Title IX

[Ravariel]

Title IX

Passed 35 years ago to advance (supposedly) the equality of opportunities for women in sports. But does it really do what it says. Female sporting events pull in a fraction of what male sports do... and often, male teams are eliminated to try to avoid Title IX lawsuits.

Some feminists actually believe that Title IX itself is sexist. (listen to the show)

So... do the benefits outweigh the costs? Should we simply remove gender-specific teams altogether, and let women compete as true "equals"? Or is it good as it is now?

[TonyTostieno]

At 12/28/07 04:35 PM, Ravariel wrote: Title IX

Passed 35 years ago to advance (supposedly) the equality of opportunities for women in sports. But does it really do what it says. Female sporting events pull in a fraction of what male sports do... and often, male teams are eliminated to try to avoid Title IX lawsuits.

Some feminists actually believe that Title IX itself is sexist. (listen to the show)

So... do the benefits outweigh the costs? Should we simply remove gender-specific teams altogether, and let women compete as true "equals"? Or is it good as it is now?

Jesus christ...I didn't even know about this law until just now. Honestly they should keep the TEAMS seperate based on gender, but they as long as there's enough interest they should have a team for each gender for each sport.

The only reason I think it should be separate teams for gender is because, naturally, women have more fat then muscle on their bodies then men, so in some competitions that would give men an unfair advantage, and vice versa.

If there's not enough interest for their to be a team for both genders (or there's only enough money for one team) then I'm gonna go with just having one team that's a mixed gender team and just have separate locker rooms.

[n64kid]

This is why many US universities have mens rowing teams but no mens baseball teams. The university of wisconsin at madison is just one of many major state colleges affected by title IX

[Christopherr]

Who gives a shit? Women in general aren't as good of athletes as men, so why bother letting them into male sports, such as... pretty much every sport?

[Ravariel]

At 12/28/07 05:26 PM, Christopherr wrote: Who gives a shit? Women in general aren't as good of athletes as men, so why bother letting them into male sports, such as... pretty much every sport?

Cuz Track and Field is totally a "male sport"... that's why women are catching up in nearly every record on the books, and are on pace to equal men's best times within a couple decades.

[SmilezRoyale]

In sports where competition is virtually equal [or if women are superior and have no reason to complain] i see no reason why they shouldn't be integrated. If it's scientifically proven there are issues in natural ability [and statistically as well] separation is the fairest measure.

[SkunkyFluffy]

At 12/28/07 04:40 PM, TonyTostieno wrote: women have more fat then muscle on their bodies then men

If this were true, we could not move. Women have very nearly the same percentage of muscle as men, but our bodies are smaller and require less muscle to move. Men have a greater propensity for developing muscle, so an active male will have more muscle. Women have a higher percentage of body fat naturally, but it is not a large amount.

The percentages have less to do with men's relatively greater strength than do the sheer size difference. A 130-pound woman is nearly as strong compared to her size as a 180-pound man.

[LazyDrunk]

At 12/29/07 12:25 AM, SkunkyFluffy wrote:

At 12/28/07 04:40 PM, TonyTostieno wrote: women have more fat then muscle on their bodies then men

Women have a higher percentage of body fat naturally, but it is not a large amount.

In athletics, a BMI difference of 5% can mean the world. Since male sports have a propensity towards the violent, even a small natural disadvantage could be disastrous to the competing female. But that's only in a co-ed environment.

The fact of the matter is that male sports draw more $$$$. Does that mean they should be required to Communist-ize their moneys and cut potential male athletes to meet a quota?

Quotas suck. I could argue that quotas encourage real discrimination by forcing the administrator to crucify someone they normally wouldn't.

The percentages have less to do with men's relatively greater strength than do the sheer size difference. A 130-pound woman is nearly as strong compared to her size as a 180-pound man.

Comparative strength is a hard nut to crack.

[fahrenheit]

At 12/28/07 09:03 PM, Ravariel wrote: Cuz Track and Field is totally a "male sport"... that's why women are catching up in nearly every record on the books, and are on pace to equal men's best times within a couple decades.

Track and Field is hardly a sport. They're merely running and throwing activities.
Besides, those are the records, not the average. Saying that a few women can compete with men does not mean the average women can compete with men.

At my high school the best women are close to the best guys in terms of athleticism, but after the top three the skill drops quickly. Getting rid of the gender teams would put maybe 1 or two women in the varsity sports but the rest wouldn't make the team.

Opening up sports to all genders, especially on the pro level, would do nothing except eliminate the female sporting teams all together. The top women from each sport might be able to make the men teams but very, very few would be able to.

