According to NPR's Frank Deford, Title IX mandates that representation on sports teams be proportional to enrollment. With the proportion of women at American universities at 57% and rising, this means some schools might have to eliminate men's teams. To avoid this, some athletic departments would like to redefine cheerleading as a sport rather than an "activity." Since cheerleading is female-dominated and relatively inexpensive, calling it a sport would increase women's representation without much outlay of funds.

On the one hand, this reclassification would honor the athleticism many cheerleading squads display. To illustrate its physical demands, Deford points out that nearly a third of severe injuries to female college and high school students occur during cheerleading. And many cheerleaders would probably relish the acknowledgment that what they do is competitive and demanding, not the popularity contest among Barbie dolls sometimes depicted in teen movies. On the other hand, calling cheerleading a sport might allow schools to cut women's teams that required more equipment and outlay of funds. Ultimately, the reclassification seems to be less about giving cheerleading the respect it deserves than about saving money by scrimping on women's athletics.

The debate over cheerleading highlights what a thorny issue sports in schools can be. As Deford notes, football is such a huge deal at many high schools and colleges that it tends to obscure other sports. And especially at the college level, sports are a major cash cow, not only through ticket sales but through alumni donations. Unfortunately, this may lead schools to pay more attention to the bottom line than to fairness and equality. Title IX was meant to prevent this — and schools shouldn't use cheerleading as a vehicle to circumvent it.

Women's Sports, Title IX And The Cheerleader Option [NPR]

Today The Wall Street Journal reports that many institutions are reconsidering the point of cheerleading since it's original goal of cheering the football team to victory in the late 1800s has evolved into performing difficult stunts in recent decades. Many are concerned by recent reports on the dangerous of cheerleading:

Cheerleading accounts for 65% of all female catastrophic injuries in high school and college, according to the University of North Carolina's National Center for Catastrophic Sport Injury Research. The Consumer Product Safety Commission says the number of injuries from cheerleading accidents has more than quadrupled in 25 years. Another report put the number of cheerleader emergency room visits in 2007 at 26,786.

It's hard to put these numbers into perspective, since it's unclear how many cheerleaders there are. There are an estimated 400,000 public high school cheerleaders, but there are an unknown number of private teams, and the National Collegiate Athletic Association doesn't track the number of college participants since it's not considered a sport. According to The Wall Street Journal, the consensus estimate is that there are about 4 million cheerleaders in America, which puts the sport's injury rate on par with women's soccer. Cheerleading may only seem more dangerous than other sports because they practice year round and cheerleaders may be taken to the E.R. more than in sports with designated medical staffs.

The American Association of Cheerleading Coaches & Administrators issues safety guidelines for high school and college cheerleaders, and has banned several particularly dangerous stunts in recent years. For the 2008-2009 school year the association banned certain twists on basketball courts without a mat, Reuters reports. And in 2006 more restrictions were put on stunts involving pyramids after a Southern Illinois University cheerleader fell from a 15-person pyramid, cracking her vertebra and getting a concussion, according to USA Today.

The Wisconsin Supreme Court ruled that cheerleading is a contact sport in January (preventing injured cheerleaders from suing their schools and teammates), but part of the problem may be that too many people don't consider it a sport at all. Jeff Webb, chief executive Varsity Brands, which makes cheerleading uniforms and runs camps, says that compared to cheerleaders who performs stunts, those seen at NFL games are "a joke." But many seem to prefer the old-fashioned kind of cheerleader, like officials at the University Connecticut, which replaced the school's cheerleading team with a less-athletic "Spirit Squad" last month. John Saddlemire, the university's vice president for student affairs explained, "The emphasis on stunting had detracted from the major purpose," which he says should be on "fan interaction and truly on cheering and cheerleading."

