When I wrote
>>
>>You said:   Personally, I don't have a problem with a school dropping a
>>sport to comply with Title IX.
 
I meant what I said.  There are schools where there are far more men's teams
than women's teams.  At those schools, if athletic directors choose to drop
a men's team--or a smaller women's team--to comply with Title IX, then I
don't have a problem with it.
 
I'd like one person to point to the kind of wholesale bloodbath that many
posters here fear will happen in the name of compliance.  Name one school
where sport after sport--all men's teams--was cut so that women's teams
could be supported.
 
I stand by my assertion that, in the United States, there's ample
opportunity for men and boys to play school sports.  The same cannot be said
for women and girls.
 
Eyeore wrote:
>
>I really think that minor men's sports should see football as the enemy,
>not wmoen athletes.  Most of the people I discuss this with who are
>involved with men's athletics don't choose to see it this way; instead,
>they identify with football.  They want to see the issue as "us" (the
>men) vs. "them" (the women).  If that's the way they choose to draw the
>lines, then when one of the men's sports is cancelled, it's a matter of
>the shoe being on the other foot.
 
It's so much easier to blame those who want equity than it is to blame those
who hold the purse-strings.  I don't see football, per se, as the enemy; I
see a school that funds 60+ football scholarships as a school with
problematic priorities.
 
> There is a good dose
>of justice involved in watching men get denied an opportunity.  Harsh
>justice, perhaps even unfair justice, but justice nonetheless.
 
This feminist takes no pleasure in watching men's athletics get cut.  I
don't like to see male athletes suffer; certainly, as I've said before, the
athletic departments could come up with a better solution.  But if cutting
football scholarships enables the women's soccer team to be funded, that's
fine with me.  If a school chooses to fund women's soccer and not men's
soccer to comply with Title IX, then that's fine; there are *plenty* of
other schools that offer soccer for men, and *plenty* of other team sports
for men to play.
>
>How does it feel, guys?  I wish I could say that I thought that this
>situation would teach you to try to grasp how the women have felt all
>these years.
 
I don't want men to have to learn the lesson I learned when growing up.
When I was in school in the '70s and early '80s, girls were absolutely not
offered the same number of oppotunities as boys were to participate in
organized school sports.  Was the demand there?  Yes.  My girls' softball
league was packed.  The only sport offered to junior high girls where I went
to school was basketball, until soccer was introduced when I was in the
eighth grade.  Thirty girls came out for soccer that first year (in a co-ed
school where the total number of eighth-graders was 50), and no one was
turned away.
 
In high school, girls were actively involved in intermural sports to make up
for the lack of funded organized girls sports.
 
I attended a SUNY school in the '80s.  Aside from track, there was no
mention of women's sports *at all* in our college paper.  Men's basketball,
men's soccer, and (later) men's hockey were the big three.  If there were
other women's sports offered (and there must have been), I never heard of them.
 
Men have taken for granted all their lives what women again and again have
to ask for:  equity.  The causes of women--academic, athletic,
employment--should not be furthered at the expense of men, and they don't
have to be; however,  when men respond to Title IX by saying it's "us vs.
them," or it's "a battlefield," I can't imagine much progress toward
all-around equity being made.
 
Paula C. Weston
Girl Reporter
 
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