The Stronger Women Get the More Men Love Football.

• Author: Conniff, Ruth

In The Stronger Women Get The More Men Love Football: Sexism and the American Culture of Sports, Mariah Burton Nelson, a former professional basketball player, tackles the issues of sports and sexism head-on.

Can girls ever be as good as boys and play with them as equals? These questions dog women and girls--and, according to Nelson, men, too--in sports and in life. Obviously, competition is native to sports. But there's something particularly nagging about this rivalry between women and men.

I train with a group of male athletes on a track team, and I think about this issue a lot. I have often been annoyed by men who are close to me in workouts, but nonetheless try to use me as the low bench mark. They insist on seeing it as a disgrace to be beaten by a woman. It is true that men are faster than women at the uppermost levels. Still, a fast woman can beat your average man.

But, as Nelson points out, men often take credit as a group for the accomplishments of male sports stars. "A woman can do the same job as I can do--maybe even be my boss. But I'll be damned if she can go out there on the [football] field and take a hit from Ronnie Lott," Nelson quotes a former football player as saying. "Never mind," she continues, "that most men would not fare well either if 'hit' by Ronnie Lott--or any other pro football player."

Nelson's book is full of examples of how men's sports reinforce a definition of masculinity based on force and domination, as well as contempt for women. A chapter on rape by college athletes is particularly disquieting.

One of the most revealing sections of the book is on sports reporting. More overtly than in any other area of journalism, in the sports pages reporters cozy up to their sources, downplay the bad news, and generally act like fans.

This hero-worship is especially evident in the locker room. Nelson describes the peculiar atmosphere of a locker room full of hangers-on ("guys with baseball caps on backwards saying 'Yo'") and explores the hostility to women reporters who enter this male domain, relating some harrowing tales of taunting and sexual threats in which male athletes, coaches, and reporters collude to make women understand that they are unwelcome.

Professional teams decline to set up another venue for interviews, so female reporters go into locker rooms and put up with sexual harassment as part of the job. The burden is on women to be inoffensive, to dress modestly, and to diffuse tensions if they arise...