Cheerleading has split into two very different forms over the years and continuing to put them in the same category may be detrimental to both activities. While many were offended by the University of Connecticut's decision to replace the cheerleading team with the Spirit Squad, there's nothing inherently wrong with having a group of (modestly-clothed) students cultivate school spirit. Opinions on stunt-based cheerleading have been polarized by the traditional image of girls in skimpy outfits cheering on all-male teams. While some men lament the loss of sexy women to oogle on the sidelines, many feminists belittle the sport because of its sexist roots.

As many young women (and some men) push themselves to perform increasingly difficult gymnastic moves in pursuit of cheerleading trophies and college scholarships, a culture has developed in which they're encouraged to tolerate injuries. Since many schools don't define cheerleading as a sport, teams don't have to comply with any safety guidelines and may not have the funding to hire well-trained coaches.

Some schools attempts to count cheerleading as a Title IX activity have been controversial. Quinnipiac University's decision to eliminate three sports teams, including women's volleyball, and move its (less expensive) cheerleading team up to varsity in the spring led to a federal lawsuit, the Associated Press reports. In her testimony Quinnipiac's volleyball coach said her grandmother could have been a cheerleader and, "To me, Title IX is about giving women opportunities beyond that." Obviously the intent of Title IX wasn't to eliminate existing sports opportunities for women, and many schools do just see cheerleading teams as a cheaper way to comply with the law. However, competitive cheerleading isn't the same activity practiced decades ago. As the struggle to reconcile the "sexy cheerleader" image with the skilled, physically demanding version of the sport practiced by many women today, injury rates among cheerleaders will remain high, as there isn't enough regulation or funding for better training and medical attention when they need it.

What's The Point Of Cheerleading? [The Wall Street Journal]
The American Association of Cheerleading Coaches & Administrators Announce New Safety Rules [Reuters]
New Rules Ban Dangerous Cheerleading Stunts [USA Today]
At Some Colleges, Cheerleading Counts As A Sport [Associated Press]

Earlier: UConn Replaces Cheerleaders With Less Athletic "Spirit Squad"

Berman's thoughtful meditation is prompted by British writer Dominic Lawson's assertion that sports should be unsegregated, freed from the "apartheid" that leads to controversies like that surrounding Caster Semenya. And in a theoretical sense, you can see his points; the distinctions can become very tricky - and very fraught. (Although, on a social level, track is already one of the most integrated.) Says Berman:

What should a "woman" be, for the purposes of international sports? Should socially constructed gender and biological sex be part of the equation? Should believable-looking girl parts be enough to pass the test? (And, if so, what do we do about transwomen athletes?) Or is this extensive battery of medical and psychological testing necessary? And, perhaps most important of all, is enforcing whatever standard we choose worth publicly destroying the lives and identities of athletes who have only ever known themselves to be women?

But at the same time, says Berman, would such a proposal really achieve much? It could even, she suggests,

have a dramatically negative effect on women athletes, from the elementary-school level all the way up through Olympians. If female medalists become rare, and if only a few young women each year make their high school's co-ed soccer team, it's easy to imagine girls becoming alienated from sports. Why even try if you're so unlikely to achieve anything you can be proud of?

I agree with this point - and I'd add that there are a lot of social and communal benefits to single-sex sports, perhaps especially for young women. In addition to the obvious benefits of bonding, leadership and mutual inspiration - to say nothing of healthy competition - there's a lot to be said for creating an oasis from the highly-charged sexuality of adolescence - whatever the orientations of the folks involved (since I think the kind of public expressions or pressures I'm referring to tend to be pretty heteronormative at the high school level.) Of course, though, this point works a lot better in a post Title IX perfect world where women's sports are given respect and girls are given the same encouragement and equivalent opportunities. And frankly, I'd worry less about making adult sports co-ed than about encouraging a true equality; it's only "apartheid" if you consider one group inferior.

Women should obviously be given a chance to play football with men when there's no equivalent girl's team and not enough interest to found one - at any rate, they should have the chance to try out. But it's important to remember that it goes both ways. In my progressive high school, there was a boy who wanted to play field hockey and, since there was no equivalent boys' team, he won the right to do so. At 14, he was about the size of most of his teammates and opponents. Three years in, let's just say the team was dominant and there were grumblings from rival schools.

