Poor Chicago hasn’t had a good quarterback since Sid Luckman.  But we’ve had defences that can kill the other team, and have won games with field goals and running back interceptions and punts.

But what do I know?  I’m just a lowly female who shouldn’t be allowed to watch the manly men play.  I should be in the kitchen cooking and bringing beer to the menfolk.  I’m sure the Bitchy Fussbudgets are concerned about me.

Demanding schedules for boys, on the other hand, are totally understandable. They’re too tough for church or family time anyway. This is another example of antifeminists actually hating everyone, not just women.

Sports fans don’t even give soccer a chance, for fear they’ll break out in vaginas. 

Though I don’t doubt that’s a factor nowadays, professional soccer was a niche sport even before organized play for girls took off in the US. Consider the North American Soccer League (1968-1984) the Major Indoor Soccer League (essentially took up where the NASL left off to 1992) as well as MLS (1996 to present). The biggest youth soccer organization, AYSO, was founded in 1964—four years was hardly enough time to create an association in the public mind.

Professional soccer was played throughout the 20th century in the US, and just never took off:

http://www.sover.net/~spectrum/champs.html

Also the fact that foreigners are much better at it than the good ol’ USA.  Anything ruled by South Americans and Europeans must be inferior.

Trust me, it has been the source of some amusement for decades elsewhere that the football played in America requires:

i, Players dressed up in hyper-masculine uniforms,
ii, Crouching behind each other’s butts,
iii, Running plays like a military campaign AND
iv, Stopping for a commercial break every few minutes.

That’s why American football doesn’t succeed well outside the US in countries that have rugby or soccer traditions - it looks ludicrous to outsiders by comparison.  Perhaps you should try it with India or China?

NZers would dearly love it if Aussie football had that many elements we could laugh at, but, alas, it’s just rugby as played by people who didn’t listen.

Does she say what she things girls need in a relationship? Which relationships is she talking about? Do athletes do not form relationships with their teammates, and why do they not qualify?

No, no, you guys are looking at this relationship thing from the wrong angle.  Girls want (nay, NEED) to form relationships.  The competition aspect of sports is foreign to them - they don’t naturally want to beat the other team, they want to braid their hair and talk about boys and Jeebus.  Forcing girls into a competitive frame of mind is unfeminine and probably dangerous.

That’s the problem with “the quest for scholarships” too.  Icky, ungirly competition.  Leads to manification and lesbianism.

Real girls don’t need scholarships anyway. Scholarships are for all those working-class dirt-smudged baseball-playing lesbians who don’t get to live off their fathers’ money. They probably don’t even have fathers.

As a straight man, I always looked at the most “masculine” sports as being a bit, well, gay.

You’re not the only one, I think the exact same thing!

Anything that is good about sports for men is good about sports for women.  That’s what Title IX is about.  Wellington claimed Waterloo was “won on the playing fields of Eaton.”  (so some such).

It doesn’t matter whether it’s as popular with fans/viewers; that isn’t the point.  The point is teaching teamwork and self-sacrifice.  It is about teaching leadership.  It doesn’t even matter what sport you’re talking about.  It shouldn’t even matter who wins or loses as long as you brought everything you had to the playing field.  College sports is supposed to be about personal growth. 

As women find themselves more and more in leadership positions, the things that sports teaches are more and more needed by more and more women, lesbian, straight or otherwise.

Well, it boils down to if girls play sports, where are they going to find cheerleaders? And who’s going to do the chores that the boys never learn to do, thereby justifying the myth that women are ‘better’ at housework and that men can’t scrub toilets?

These women just don’t want other women to be happy and healthy, period.

“Sports fans don’t even give soccer a chance, for fear they’ll break out in vaginas.”

Amanda, you owe me a new keyboard.

“As a straight man, I always looked at the most “masculine” sports as being a bit, well, gay.”

As a gay man, I did too.  But alas, I ran and threw a ball like a fag.  I missed out on all those opportunities to check out guys in the shower.  Luckily, I could sing. But you don’t take showers after theater practice.

So…girls can pay for their education now through their skills, or they can pay for their education later, through loans. Hmmm.

As per the relationship thing; I made some great friends while playing softball (four square, Ultimate, etc). I also strongly desired to destroy the competition. Does this mean I’m seceretly a man>