www.thornwalker.com/ditch/lights139.htm
January 31, 2006
Strakon Lights
Up
Old news —
but not to me
Same-sexism in the
schools
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I've occasionally mentioned a certain aggravating sidelight of our era's exploding
totalitarianism: the fact that none of us can be familiar with all of the state's outrageous
impositions and depredations. (That unavoidable ignorance applies to the lawfakers and
bureaucrats themselves, by the way.) From time to time this epiphenomenon of tyranny
leads to some ugly surprises — perhaps even to some embarrassment. Well, stand by:
I'm about to embarrass myself.
A couple of years ago one of my co-conspirators and I, both of us men in our fifties without young children, were watching an episode of the (since-canceled) TV series "Joan of Arcadia," and we were scandalized by a scene showing boys and girls together in a phys-ed class at the state high school attended by the title character. We gaped. We gasped. "What?!" we exclaimed. "Do they shower together, too?!" We didn't know whether this was just a conceit of cultural Bolsheviks among the show's writers or whether some state schools somewhere — in San Francisco, maybe? or Madison, Wisconsin? — actually had started to impose coed gym classes.
"Started." Hah. On December 18 of last year, I came across a story in the Metro section of the Fort Wayne (Ind.) Journal Gazette headlined, "Experts debate merits of same-sex gym classes." I gaped. I gasped — especially when I read that the high school in suburban New Haven "is one of several schools in the region that separates boys and girls for physical education." In other words, it's one of only "several" controversial exceptions here in my Hoosier homeland. When did this madness erupt?
Oh, just in 1972. Only five years after I graduated from high school.
Since I haven't spent all the time since then dozing behind the door, I had heard tell of the famous, or infamous, "Title IX" laid down by the Central Government, but I'd thought its major provision was to force local school districts to introduce the decidedly mixed blessing of girls' team sports. And it had similar effects, I knew, at the college level. I had not imagined, however — or tumbled to the fact — that Title IX also "mandates" coed gym classes. The across-the-board ideology informing this cultural Bolshevism is, of course, the rule that "separate is unequal," where inequality is taken to mean, among other things, the impermissible recognition that we're not all identical in every respect.
My understanding of the Red Guards' coercive egalitarianism has now been deepened. Their rules, it turns out, require both that girls and boys take gym together and that girls have their own sex-segregated interscholastic sports teams.
Seriously, why aren't those teams sexually integrated by force of law? It seems the Guards have exercised some caution as they have widened their control. For one thing, they've been careful not to bite off more than they can chew, recognizing some vestigial cultural constraints and, mirabile dictu, even some physiological realities. With respect to phys ed, Kelly Soderlund, the writer of the JG's story, reports that Title IX "mandates that physical education classes be coed, unless an activity involves bodily contact, teachers are discussing human sexuality, or the teacher objectively [sic] separates students based on their ability without regard to their gender [sic]." I infer from this account that the children are not made to shower together or share a locker room. (Yet. Let us recall that some colleges now feature coed dorms, complete with coed bathrooms.)
However, with respect to that avoidance of bodily contact, statements elsewhere in the story by officials of various school systems indicate that boys and girls do play basketball, softball, and volleyball together in some coed classes. It may be that the Central Government Authorities have defined those activities as non-contact sports.
One official at the New Haven school system, by way of defending its sex segregation, says: "You and I know that the approach that genders [sic] can take might be a little bit different. There might be the potential for injury." Perhaps he is referring to a type of injury that does not involve bodily contact — and actually such injuries are very possible, as anyone can testify who has been on the receiving end of a high-testosterone volleyball spike.
More important than any recognition of realities, cultural or physical, in accounting for the Guards' bifurcated policy must be their aim of extirpating normal sexual identities. That aim is served both by setting up a special preserve for girls, aimed at luring them, too, into the whole hoohah pumped-up team-sports ethos; and by mixing girls and boys together in phys ed. It's really not contradictory.