The issue's a lot less complicated at the child's level, where kids are still on an equal physical playing field - literally, too, since the 1974 lawsuit forcing Little League to admit girls. The fact that girls are still underrepresented is a good demonstration that Lawson's utopian suggestions wouldn't solve everything. As Bob Cook writes on TrueSlant, the fact that there are two girls ( Katie Reyes, and Bryn Stonehouseat) at this year's Little League World Series is notable. But, he adds, there's a "groundswell of support" for those girls who wish to play baseball rather than softball. Says he, "As it turns out, there are more female-only baseball organizations forming for the benefit of girls who would like to play the sport without having to put up with the male bullshit. Part of the ultimately unsuccessful bid to get baseball back for the 2016 Olympics was to have men's and women's baseball events." And that, at least, is equal-opportunity discrimination.

The End Of Sex-Segregated Sports [Salon]
No Sexing, Please – Let's All Race Together [TimesUK]
Girls Play Baseball, Too [TrueSlant]

• Robert Bork gives an interview about Sonia Sotomayor, declares his favorite Justice is Clarence Thomas and basically acts like such a huge douchebag that he makes Scalia look cuddly. • The Supreme Court ruled today that Valerie Plame and her husband, former Ambassador Joe Wilson, can sue the whole government for outing her secret spy life, but not the individuals that actually did so. • Elsewhere in the government, women are joining the FBI and making their way up its ranks in ever-greater numbers. • Khadijah Williams spent most of her childhood homeless or nearly-homeless, but worked her ass off in school and is going to Harvard. • U.S. Ambassador to the UN Susan Rice recalls her own days as a female athlete and encourages women to send in their athletic pictures in celebration of Title IX's anniversary tomorrow. • Wired imagines that some day we'll be able to inhale our birth control, and not in a scary "the atmosphere is filled with poisonous chemicals" kind of way. • There's a consumer survey in which the characters from Mad Men ask you questions. No one cares what the survey is about. • Sometimes, women are sexually assaulted on cruise ships and there's not much that anybody does about it. • China is finally admitting that it has both an HIV problem and a number of sex workers, so they're trying to educate the latter about the former. • If you pay the site ManBabies $10, they'll swap a baby's face with a man's face and you'll get to be icked out. • It turns out that the most popular ways of measuring BMI actually overestimate the BMI of African-Americans, since it was designed around white people. It's like the SATs, only after you take this test, everyone calls you "fat." • Old married people who still really love each other show brain activity just like young people who just fell in love. As though you couldn't just look at an elderly couple holding hands and tell that. •

Her first piece, about a middle school basketball team in Brooklyn, highlights a number of challenges facing the girls who are trying to play. Thomas writes:

The Cougars have few of the basics that suburban public school girls have come to expect, including free transportation, uniforms and full seasons of regularly scheduled games. At M.S. 61 in Crown Heights, Brooklyn, each road game is a logistical puzzle for Mr. Mariner, 46, who is dean of students and coach of the school's girls' and boys' basketball teams. Even when the Cougars arrive ready to play, games are sometimes canceled because the opponents - facing the same obstacles - cannot field a team. Parents rarely show up to watch.

Mariner, by the way, won't cut a girl from the team regardless of ability... and has to clean the gym after he's done, despite being the Dean of Students.

The other problem lies in how many girls can overcome the barriers to participation.

In the suburbs, girls play sports at rates roughly equal to boys. A 2007 survey by Harris Interactive of more than 2,000 schoolchildren nationwide showed that 54 percent of boys and 50 percent of girls in the suburbs described themselves as "moderately involved" athletes.

Urban areas revealed a much greater discrepancy. Only 36 percent of city girls in the survey described themselves as moderately involved athletes, compared with 56 percent of city boys.

This hints at the idea that issues of class and financial wherewithal weigh heavily on girls when it comes to sports.

