Title IX was only the beginning. Title X is upon us, and its terrifying and glorious reign shall last ten thousand years.
The student captains of all major high school sports teams will be required to have gay sex with one another at least twice a year: once at homecoming, then again immediately after prom.
Water polo players must begin each game with tender, vulnerable hugs lasting no less than forty seconds.
Little girls will henceforth be made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails.
Any female field hockey player may take the personal equipment of any male lacrosse player at her discretion. He may not ask for it back until her next menstrual cycle.
Any woman, student or no, may interrupt a basketball game to talk to the spectators about her feelings. The basketball players must sit quietly in a circle around her and ask her to be specific. When she is finished, they must carry her off the court on their shoulders.
All football will be powderpuff football.
All hockey players will be required to cultivate a begrudging, then enthusiastic, appreciation for the majesty of dance.
Softball will be mandatory.
All marching bands will be required to learn WNBA player Brittney Griner’s favorite song and play it every year on her birthday.
Boys will be forbidden to skateboard. All boys must turn their skateboards over immediately to whatever female classmate lives nearest him. She may kickflip over him as often as she likes.
Reading will be immediately classified as a varsity sport.
All out lesbians will be given free Gatorade.
Each year, four seventh-grade boys who display natural athletic talent will be slowly demoralized and discouraged until they quit the team.
Instead of jumping over hurdles, female track players will jump over popular boys.
Enjoying the television program Friday Night Lights will be illegal. Talking about Connie Britton’s hair will be grandfathered in.
All sports teams with racially offensive mascots will be immediately renamed The Misandrists and asked to identify as anarchic gender radicals.
All schools receiving federal funding will also be subject to Titles XI and XII and some date in the future; the specifics of Titles XI and XII are classified and will not be revealed. However, should a school fail to live up to the prescriptions of Titles XI and XII, they will be immediately shut down.
Female gymnasts may claim as their prom date any student they can leapfrog over during passing periods.
Men who coach girls’ teams will not be allowed to own cell phones or make eye contact with any student.
[Image via Wikimedia Commons]
Tags: misandry, sports day, title ix
Schools will receive additional funds for its athletics programs only when the audience for women’s sports exceed men’s sports.
Boys will be asked to play all field sports in skirts/kilts. When asked why, they will be informed that the skirts/kilts fill the twin roles of allowing more range of motion than their previous uniform and the skirt will help obfuscate any jukes, cuts, or any other strategic changes in direction. (The reasons do not have to make sense or be grounded in reality.)
Any female-majority kickball team may throw the ball overhand while pitching. Players from the opposing team may not dodge nor are they given a walk if hit by the ball. After striking the kicker three times with the ball, the pitching team gains a point.
Photography and drawing pictures of horses are also classified as varsity sports. Horse-related photography will be an Olympic sport.
All companies will have annual Breaking the Glass Ceiling ceremonies, where female workers are given positive upward reviews, 5% raises, and afterwards participate in photography and horse-drawing competitions. A sports banquet will be held to handout awards. All male workers must bring a side dish, warm entree, or dessert to the banquet.
If a male worker happens to win anything, they will be given a jewelry box as a prize.
Oh, they never win.
Water polo sounds cool.
All marching bands will be required to learn WNBA player Brittney Griner’s favorite song and play it every year on her birthday. YES, PLEASE.
My favorite artifact of the “Hey America, Here Comes Title IX” era is a cartoon that ran in my college newspaper (prior to my enrollment, but during the time that the dude who would someday become my boyfriend was their layout editor – time and life are both weird things). Anyway, said cartoon depicted an upright vacuum, Monica Lewinsky, and the words “Title IX” and was captioned: Things That Suck. It’s certainly “of a time”!
o_O
On the flipside, people still gripe about Title IX today, e.g. any time a men’s sport is cut.
Mmhmm, I was just listening to a story on NPR today (not sure if it was national or produced by my local affiliate) about gender parity in K-12 sports. There was A LOT of hemming and hawing from school principals about Title IX and how girls shouldn’t need to be allowed on the football team because schools have field hockey for a reason (apparently the reason is so they don’t have to let girls onto the football team?)
Hahaha, and football and field hockey are so similar, right, that any girl interested in playing football would be able to practice the same kind of skills in field hockey?
On this note, here’s a question for you Toasties, from a latecomer to sports and sports culture: why is there no women’s baseball or women’s football in high school or younger levels? It just seems like the answer might be “because there never has been one before” which seems a little weird.
Holy shit, if reading was a varsity sport, I could have been captain of the team senior year. Worn a letter jacket around, done reps of Jane Austen in the library. Have a series of starstruck guys and girls carry my books around for me between class and giggle even when my jokes were horrible and awkward and /why didn’t I get to have this/
I lettered twice in creative writing.
(I went to an arts magnet school without sports teams, and lettering in creative writing involved putting a certain amount of time into the literary magazine.)
I lettered in newspaper. At a school that actually had sports teams. I don’t know how this happened, but I took the letter.