We may suspect that — pace their professed egalitarianism — the Guards are specially interested in injuring males, as we will see below; but their ideology blinds them to the fact that they may be injuring females, too. [1]
Distant Red Guards are glowering at New Haven and its sex segregation. Soderlund quotes Mary Curtis, associate director of athletics at the University of Iowa and an "expert" on Title IX: "It wouldn't stand up in court, I can tell you that." Miz Curtis adds this observation: "At the ninth-grade level the girls are probably more apt to hurt the boys" because the girls at that age are more "physically mature." Now that's rather peculiar as a defense of sex integration, unless anti-male premises lurk within the ideology: Let's hurt those weak little boys! Maybe we can keep them from growing up to be strong men!
The Guards are glowering at many more school systems than the one covering New Haven, I'm happy to say. I'm happy because of this revelation by Soderlund: "The state and federal departments of education can't possibly monitor whether every public school in the country is following this mandate and don't really push schools to follow the statute."
It's unclear to me why they can't enforce it — totalitarianism has proved practical in other areas of our lives at the same painstaking level of detail — but in any case the less-than-happy fact is that the law is on the books. The camel may be discreetly napping just now, but it's in the tent from nose to tail. Given the unceasing and unstoppable disintegration of our culture, would you predict the same level of Central Government indifference in the future? All that's necessary to bring more school districts into line is more lawsuits by "progressive" parents who grew up under Title IX.
Parents of children who have suffered their way through a state high school in the past thirty-some years have long since started smirking at my ignorance. But they ought not to smirk too long.
Instead they ought to start wondering what awful "laws" have been on the books for half
their lifetime that they've missed hearing about.
I write, above, of the "decidedly mixed blessing of girls' sports" mandated by the Central Government. It seems I disapprove. Well, of course I disapprove absolutely of government coercion; and the hoohah, muscling-up, gimme-fi' aspects horrify me absolutely; but on whatever remains of the matter I am reluctant to take a hard line. It seems ungallant to condemn girls' sports categorically, in view of the fact that many honorable, admirable girls — and their parents — are thoroughly committed now to defending the girls' special preserve. Those people are understandably proud of the accomplishments attained in that forum. Whatever happened — they may ask — to mens sana in corpore sano? Does it apply only to boys? [2]
We should recognize that the rise of girls' team sports in the first third of the 20th century, their decline by midcentury, and their resurgence in the 1970s were all directed by governmental power. The rise and decline were directed by school authorities at the state level, and the eventual resurgence was directed by Central Government authorities.
Of course boys' team sports were defined and promoted by state authorities, too. Interscholastic team sports at the high school level, for either sex, are mostly an expression of state policy. They are an important part of the state-schooling culture, and one may fairly suppose that government authorities molded them, at least in part, for purposes of social control. That is, the authorities implemented team sports to foment school loyalty — rah! rah! rah! — fostering habits of mind that could be exploited to reinforce loyalty to the nation-state. Insofar as that is true, I find it an unrelievedly bad thing. [3]
That does not mean that every facet of team sports must be a bad thing, for boys or for girls. People find ways to live within the statist culture they are born into. They carve out niches within the existing environment that allow them some self-expression and self-fulfillment. Playing well in cooperation with others demands not only native talent but also highly voluntary focus and determination, and that is so even in a state-school environment.
But as one who favors freedom, I have to wonder what niches
people would carve out in a non-state society. I would like to think we would see more
pianists and ballet dancers emerge from the schools; and I would point out that as
things now stand, with state schools predominating, the mens sana part of the old
slogan is an insane joke. In any case we may be sure that the niches that were carved
would be different and more various. At the same time, the focus and determination of
energetic youngsters would not be exploitable by dishonorable politicians and bureaucrats
for dishonorable ends. Boys and girls and their parents could define mens sana in
corpore sano for themselves, in a society that was both sound and free.
January 31, 2006
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In other cases it imposes new burdens on everyone.
2. I confess that the imponderables of this issue vex me. If girls' team sports necessarily lead to defeminization, then I would have to abominate them in despite of all the good-hearted folks cheering them on in good faith. But if I may resort to a personal anecdote, I'll note that an aunt of mine played girls' basketball while in high school in the 1920s; and in later life — when I knew her — no defeminization was apparent.
On the other hand, that was then, and this is now.
1. There's the maddening twist, and the logical incoherence, of coercive egalitarianism. It blinds itself to natural differences among people, and it will not permit those people to sort themselves out naturally. Thus, it typically grants new privileges to some and imposes new burdens on others.