But, as Marj Snyder, Chief Program Officer for the Women's Sports Foundation points out in the above clip, studies show that girls' participation in sports help them build career-critical team-building skills, help combat obesity and is strongly correlated with academic success.

In Boston, a number of non-profit groups are working to try to encourage girls to participate more in sports. One group is even helping adults learn to break down barriers in gender-specific play.

Employees at Sports4Kids, a nonprofit group that oversees recess at public schools, have been devising ways to shake up gender roles and increase options for girls. Tes Siarnacki, a recess coordinator at a school in East Boston, regularly encourages older girls to referee boy-dominated soccer games, and assigns older boys to monitor double Dutch jump rope, which is played mostly by girls.

One day this spring, Siarnacki zeroed in on a group of girls huddled in a corner, their heads bent in conversation. Siarnacki jogged over, spoke to them quietly for a few minutes and before long the girls hopped to their feet and began doing sit-ups and jumping jacks.

"They wanted to play ‘teacher,' so I told them to play ‘gym teacher,' " she said. "It was a pretty easy sell."

The groups hope that by encouraging boys and girls to consider various athletic options, they can keep girls playing sports longer.

Interesting, one thing Thomas highlights in both of her pieces is the difficulty faced by coaches and coordinators with girls assigned childcare duties by their families. In Brooklyn, Thomas tracked one immigrant girl who, while a star on the team, was assigned by her family to pick up a cousin each afternoon from kindergarten and another from daycare instead of going to practice or participating in games. In Boston, one sports program identified child care responsibilities of teenagers as such major obstacle to participation that they attempted to create an program to watch the charges of their participants. In most cases, boys in the family share no such responsibilities. So in more ways that one, traditional views of women's roles continue to shape girls' lives in ways that are unhealthy for them.

Less interesting (as one would figure) are the comments on the Times pieces, which turned the issue into a referendum on Title IX and whether high school athletics have any right to tax dollars. If one read the series, one would note that the point is that, in urban schools, basically no tax dollars are spent on sports programs and that, given historic interest in keeping boys off the streets and busy, girls athletics have been ignored by private groups despite the proven benefits for girls. Thomas goes back again and again to the idea that school athletics in suburban areas have come pretty close to gender parity and private leagues that require fees are common and parents take time off to attend games — but none of those structures or opportunities are available in urban areas, particularly to girls because of a mixture of time, sexist ideas about the role of girls in extended families and the view of sports as a male activity, and money. In other words, the whole series is becoming an analysis of the role that class and (albeit implicitly) race play in girls' participation in athletics, and why the girls with the least opportunity might need such activities the most.

A City Team's Struggle Shows Disparity in Girls' Sports [NY Times]
Using Teamwork to Bring Girls Into the Game [NY Times]
Struggling to Play [NY Times]
The Have-Nots [NY Times]
Playing Against The Odds [NY Times]

Double-dutch teams have been created at 10 high schools in predominantly black New York City neighborhoods, according to Salon. Last year, the New York Times reported that the city was introducing varsity double-dutch to address the fact that in city schools only 10 percent of high school students played on sports teams, compared to more than a third in many suburban districts.

Legitimizing the sport, which many girls already participate in when they're young, may be the key to getting them to continue their involvement in sports through high school. A study last year from the Women's Sports Foundation found that inner-city girls of color have some of the lowest rates of sports participation of U.S. teens, according to Women's eNews. Sociologist Don Sabo, the organization's research director says that urban girls tend to start organized sports later and are thus more likely to drop out. He says:

"They haven't learned the fundamentals of how to balance, jump, run, how to be a team member, how to suck it up and play through being tired. They feel foolish," said Sabo ... "When was the last time you tried something you weren't good at and stayed with it for a year?"

Urban girls of color are "hit with a double whammy," says Neena Chaudhry of the National Women's Law Center. Often their communities have less access to open spaces and they face competition for scarce resources at school. Theoretically, Title IX should solve this problem, but unlike in colleges and universities, high schools are not required to report gender breakdowns by sport, resources, and funding. A study by the National Women's Law Center suggested that few urban female athletes were using Title IX to demand equal treatment.