[Musician]

At 12/28/07 05:26 PM, Christopherr wrote: Who gives a shit? Women in general aren't as good of athletes as men, so why bother letting them into male sports, such as... pretty much every sport?

WOW!

[Ravariel]

At 12/29/07 01:11 AM, fahrenheit wrote: Track and Field is hardly a sport. They're merely running and throwing activities.

Bite your tongue, heathen!

Besides, those are the records, not the average. Saying that a few women can compete with men does not mean the average women can compete with men.

Yes, actually it does. If both sexes have an equal upper limit to their abilities, then their abilities in general can be shown to be similar as well. TBH, only one female that I have ever raced alongside (same meet, different events... separation and all) was able to better my time at any distance... and she went on to a stellar college and pro career. However, the disparity in the medain skill levels can be easily attributed to centuries of social, psychological, and physical conditioning via the "common knowledge" that women's bodies were more fragile and weaker than males. Now that availability of equal training is gaining ground, we see a greater increase in skill levels over time, and a narrowing of the gap between males and females.

Opening up sports to all genders, especially on the pro level, would do nothing except eliminate the female sporting teams all together. The top women from each sport might be able to make the men teams but very, very few would be able to.

Very very few MEN are able to... so that is as it should be. Few women may be able to make (at first) the varsity sports in high school... but you better believe nearly half of the Junior Varsity would be women... and the ratio at the Varsity level would increase over time, as we eventually did away with our ingrained ideas of the physical abilities of men and women.

Now, I'm not saying that women are best suited for the NFL... but I thoroughly believe that they could compete in the NBA, soccer and nearly all non-contact sport. Shit, even in some intensely contact sports, women rule.

Most of the "conventional wisdom" about female physical ability is false.

So back to Title IX... because it is, in fact, allowing us to close the gap physically between men and women, do we keep it? Or is the cost to the ones who are most likely to DO sport (physical ability aside, women are generally psychologically less physically competitive and less likely to do sports) too great.

Are just seeing another version of "separate but equal"?

Can we do better?

[TonyTostieno]

At 12/29/07 12:25 AM, SkunkyFluffy wrote:

At 12/28/07 04:40 PM, TonyTostieno wrote: women have more fat then muscle on their bodies then men

If this were true, we could not move. Women have very nearly the same percentage of muscle as men, but our bodies are smaller and require less muscle to move. Men have a greater propensity for developing muscle, so an active male will have more muscle. Women have a higher percentage of body fat naturally, but it is not a large amount.

Not gonna lie I really used the wrong wording on that one. The difference IS very slight, but the thing is that it is enough to make a difference. Plus there's some other stuff that I honestly don't have the know-how to get into and am too tired to really talk about right now too.

[lapis]

During the 1998 Australian Open, Serena (Williams) and her older sister, Venus, boasted that they could beat any man ranked outside the world's top 200. Karsten Braasch, a German ranked No 203 (his highest ranking was No 38), accepted the challenge. Braasch, who was already out of the tournament, played a round of golf in the morning, drank a couple of beers, smoked a few cigarettes, and then played the Williams sisters for a set each, one after the other. He defeated Serena, 6-1, and Venus, 6-2.

I've seen women playing darts, it was a disgrace. Their biggest champion, Trina Gulliver played like she would have been ousted by any man playing in The Embassy. The BDO never had a separate competition for women but they made one in 2001 because none of the women ever made in into the competition, even though they tried. Now one could argue that darts is not a very representative sport, the stereotype might bar women from practicing as much as men, but the same can't be said about tennis. Some female tennis players have practiced extensively since their childhood, and I'm not exactly a tennis enthusiast but I could name more female players than males (although in Kournikova's case that's probably not thanks to her skill). Still, I think the best female players would probably bite the dust against males from below the top of their league.

I'm hardly an expert, but I'll just throw it out here anyway: I think that the median female has less developed motor skills than the median male, which is basically the only reason I can give for their poor performance in darts (which doesn't require a great physical shape). Years of throwing javelins at wild boars might have left males with an inherently better hand-eye coordination than women. Of course, this doesn't bar them from most athletic sports like running or swimming etc. but when it comes to coordination sports like football (soccer), darts or tennis I think women have a long way to go in order for them to play at the level of males.

So I think a separate women's league might be useful for many sports, then again I see no problem with letting the best females join male teams or competitions, even if trying to get a female player is probably more often a publicity stunt like in the case of Perugia trying to get Hanna Ljungberg to sign for their team (before the FIFA ban on women joining male teams) than a decision based on skill alone.

