This year’s spectacular Rose Bowl game attracted a phenomenal 35.6 million viewers because it featured what we want: rugged men playing football and attractive women cheering them on. Americans of every class, men and women, remained glued to their television sets and nearly 95,000 spectators watched from the stands.
The runaway success of this game proved again that stereotypical roles for men and women do not bother Americans one bit. Political correctness lost out as all-male teams battled and women cheered.
It’s too bad that male sports are being eliminated on most college campuses. Except for Texas, USC, and a few other places, radical feminism rules in the athletic departments at the expense of popular male sports.
Feminists oppose anything that is all-male or all-female unless it’s gay marriage. They won’t be able to ban the Rose Bowl anytime soon, but the Feminist Majority Foundation posts this warning on its website: “By encouraging boys to become aggressive, violent athletes, and by encouraging girls to cheer for them, we perpetuate the cycle of male aggression and violence against women.”
Meanwhile, the feminists are censoring out hundreds of traditional manly college sports teams. If your favorite college once had a wrestling, baseball or track team, check again: there’s a good chance it has been eliminated.
Several years ago, Howard University Athletic Director Sondra Norrell-Thomas announced her elimination of both its wrestling and baseball teams on the same day. It should surprise no one that Howard University’s male enrollment has dropped to only 34 percent compared to 66 percent female.
On June 2, 1997, the feminist National Women’s Law Center announced that it would file a complaint against Boston University, the fourth largest private school in the nation, over its sports programs. Within months, BU ended the football team that had been in existence for 91 years.
It is no surprise that male enrollment at Boston University is now down to 40%. One transfer student expressed his dismay in the student newspaper upon learning that his new school has 16,000 undergraduates but no football team.
In the entire State of Washington, there is no longer a single major college wrestling team, despite wrestling’s huge popularity in high schools. Wrestling is one of the least expensive sports, requiring almost no equipment and having a low risk of injury, but feminists are working to eliminate all masculine sports.
The few colleges that have held firm against feminist pressure continue to attract males. Penn State, for example, has kept its superb programs in football, wrestling, baseball and track, and enjoys a 55-45 percent male-to-female enrollment.
The mean-spirited feminists recently demanded the resignation of 79-year-old football coaching great Joe Paterno because he spoke in sympathy of an opposing team’s player accused of sexual assault. There was nothing offensive in Paterno’s comments and 89 percent in an online AOL poll sided with him, but just a few feminists with a fax machine will smear anyone in their war against football.
The lack of college sports teams and camaraderie makes many high school boys wonder, why bother going to college? Despite the bloated price of college tuition, college doesn’t even offer the sports opportunities that they enjoyed in their poorer high schools.
The Rose Bowl proved that public demand is for all-male sports, not female contests. Boys do not want to go to a college that eliminates the macho sports, and that is true even if the boy does not expect to compete himself.
The effects of the feminists’ attack on men’s sports are now coming home to roost. By the time this year’s college freshmen are seniors, the ratio will be 60 percent women to 40 percent men, and women are now crying that there are not enough college-educated men to marry.
China’s brutal one-child policy has artificially created millions of young men for whom no wives are available. Right here at home, the feminists have created millions of college-educated women for whom no college-educated men are available, and the trend is getting steadily worse.
Part of the change in the ratio of male and female college students is due to the ruthless interpretation of Title IX by the radical feminist bureaucrats in the Carter and Clinton administrations. Unfortunately, President George W. Bush and Secretary of Education Rod Paige chickened out on their opportunity to remedy the mischief.
Congress should step into the gap and stop funding colleges that terminate men’s sports to meet arbitrary feminist quotas. Congress should imitate its action in passing the Solomon Amendment that tells colleges they will lose federal funding if they discriminate against military recruiters.
Congress should tell colleges they will lose federal funding if they discriminate against men’s sports. The American people clearly want male football, baseball, track and wrestling, and colleges that cut these sports should be cut out of the federal budget.