There's a push now to require high schools to report statistics like colleges and universities do to make sure that the schools are complying to Title IX. Last month Senator Olympia Snowe reintroduced a 2004 bill to the Senate called the High School Sports Information Collection Act, which would require high schools to report the gender of student athletes and the financing of sports teams.

Advocates say that enacting Title IX compliance laws would increase sports opportunities for girls and boys across the country. While city officials hope to increase girls' participation in sports especially, the new double-dutch teams in New York are coed. The video below from the annual double dutch tournament held at the Apollo Theater in New York shows the incredible amount of athleticism that competitive double-dutch requires. Since countless studies have shown that student athletes perform better in school and have higher self-esteem, clearly girls across the country would benefit from similar programs.

Double Dutch Bust [Salon]
Double Dutch Gets Status in the Schools [The New York Times]
Girls' Sports Opportunities MIA In City Schools [Women's eNews]

China beat the U.S. in the medal count this year, and according to the Journal, " while Chinese athletes rely on state sports schools," the men's gymnastic team at Arizona State, which has lost school funding, depend on their own fund raising to continue training. Some schools are choosing to implement Title IX, which forces colleges to spend the same amount of money as men's and women's sports, by the gender breakdown of their entire student body. In other words, if a school is 54% female, then 54% of their athletic budget goes to women's sports.

It seems to me that more of the blame should be placed on the football teams that eat the bulk of the men's sports budgets at many large universities. But, as the Journal points out, the Arizona State athletic department chose to cut gymnastics and two other sports that were Olympic feeders "because, unlike the football program, they don't generate much revenue. The department's $41 million budget depends on ticket sales, team souvenirs, event parking and other game-related revenue, about half of which comes from football." And ultimately, shouldn't we be more concerned with the cut backs on the academic side of the fence when there is a finite amount of university money to be shared? When it comes to choosing between a men's gymnastic team or paying a few more writing teachers, it doesn't seem like a tough decision to make.

Cutbacks
In College Sports Risk U.S. Olympic Future [WSJ]
Billie Jean King Remembers 'Battle Of The Sexes' [NPR]

U.S. 4x400 Teams' Gold Ends Spotty Performance By American Athletes [SF Chron]

Pinker adds that perhaps if science departments helped women combine family responsibility with hard science careers, they might be more likely to choose those careers. Other opponents of this application of Title IX think "[female scientists] would be marginalized if a quota system revived the old stereotype that women couldn’t compete on even terms in science," Tierney notes.

It's clear that Tierney is against using Title IX to create parity in labs. "Whether or not quotas are ever imposed, some of the most productive science and engineering departments in America are busy filling out new federal paperwork," he said. "The agencies that have been cutting financing for Fermilab and the Spirit rover on Mars are paying for investigations of a problem that may not even exist. How is this good for scientists of either sex?"

On one hand, he has a point — who cares if a man or a woman cures cancer as long as it's being cured? But Tierney's argument also has a smugness about it, since it dismisses gender concerns by belittling them.

A New Frontier for Title IX: Science [NYT]
Male Bias or Female Choice? [NYT]

Earlier: Why Women Are Opting Out Of The Hard Sciences

Tierney, that renowned expert on gender differences, suggests that men are biologically more inclined to be competitive — because, of course, it's always nature over nurture — and that sports were designed with men in mind and so, of course, women's bodies won't be suited for them. Because running and kicking and jumping, well, gosh, that's something girls are obviously biologically unsuited for because we develop hips and stuff. Also, he claims that female cross-country runners are more prone to eating disorders, not that he bothers comparing them with, say, male wrestlers or contemplates the possibility that women prone to eating/exercise disorders are attracted to an endurance sport that doesn't encourage a lot of muscle growth or anything. Oh, and of course he finds a woman anthropologist who says that playing sports isn't necessary to learn anything about life later, since

"You don't need football to learn how to succeed in school or the office. You don't surround a computer and tackle it. You need the ability to read and discuss and compromise- - the kind of skills that women were developing around the campfire while men were off fighting and chasing animals."