[cellardoor6]

Let's be honest. Most people don't enjoy female sports. You can't force people to invest in, or watch/attend something that they don't enjoy. Therefore the fan base will never been up to par with that of traditional sports which are male sports. Female sports will probably never be as successful as their male counterparts (except maybe tennis or something lame like that).

Anyway, I think that bill has been cited to allow females onto male teams in schools.

When I was in Football in middle school, we were forced to allow 2 girls on our team because there was no female football team obviously. This ended up being awful for our team. Both of the girls cried several times (some guys did too though), they couldn't follow the standard training regimens, were given easier ones, and were specifically given handicaps during practice. We HAD TO go easy on them. This ruined the entire structure of our practice, and ended up screwing us over during games. The girls were absolutely horrible, but they had to be given something like 10 minutes each to play during our games anyway, which they sabotaged several times. They basically frolicked around aimlessly after the snap, broke the rules several times, one of them actually dodged out of the way of the other teams running back when she was on defense. I'm dead serious.

And the funny thing is, after there was a HUGE stink among the parents of the team, after a protracted debate in the school, after we were forced to let them on and had to cater to the addition of 2 girls to our team... they both quit after 3 games.

I take my Football seriously.

[Christopherr]

At 12/28/07 09:03 PM, Ravariel wrote: Cuz Track and Field is totally a "male sport"... that's why women are catching up in nearly every record on the books, and are on pace to equal men's best times within a couple decades.

Don't count your chickens. You have no idea if their progress will slow near the men's level.

Even if they might get to our level, they still haven't done it yet. So no mens+womens track-and-field yet.

[fahrenheit]

At 12/29/07 05:40 AM, Ravariel wrote: Yes, actually it does. If both sexes have an equal upper limit to their abilities, then their abilities in general can be shown to be similar as well.

No it doesn't, which is because men have an easier time getting stronger and more athletic. For a women and a male to reach a equal athleticism ability the women have to work harder. And when you compare the top athletes on both sides you compare people who have trained to bring their ability to the height of the best athletes. But when you compare average women and men you compare two people that have the same amount of training. And since biologically its easier for men to not only gain athletically ability but to retain it, we would be at a great disadvantage.

Its easy to test, grab a random girl and a random guy who appear to be in similar body shape and have them race.

Oh, and I forgot to mention, about the track and field thing. Its the running where their catching up, not throwing.

and a narrowing of the gap between males and females.

I see the top narrowing, but not the median.

Very very few MEN are able to...

I mean very few of the women in the WNBA would be able to make the cross.

but you better believe nearly half of the Junior Varsity would be women...

Thats the thing, the varsity girls team would become half of the JV team. One or two could make varsity but the rest would have to sit out. Splitting up the sports allows all the girls to play, not just the very best.

To be honest I would like to see the availability for women to compete in former mens sports, but at the same time there should still be a womens league for those that are good but not good enough. Kind of like how there are junior pro leagues.

[fahrenheit]

And one more thing that could be mentioned, during track events (I used to be on the track team) my team had this phenomenal girl thrower. She took first in every tournament, set a few school records, and even got a track and field scholarship to a college. But the thing is everything was divided between male and female and she threw about 130 in Javelin. Thats decent for males, but in terms of how she would have done in all gender tournaments, she would have been in the lower middle of the pack.

[poxpower]

At 12/28/07 04:40 PM, TonyTostieno wrote:
The only reason I think it should be separate teams for gender is because, naturally, women have more fat then muscle on their bodies then men, so in some competitions that would give men an unfair advantage, and vice versa.

Vice versa?
What sports that people watch would women be better at?
Football? They'd get murdered. Baseball? No home runs there. Hockey? Good luck.

Bah being a woman, I think it would be cool competing against males when you're younger ( teens ) and you're both sort of equal, but the natural potential of a man for sports is undeniably higher.

At 12/28/07 09:03 PM, Ravariel wrote:

At 12/28/07 05:26 PM, Christopherr wrote:

Cuz Track and Field is totally a "male sport"... that's why women are catching up in nearly every record on the books, and are on pace to equal men's best times within a couple decades.

Pardon my skepticism but you can't predict a trend in sports like "her women have been getting 0.3 seconds faster every 5 years for the last 20 years, so it will be like that forever!.
There's no way anyone will ever run the 100m in less than 5 seconds, not in a trillion years.

So yeah might happen at some point that on freak woman would come along and beat a record or two that a man made, but how likely is that anyways.

