Given the political culture of the United States, with its oscillations between gender conservatism and belief in equality of opportunity, the liberal vision of sports is implemented more often than the radical. The push and pull towards equity is notoriously incomplete, jagged, and uneven. As the century turned, women were 56% of United States undergraduates, but in the major schools, they had only 36% of the athletic operating budgets and 32% of the recruiting dollars.1 Even the liberal vision wrenches the guts of the diehard sports traditionalist.
The liberal healing of the Atalanta Syndrome, with its potentially radical consequences, offers two compatible treatments, each with its own highly publicized and politicized national drama. The first is the taking of access for women into previously “masculine” arenas and individual sports – as players, administrators, writers, broadcasters, and knowledgeable fans. Having gained access, they may compete against men or each other. So I applaud the fact that in the 2004 Greek Olympics, Atalantas were on the march. About 44% of the participants were female, including two Afghan women, one in judo, one in track. I cheer on the pioneering women jockeys, boxers, wrestlers, ice hockey players, and saber fencers; the girls and their parents who integrated Little League; and Anneke Sorenstam, who played against the touring male PGA pros in the 2003 Colonial tournament. Her motives, she said, in the rhetoric of liberal individualism, were to test herself and her skills. Sorenstam’s career, no matter how glorious as golf history, is another example of the non-glories of the Atalanta Syndrome. In 2002 she won more than 50% of her starts, 13 victories in 25 international tournaments. In contrast, Tiger Woods – whom I watch avidly and who famously embodies statements about sports and race – won 6 of his 22 starts. Are we surprised to learn that Sorenstam earned $2.5 million in endorsements while Woods earned $60 million, many more bushels of golden apples?
The most recent national dramatization of the push for access was less about playing the game than about playing the game in a “masculine” space: the Augusta National Golf Club. This site of the Master’s Tournament most vividly represents a conjunction of elite, almost exclusively white male power, prestige, and sports. Apparently, the magnolias emanate a sacramental fragrance.2 The march of the women on Augusta has been beaten back, if temporarily. The resistance of the club’s leader and many of its members to the admission of women is explicable. Why should they give up their material and psychological comforts, the luxuries of power and privilege, and the ability to control women? Yet the hostility to women seems at once fearful, ludicrous, and a sinister reminder of the power of the Atalanta Syndrome.
The second treatment of the Atalanta Syndrome is the continuing growth and prowess of women’s sports teams, of women playing with and against each other in women’s soccer, rugby, volleyball, softball, basketball, track. For many years, these teams – like individual women’s sports – tended to be the province of the affluent, but they have become both more democratic on the school level and more professional on the post-collegiate. The political struggle of this effort has been over Title IX, which has been responsible for greater democracy and has affected a broad cross-section of institutions. Passed in 1972, Title IX preceded by one year the spectacular tennis match of Billie Jean King against Bobby Riggs, where Billie Jean King, the feminist warrior, beat the mouthy patriarch. An amendment to an Education Act, Title IX is historic legislation. Yet, it reads simply, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
After 1972, a series of federal regulations clarified the law for athletics. In 1979, they mandated a “three-prong” test to measure an institution’s compliance with Title IX. Schools could show that their male-female athlete ratio was “substantially proportionate” to their male-female enrollment, or they could show a history of opening up sports opportunities for women, or they could show that the athletic interests and abilities of women were “fully and effectively” accommodated. About 2/3rds of schools chose the latter two prongs.
For women athletes, Title IX has been a boost. Between 1971 and 2002, the number of girls participating in high school sports increased from 294,000 to 2.8 million. Today, more and more fathers are bringing suits under Title IX to give their daughters better high school sports facilities and training. We have softball dads as well as soccer moms. The transmittal of the culture of sports from father to son has been broadened to include daughters. Why, I asked with mock naïveté, would such a wonderful evolution be challenged? For the most part, public opinion seems to support Title IX. Yet, its implementation has proved so contentious that Title IX has had its near-death experiences.
In the 1990s, about 400 men’s college teams were eliminated, with wrestling and gymnastics taking a particular blow. Driving a wedge between female and male athletes, the advocates of male sports blamed Title IX for their demise and called for a resurrectionary change. An alternative – to alter sports funding so that both men and women’s teams could prosper – was often ignored. The average college wrestling program costs $330,000 per year – not cheap, but far less expensive than football. In 2002, the Department of Education, under Secretary Rod Paige, appointed the presidential Commission on Opportunity in Athletics to ask if Title IX should go on. A force behind its establishment was a suit against the Department brought by the National Wrestling Coaches Association. After public wrangling and advocacy, the Commission did recommend that the Education Department should reaffirm its commitment to equal opportunity for both sexes. A University of South Carolina professor, Robert Stokes, in a letter to the Sports Editor of the New York Times, commented wryly:
It is ironic that the erosion of Title IX’s socially salubrious requirements of gender equity in college sports was initiated by a lawsuit filed by the college wrestling coaches’ association. Considering America’s current fascination with female wrestling, as evidenced by the recent number of pop culture references to the sport, one would think that instead of ending male programs, colleges and universities would advance female wrestling as a revenue producer that would rival football and baseball.3
Unfortunately, the weakening of the Atalanta Syndrome is extracting a price: the sexualization of the strong woman athlete, the engineering of the “buff bunny” or the “heterosexy” competitor. Let our Atalantas be champions, but have them emanate sexual charisma as well. Let her be swifter and stronger, let her go higher, but let her have glamour, allure. A pioneering study of the media guide cover photographs of the Division I schools of the National Collegiate Athletic Association, which the schools themselves distribute, found that during the 1990s, the covers changed to have a rough parity of men’s and women’s sports, but the images of women were more apt to be gender stereotyped and “sexually suggestive”.4 If a contemporary Atalanta were to be an ambitious beach volleyball player, playing a tough sport barefoot in a sand pit, she would strategically fuse strength and femininity before the voyeuristic TV cameras and perhaps mention the support of a boyfriend in her after-game interviews. Moreover, the sexualized woman athlete, like women in many fields, is more marketable than the decorous good girl or the frump. As a review of books about bodybuilding comments, female body-builders “adhere to – and are often photographed and featured for narrow, highly sexualized versions of femininity, which are immensely profitable.”5
- Welch Suggs, “Small Colleges Lag on Sports Opportunities for Women,” Chronicle of Higher Education L: 41 (June 18, 2004): A1, 32-36 is a major report about the current status of gender equity in higher education. Smaller institutions are lagging behind those with major sports programs, but one must also look at individual sports. [↩]
- A description of this drama and the sexism of Augusta is Marcia Chambers, “Ladies Need Not Apply,” Golf for Women (May/June 2002): 108-113, 130. [↩]
- February 23, 2003, p. 10 N SP. [↩]
- Jo Ann M. Buysse and Melissa Sheridan Embser-Herbert, “Constructions of Gender in Sport: An Analysis of Intercollegiate Media Guide Cover Photographs.” Gender and Society 18: 1 (February 2004): 66-81, quote from 73. [↩]
- Shari L. Dworkin, “Review,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 26:2 (Winter 2001): 580-583, quote from 581. Dworkin focuses on bodybuilding. An accompanying review by Toska Olson, pp. 577-580, takes up books on self-defense and martial arts. [↩]
