The Stronger Women Get the More Men Love Football.

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. You have to wonder why they do it.

Women sports reporters tell Nelson about their survival strategies in this man's world. Mainly they lie low, ignore the abuse, and, occasionally, hearteningly, make a snappy come-back: "It was allegedly a female sportswriter who came up with a now-classic retort to a flasher," Nelson writes. "'You know what this is?' he asked. 'It looks like a penis, only smaller,' she responded."

Parallel to the history of women's exclusion from sports, there is a history of provocative, funny sports writing by women, the author reveals--including some hilarious columns written in the 1920s by Lorena Hickok, who poked fun at men's sports from the point of view of an "uninitiated girl reporter."

More recently, Billie Jean King slyly admits that she makes a habit of using men's first names when she's a commentator at tennis matches. (Women players are called by their first names 53 percent of the time in televised tennis matches, compared with 8 percent of the time for men.) In sharp contrast to the inflated descriptions of male athletes, Nelson points out, reporters seem to go out of their way to diminish women in sports--using adjectives like "petite" and "tiny" to describe women who are of average or even larger-than-average size, focusing on the athletes' nervousness, exhaustion, and other signs of weakness and failure. And, of course, giving a hugely disproportionate amount of play to stories about female athletes as victims of violent attacks.

It is a joy to read about women fighting back, taking the macho boys down a peg, and claiming their own place in sports.

The larger question Nelson raises, though, is whether men and women can get along at all. Reading her book, and recognizing the picture she presents, gave me a sinking feeling. Maybe it's true that men as a group reserve real love and respect--and a considerable amount of unacknowledged erotic feeling--for other men, that they are committed to worshiping football, brute strength, sports talk, and male bonding, that the more they feel women encroaching on their turf, the more they will retrench.

On the other hand, I have developed some wonderful relationships with men through my own participation in sports. And I've experienced, first-hand, how gender roles have loosened up over the last few years as more and more women develop their muscle.

Over the holidays, as I was finishing Nelson's book, two women I know--both of them talented, graceful athletes, both lesbians, and both quite strong--revealed to me that they love football. One of them was at my house for Thanksgiving dinner. When my boyfriend arrived late, full of lament about the Green Bay Packers' loss, she was crushed. She had taped the whole game, and was hoping to go home without knowing the outcome and watch it herself.

Women watching, commenting on, and participating in sports shake things up. They upset some fundamental dynamic, as nelson amply demonstrates.

Sports, like sex, rooted in the body, touch our most intimate selves. Our feelings about what we are as human beings and our relationships to other people, to nature, and to the rest of the world, all come to the surface when we get physical.