Oh, and by the way, Tierney says that women may exercise more after college then men, but that we don't tend to stick with team sports — and it's not because we lack the opportunity — but instead we turn to dancing which is probably safer for our weak and fragile bodies. (I guess I should go tell my sister to get off her ultimate Frisbee team and stop playing co-rec softball and I should totally tell my friend Harry's wife Gail and her teammates that co-rec football is too dangerous and, oh God, my friend Molly really needs to stop playing softball, soccer, volleyball, Frisbee and football because they're going to harm themselves and all the women like me that are concerned with injury are in dance classes. Except that I'm not, because I hurt my hip dancing ballet as a teenager as a way to avoid the competitive sports at which I suck and don't really like.

But, back to Sokolove: he and his questioners point out, rightly, that one of the causes of ACL injuries seems to be a lack of appropriately-supportive muscles in the legs of young women, many of whom don't want to have chunky legs (because, as we've all learned from coverage of Hillary Clinton, that is truly the biggest sin). Also, parents who push their kids to play sports for scholarships suck and are completely misguided; refs who allow more inappropriate violence in women's games might play a role; and pain is there for a reason and playing through it is probably bad. All of which is great, and important information, but it still doesn't add up to "feminists are ignoring injuries to women in a quest for equality," which is the connotation of statements like this one:

Advocates for women's sports have had to keep a laser focus on one thing: making sure they have equal access to high-school and college sports. It's hard to fight for equal rights while also broadcasting alarm about injuries that might suggest women are too delicate to play certain games or to play them at a high level of intensity.

The Uneven Playing Field [NY Times]
Michael Sokolove on 'The Uneven Playing Field' [NY Times]
Secretary's Commission on Opportunity in Athletics [US Department of Education]
Politically Incorrect Soccer Injuries [NY Times]

Which is to say, not only did the story expend 8,000 words on the "pain" supposedly afflicting a rarified slice of a rarified slice of the very upper echelons of the world's richest country — hypercompetitive female high school soccer players who voluntarily stress and occasionally tear their Anterior Cruciate Ligaments in order to get into college — it kind of is only maybe-true. It could be true, of course, but for the fact that

"Comprehensive statistics on total sports injuries are in short supply."

Some studies have measured sports injuries by emergency-room visits, which usually follow traumatic events like broken bones. A.C.L. and other soft-tissue injuries often do not lead to an E.R. visit.

David Cooper, Hannah's father, observed, "I once heard that the injury rate in the N.F.L. is 100 percent. It looks to me, in girls' soccer, it's the same thing."

Some researchers believe that in sports that both sexes play, and with similar rules — soccer, basketball, volleyball — female athletes rupture their A.C.L.'s at rates as high as five times that of males. According to the NCAA Injury surveillance system, it's 0.25 per 1000 in soccer as opposed to 0.10 per 1000 for male soccer injuries.

If you are the parent of an athletic girl and live in a community that bustles with girls playing sports — especially the so-called jumping and cutting spots like soccer, basketball, volleyball and lacrosse — it may seem that every couple of weeks you see or hear about some unfortunate young woman hobbling off the field and into the operating room. The first time, you think: what a stroke of bad luck. But you figure it won't happen to your daughter because, after all, what are the odds?

After a couple of more A.C.L. tears in the neighborhood, you get worried and think, Gosh, we must be in a really bad cluster for these injuries. Why here? But in all likelihood, what you are witnessing is not a freakish run of misfortune but the law of averages playing out...PARENTS OF TEENAGE GIRLS who play sports have grown accustomed to what seems like entire teams battling injuries — and seeing those who do make it onto the field wrapped in Ace bandages or wearing braces on various body parts. Hannah Cooper, a star soccer player at Bethesda-Chevy Chase High School in Maryland, sat out several games early in the 2007 season with a severe ankle sprain, one of many she has suffered since her years in middle school.