My school gave out academic varsity letters! I can’t remember now if it was for honor roll, or math team, or what, but I definitely got one. All schools should do this.
Although I can only think of one person in my whole school that actually bought a jacket for sports or academic letters.
I lettered in academics! (also, um, band and theater). I did not buy a letter jacket, not least because purple & gold do not translate well to that format.
I was on a reading Olympics team from elementary school to high school. We had to read a pre-determined list of super mediocre to occasionally good books and then answer questions about obscure details from them at a competition. Its primary draw was getting to complain about bad books with friends then spend an evening eating pizza and complaining about it when the judges required super specific details before they’d accept an answer. My favorite part was that in high school, the cool librarian who ran it explicitly said that the team at our school was not about nourishing a love of reading or teamwork (because if you’re on a high school reading Olympics team, you probably already love to read), but was solely focused on getting the highest score of all the teams there.
I lettered in Speech & Debate! Just by participating enough!
I will be available to talk about Brittney Griner in the comments all day.
Brittany Griner in slouchy menswear.
UUUUGH
*slides to the floor, dies
I WANT TO BRING HER FLOWERS EVERY DAY AND CALL HER MA’AM AND MAINTAIN A RESPECTFUL DISTANCE AND SLEEP AT THE FOOT OF HER BED IS THAT WEIRD
I highly recommend the following Google image search: Brittney Griner dunk
Glorious.
you guys I think Mallory LOVES US she wrote us a sports thing FOR FUN
I think I know a guy in New York with a lot of start-up capital who wants to syndicate your post, Mal! He’s not going to pay you anything for it, but you have a boyfriend who buys stuff for you anyway, right? You don’t need money.
DO THE BUSTLE *doo doo doo doo doo-da-doo doo doo*
Sports Day is making me think about one day that overshadows all my half-assed cross-country runner high school memories: the day that one team-member’s boyfriend broke up with her and shoved her out of his car. He was on the boy’s team. She came to practice crying, and told our shining worshiped lightning-fast coach, and for practice that day we ran him down and beat him up. I’d never been in a fight before. Nobody talked about it afterwards, there were no consequences. I wouldn’t even think it really happened, but my sister was there too, and she had just been also cruelly (though not violently) dumped, and I vividly remember that we all stood in a circle around him, hesitating, until she knocked him down.
I don’t know, man. Sports Day.
I’m pretty sure I read a Facebook comment that was exactly this, except regarding the California locker room law, and not kidding.
Enjoying the television program Friday Night Lights will be illegal. Talking about Connie Britton’s hair will be grandfathered in.
I didn’t really experience gender-segregated sports in school as I went to a girl’s high school (and then a design college that didn’t have sports teams), so it’s going to be interesting navigating this as a parent (although I will be shocked if any of the Bergy Bits manages to develop an interest in sports as it basically doesn’t exist in our house)
Could a team with a racially offensive mascot be renamed The Diversities, or, The Mixed-races? The former is better. It would be kind-of awesome if there were a H.S. mascot called The Minorities. I always root for the underdogs though.
I initially read “All out lesbians” with a hyphen, “All-out lesbians” and thought, huh, so Gatorade just for the extremely enthusiastic, committed lesbians then?
All boys’ and men’s teams will be named by adding “Fella” or “Boyish” to the nickname of the girls’ and women’s teams. Fella Wildcats, Boyish Aggies, Fella Eagles, Boyish Steelers.
(My high school girls’ teams were the Lady Caballeros. Yes, the Lady Gentlemen on Horseback.)
Lady Caballeros is amazing. A Catholic high school near my home town away stuck with the Lady Popes.
Lady Popes needs to be a band that plays riot grrl covers of Gregorian chants.
(Obligatory Pope Joan link.)
That’s kind of the best thing I’ve ever heard.
Mine were the Lady Rams. I still stroke out a little bit when I think about it.
Sorry to revive a long-dead thread, but I have to say that my school also had Rams and Lady Rams, and we joked a lot about changing it to Ewes and Gentleman Ewes.
Lady Popes needs to be a band that plays riot grrl covers of Gregorian chants.
(Obligatory Pope Joan link.)
There was girl on the football team at my high school, she was also totally popular and beleoved. Another girl (new to the school) even joined after the first moved. Granted the team stunk in general so attitudes might have been different if she tried to join a winning team.
As a male Brit who played (grass) hockey in the UK and then move to the States I actually wore the skirt/kilt in order to play and keep playing a sport I enjoyed. I found it interesting how it was really the skirt that was used as a deterrent to boys playing, although in my case I was actually asked to play in order to keep the team going. And yeah, we had Lady in our name too.
This is hilarious for me right up to the point where the racist mascots get renamed The Misandrists. It feels like the takeaway is supposed to be that feminism (even joke-feminism-for-the-purpose-of-the-article) addresses racism, when racism is another dynamic of oppression entirely and would not be addressed by any of these magical cures.