And are women banned from sports? Wasn't there a woman in the NHL at some point? A goaler? Anyways, I'm pretty sure women would just get ass-raped in the following:

-football
-soccer
-tennis
-bike
-baseball
-hockey
-basketball
-arm-wrestling

[Durin413]

ANY artificial quota system like this is bad. Even more so for sports, due to the economic impact.

In High School for example, the sports are mostly self-sustaining in terms of funds (at least where I grew up). The monies generated from the ticket sales in particular went to pay for a lot of the stuff. However, many of the sports don't generate enough ticket sales/other stuff to fund themselves. The ones that do are Football and Mens Basketball, with some exceptions for schools with really small/crappy teams. And of course there are exceptions in the other direction, such as when a sport is real popular in a region, such as wrestling. But the sports that are not generating money leech off of the ones that do. The Football team with the one or two other money making teams essentially pays for the other teams to exist.
For you see, the money taken in through things such as ticket sales, doesn't go directly to the team. It goes straight to the county to be divided up. And dont say stuff like fundraising. While that can help support a team, it is not enough to sustain it. In addition, things such as concessions only work for some sports (the ones with crowds) so those are not available to help the weak sports either.

In college the situation is improved somewhat, but still most of the teams are money sinks, with Football in particular pulling a lot of the weight, and in some areas, Mens Basketball contributing a lot as well (such as really big teams, like Duke or those found in the Midwest where Basketball i wildly popular).

However, since the schools must fund the sports that few people care about, the big ones suffer.

Title IX is like sports socialism. It hurts the strong to artificially keep the weak alive.

Also, if those feminazis are so concerned about big bad football teams, why dont they create their own female football teams in high school and beyond. Oh wait, lack of participants and spectators. Some things are going to be gender based forever, especially where biological differences make a major difference.

[Gunter45]

At 12/29/07 12:25 AM, SkunkyFluffy wrote: The percentages have less to do with men's relatively greater strength than do the sheer size difference. A 130-pound woman is nearly as strong compared to her size as a 180-pound man.

I really doubt that. When I wrestled in high school, sometimes during drills and things, a girl and guy were paired up. Coming from my perspective, the girls that were about my weight and higher really didn't stand a chance when it came to pure strength. In fact, I had to limit myself simply because I was so much stronger. I did the same thing when practicing against guys who were several weight classes lower than me. The same applies to every guy and girl pairing I saw during drills. The difference between how strong a man and a woman can get as a percentage of their body weight is not slight. Everybody on the wrestling team had the same rigorous workout and were in top physical condition.

It might have something to do with how much more body fat women actually have. Women have a good amount more body fat than men do. It's a natural defense mechanism from when we were hunter gatherers. Honestly, it almost seems as though you're taking this as an insult when, in fact, it's really not an insult at all, it's just a simple matter of how humans evolved. Men have considerably more testosterone which is essential for muscle-building and fat-burning. Hell, steroids are made to mimic testosterone, of course men are going to be stronger and have less fat.

[Imperator]

I get the point of it, and there's absolutely a better way.
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I just don't quite know what that is.......

Unfortunately a lot of times you DO see a "separate but equal" thing going on, where the reality tends to be much different than the desired and women teams get screwed. But that's just a drawback from having a capitalistic society.

Music, gym, and art curriculums are regularly knocked out in school budget cuts, but science has shown they actually have value beyond their subject matters (music helps with math, etc).

[tony4moroney]

Men and women have different hormones, different body proportions, body fat % and the average adult female is around 6 inches shorter than the average male. While I'm naturally athletic I don't take sport seriously and even so I beat a couple of girls at tennis which had played for years and are apparently good at it too (I don't play tennis at all). I also almost beat our school's fastest 1500m female in trials (who I think ran states), although she was apparently sick that day, but the point is there. I can also kick soccer balls harder than basically any female that I've seen play soccer, of which I've seen many and would destroy them if we were to play football.
While there are some elite female athletes that are almost on par with their male counterparts, they're not indicative of the overall female population and women simply aren't capable of competing with males, at least not today. Gymnastics is considered a female sport, it's ratio of female to male competitors is probably skewed that way, and yet there are routines executed by men that are regarded as impossible for women. Their body proportions and bone density means they're a liability in contact sports, and overall they just lack the luster of their male counterparts which is probably one reason behind the lack of fanfare for female sports. Golf allows females to compete in male tournaments and while some of the top female golfers aspire to compete in the mens, not once has any of them qualified for a male tour.
You may want to think that women and men are physically equal but biologically and historically speaking we are not. We're completely different. They have boobs. We have dicks. Our roles in history were different, and our bodies were created and have evolved differently to better suit those demands.