The pressure to concentrate on a "best" sport before even entering middle school — and to play it year-round — is bad for all kids. They wear down the same muscle groups day after day. They have no time to rejuvenate, let alone get stronger. By playing constantly, they multiply their risks and simply give themselves too many opportunities to get hurt.

In a cohort of 20 soccer playing girls, the statistics predict that one each year will experience an A.C.L. injury and go through reconstructive surgery, rehabilitation and the loss of a season — an eternity for a high schooler. Over the course of four years, 4 out of the 20 girls on that team will rupture an A.C.L.

Each of them will likely experience "a grief reaction," says Dr. Jo Hannafin, orthopedic director of the Women's Sports Medicine Center at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. "They've lost their sport and they've lost the kinship of their freinds, which is almost as bad as not being able to play."

"I'm afraid for her, and for all these girls," Maria Pierson said. "What's it going to be like for them at 40 years old. They're in so much pain now. Knees and backs and hips, and they just keep on going."

So yeah, dear readers, I marveled that you managed to slog past the onanism and the haziness of the evidence, the utter boringness, the "because the Times really doesn't expend enough text on the sacrifices and psychodramas involved in the virtuous struggle to get into college, let's just add one more scene about how utterly Important It All Is:

She stayed down on the field, screaming. A trainer came out and tried to calm her, assuring her the pain would subside. But her screams came more from anger than pain. She instantly understood that most of her senior season of high-school soccer would be wiped out and worried that no college coach would want to recruit her.

24. We want girls to have as many opportunities in sports as boys.'

No, 'we' don't all agree with that statement. Womens' sports, with the rare
exception of a few outstanding performers, are profoundly boring and
athletically lacking when compared to the male varieties. And the fact that
women are so much more susceptible to all kinds of joint problems than men
is all the proof anyone needs of their biological handicap.

Jacob handelsman, surfzupp@cox.net

53. I would like to see some of the Title IX money going to sewing classes.

Women tend to have great fine motor control. Sewing is a kind of physical
activity. It's a training and an exploration of fine motor skills and mental
discipline. Many young women like to explore this aspect of their bodies
(hands and fingers.)

Anyone who's ever picked up an advanced sewing pattern knows that sewing is
fairly intellectual, as well.

Whatever happened to sewing class?? Not every girl in high school is a jock.
Why do we shower $$ on boys' activities, then try to make up for it by
channelling girls into equivalent activities?

How about showering some money on SERIOUS sewing programs and advanced
cooking classes? Then, let the boys to do those activities if we want to be
"fair."

We totally abandoned programs that lots of girls in the 1950's really
enjoyed. By the way, I am a serious feminist, I am not being ironic!

Claire, New York City

Like such as that amazing chick the other night on Millionaire Matchmaker who responded to news of the rice shortages by saying she was cutting carbs? She looked athletic enough, but I totes felt like tearing out my ACL the whole time she talked.

The Uneven Playing Field [NYT]

• Lest you think that the murder of 8-months-pregnant Jessie Davis at the hands of this man is an anomaly, think again. Homicide is the second-leading cause of death among pregnant women. [ABCNews]
  
• More sobering news about women and reproduction: Childbirth itself leads to the death of one woman every minute of every day somewhere in the world. [Newsweek]
  
• A 24-year-old man who raped a 10-year-old will be freed in just four months, thanks in part to a judge who claimed the girl had dressed provocatively and looked older than she was. [Guardian]
  
• Appealing to the female electorate is of prime importance for Hillary Clinton, election experts keep reminding us. Also important? According to former Reagan speechwriter Peggy Noonan, Hillary needs to "prove she's a woman". [Telegraph]

• It's the 35th anniversary of Title IX, which banned gender discrimination from federally-funded education programs and freed up millions of young girls to learn the pleasures of tripping and body-checking players on opposing soccer teams, field hockey squads, etc. Or was that just us? [Salon]