Good Sports?

Despite continuing Title IX controversy, women are having a ball.

Cathy Young from the November 2001 issue

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There are other paradoxical intersections between sports and feminism. In sports such as basketball, where women are still battling for a place in the sun, long-term success requires often grating compromises. The WNBA keeps salaries relatively paltry in order to focus on marketing and plays a truncated summer season, but has access to the deep pockets, the arenas, and the other resources of the NBA. Its erstwhile rival, the American Basketball League, which chose to play in the same season as men -- albeit in smaller arenas -- and to pay the players relatively high (though hardly NBA-range) salaries, went bankrupt in its third season in 1998.

And then there's the issue of sexuality. During the Women's World Cup of 1999, U.S. soccer star Brandi Chastain drew some flak for having posed nude, albeit in a discreet posture, in Gear magazine. Some feminists, such as writer and former basketball player Mariah Burton Nelson, have accused the WNBA of hyping attractive and heterosexual players with "their fingernails, their makeup, their boyfriends [and] their babies" while downplaying the presence of lesbians.

If lesbian athletes are kept in the closet, that's a legitimate gripe. But is it really a bad thing to highlight the fact that some WNBA players are mothers, or that a few of them are gorgeous -- such as this year's Most Valuable Player and part-time model Lisa Leslie -- and that most of the rest look unmistakably female? Unfortunately, the perception of athleticism as not quite feminine still lingers -- and, fortunately (in my opinion, anyway), most women will always want to be appealing to men. If Leslie or Chastain can reassure both women and men that women can be no less feminine for being strong and athletic, good for them, and for the rest of us.

Will girls' interest in sports some day reach the same levels as boys', making the wrangling over the meaning of parity and equity unnecessary? Will women's basketball and soccer replicate the success of women's tennis? All that remains to be seen. For now, the good news is that millions of Americans of all ages and both sexes watched the girls of summer without giving a thought to gender politics.