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by Jessica Gavora. Encounter Books, San Francisco, CA, 2002. 181 pages. US$24.95, CDN$37.50. http://www.encounterbooks.com
Jessica Gavora, herself a former college basketball player, has written a virtually perfect book about how America's Title IX law has been cynically manipulated to drastically limit men's (and sometimes also women's) college athletic options and toward other comparably destructive purposes. This book is so good, it huns. It huns to learn of the thousands of university sports teams that have been terminated, including Olympic powerhouses like the UCLA swimming and diving teams, but also including countless guys who played for the love of it, often without any scholarship aid at all. It hurts to learn how US tax dollars are funding an Office of Civil Rights that has issued `non-binding' legal position papers on the eve of several of the most critical Title IX federal court cases, and how every such decision then followed the OCR position. It hurts to learn in such painstaking detail about all the lost opportunities suffered by dedicated, talented, passionate athletes to expand their skills while simultaneously obtaining an education. What hurts most is that men's losses did not result in women's gains, except on paper and in the minds of a few radical feminist activists.
It gets so ridiculous sometimes that it is almost funny. In some cases, even when outside fund-raising meant that the university did not contribute a penny toward a sports program, it still was not allowed to continue. Suits are brought by outside activists even when not a single aggrieved woman can be found on campus to bring a complaint.
It is truly depressing to realize the extent to which the women's movement has abandoned all but the flimsiest pretext of seeking equality and has transformed a number of different battlefields into identity politics contests between men and women. Feminists succeeded in playing the woman-as-victim card, over and over again, until...