Skip to main content

After 40 years of Title IX, why can't a woman be more like a fan?

The WNBA is the only viable female pro sports league, but even Maya Moore and the league-best Lynx struggle to attract fans.

The WNBA is the only viable female pro sports league, but even Maya Moore and the league-best Lynx struggle to attract fans.

Saturday is the 40th anniversary of Title IX, and although almost nobody anticipated it then, it resulted in women gaining the right to participate in sports in proportion with their numbers attending college. Title IX not only had a huge effect on women's participation in sports, but also it culturally influenced the way both men and women view the idea of women and athletics. It's mattered greatly in our American society.

But now, what of the future effects of Title IX?

First of all I see the potential of a great, grand collision between the old law and a recent major medical revelation. As the attendance of women in college has increased, so called "minor" men's sports, like wrestling and tennis -- even baseball -- have had to be dropped to keep in compliance with the law. But now, as the number of women in college approaches 60 percent, while concurrently, evidence mounts that football damages boys' brains, King Football may be the sport in jeopardy -- especially as it's so expensive and has no female analogue.

Already in one prominent school district, it's been proposed that football should be eliminated, that schools have no business promoting a "gladiator sport." How ironic it would be that women's academic predominance would result in America's most popular sport being cut down at its roots.

But on the other hand, even as women's participation in sport has soared, there's been no corresponding interests in women watching other women play sports. The only professional female league of any sustaining viability is the WNBA, which is allowed to serve at the pleasure of its NBA benefactor in basketball off-season. The most visible women's sport is tennis, on those few weeks in major tournaments when the females gain a share of the spotlight alongside the more popular men.

To be sure, yes, there are many women sports fans, but their numbers and passion are miniscule compared to the mass of male spectators. But so what? Androgyny be hanged. Sometimes the sexes simply have different tastes in amusement. Women, for example, read the vast preponderance of novels. Novels are about imagination. Sports are literal. They keep score in games. Is it really necessary to have it, as Lerner and Loewe wrote in My Fair Lady for the misogynistic Henry Higgins:

"Men are so honest, so thoroughly square;

Eternally noble, historic'ly fair,

Who, when you win, will always give your back a pat.

Well, why can't a woman be like that?

Why can't a woman be more like a man?"

Myself, I think we've already got quota enough of women being like men. But the question for the next forty years of Title IX will be:

Why can't a woman be more like a fan?