Ms. Myths
GAVORA, JESSICA
Ms. Myths How America’s shrinking-violet feminists try to have it both ways. BY JESSICA GAVORA On opening day 1994, Bill Clinton threw out the first pitch for the Cleveland Indians, while Hillary...
...It's like Custer's last stand...
...In that book she declared that women have been socially conditioned to fear independence and instead seek to be "taken care of" by men...
...Dowling seems to struggle not to exalt girls as girls, but to prove that they are really boys—or at least they would be if the boys gave them a chance...
...They want less to be boys than to be individuals...
...I could only imagine where things went from there," she wrote...
...Should women prove themselves the equal of men, the rationale for this quota regime would disappear, and the "game" most certainly would be up—the game of women as politically empowered victims, that is...
...She has as much right to play baseball as they do...
...Of all the paleo-feminist impulses, the one that says that women will never achieve equality with men until they become just like men is the most difficult for more recent generations of independent women to understand...
...Although the subject of Dowling's new book, The Frailty Myth: Women Approaching Physical Equality, is ostensibly athletics (it was timed for release to coincide with the Olympics), it proves to have a more appropriate media hook in Hillary Clinton's Senate campaign...
...What really counts are acquired skills, trained muscles, and movement efficiency that comes from refined technique...
...Jessica Gavora is writing a book about Title IX...
...Society's resistance to women having physical equality is huge...
...But this time, instead of the patriarchy retarding women's emotional fulfillment, it is preventing us from achieving our full physical potential...
...Granted, for decades, girls and women were inhibited from realizing their athletic potential by an unwelcoming, if not blatantly discriminatory, maledominated sporting establishment...
...Make no mistake," Dowling writes...
...Maybe more, because they've been so mean to her...
...The Frailty Myth is rife with this kind of stuff...
...The blame, needless to say, is placed squarely on the brawny shoulders of boys seeking to retain their physical superiority over girls and a culture that encourages their dominance...
...Rehashing the tired, feminist theory of brash, confident pre-pubescent girls growing suddenly fearful and demoralized at the onset of sexual maturity, she paints a dark picture of young girls entering "a sexually hostile environment...
...Bottom line, they're thinking, Hillary isn't so tough after all...
...The answer, of course, is power...
...Her thinking has hardly advanced in the intervening years...
...Mean boys, picking on Hillary...
...And the irony is that in Dowling's ideal—in which women would compete with men for spots on the same teams—athletic opportunities for women would be many, many fewer...
...It's understandable that women, whether they call themselves feminists or not, would seek to end discrimination...
...Since 1992 when Brown University was sued under Title IX for not maintaining a 50 percent female quota in its athletics program, not a single women's team has been eliminated in Division I collegiate athletics...
...Meanwhile, over twenty thousand male athletes have had their teams eliminated since 1992...
...Boys aren't born with it...
...By setting aside 50 percent of all athletic opportunities for women—regardless of their interest in sports—^Title IX carves out a protective niche...
...The occasional female football placekicker notwithstanding, the fact is that Title IX has created opportunities for women by allowing athletic teams segregated by sex...
...I let loose an uncharacteristically wobbly throw and a stranger passing by remarked, "You throw like a girl...
...They are more comfortable with being women...
...Like The Cinderella Complex, The Frailty Myth is overrun with gnawing resentments...
...And like those who complain that congressman Rick Lazio is being "overly aggressive" whenever he goes on the offensive against Mrs...
...Still, if Dowling and Mrs...
...At its core, writes Dowl-ing, it has a "hidden agenda of keeping women in their place by keeping them believing in their weakness...
...Hillary throws like a girl, she tells us, and the boys are making fun of her for it...
...Dowling relies on scattered anecdotes, disproved feminist "studies," and dismissable physiology to buttress the startling claim that, given equal levels of athletic training, access, and encouragement, women will achieve physical parity with men...
...The First Lady wobbling forth her paltry pitch, an ill-concealed smirk spreading across the stadium as the men bonded in jocular superiority...
...She is eager to assert the equality of women in all manner of competition with men, and yet unwilling to cede the political power that is attached to the mantle of victimhood...
...Today, cutting a women's program is virtually impossible, while men's programs are eliminated in the name of "gender equity...
...It was what made men necessary to women, not just for love and intimacy and friendship, but for their very survival...
...Bill let fly a credible toss, but Hillary muffed it— awkward, wrong-footed, and pathetic...
...It follows, then, that should women achieve physical parity with men, the political balance of power will shift as well...
...Dowling provoked a demi-controversy back in 1981, with the publication of The Cinderella Complex...
...But the law that supposedly broke down the "artificial" physical differences between men and women has in fact served to isolate women from competition with men...
...By bringing the power of the federal government to bear on the he-man recalcitrants, she writes, Title IX has "slowly but surely punctured the male power mystique...
...call it "penis-envy feminism...
...But why, one wonders, would we want to become just like men in the process...
...and his young daughter, walking with him, retorted, "She is a girl...
...It was that she hadn't been given the chance to learn how...
...In other words, Hillary's problem on the mound in Chicago wasn't that she was incapable of throwing as well as Bill...
...The Frailty isn't just about the boys wanting to keep the playing fields to themselves...
...Dowling credits the passage of Title IX, the 1972 law that outlawed discrimination on the basis of sex in American education, with the limited progress women have made toward physical parity with men...
...Clinton, Dowling is trying to have it both ways...
...Instead of leveling the playing field for men and women, Title IX has made women a protected class...
...Mean, mean boys...
...When young Bill was out cheating at stickball, young Hillary was inside being forced to master the wifely arts of home and hearth...
...This belief is "what made men self-sufficient" and women not...
...Studies show gender to be barely relevant as a predictor, or limiter, of athletic performance," she writes...
...Like the first lady, Dowling is a feminist of a certain age...
...If women should ever demonstrate that they're just as strong, agile, and enduring as men, the whole game would be up...
...At the time of life when boys start becoming proud of their bodies, their muscles, their penises, the expressive arc of their urine, girls begin retreating in shame...
...One night recently, I was tossing a miniature football back and forth outside with a friend...
...And gender quota advocates have further shielded girls from competition with the boys by creating an effective affirmative action regime in collegiate sports...
...The much ballyhooed skill of throwing a baseball is learned," Dowling meows...
...Clinton can't face this prospect, there is a younger generation of women who are less frightened...
...Bottom line, she throws like a girl...
...Hillary could learn a thing or two from her...
...The contrast was too much for feminist Colette Dowling to take...
...Men understand this, and they are prepared to fight to the last man, to see that it doesn't happen...
...BY JESSICA GAVORA On opening day 1994, Bill Clinton threw out the first pitch for the Cleveland Indians, while Hillary Clinton did the honors for the Chicago Cubs...
...The weakness of women was the rationale for a belief in their total inferiority—"physi-cal, mental, emotional...
Vol. 6 • November 2000 • No. 9
