Sadly, the ladies have followed men's lead in sports

	Northwestern's soccer team is one of the many women's collegiate squads across the U.S. in hot water over hazing. Photo Courtesy of badjocks.com
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With apologies to Annie Oakley of musical fame, college female athletes seem to be singing a refrain that goes, "Anything you can do, I can do just as bad." Yes, the irony of Title IX, the landmark law that brought gender equality to intercollegiate athletics, is that it shows that sometimes you achieve equality by stepping down.

The decline of women into the depths of the male athletic syndrome started sometime in the 1980s, when the recruitment of female athletes began in earnest. It was about then, with women's athletic scholarships on the rise, that parents began to get their daughters to concentrate on sports at a young age -- just as they had traditionally driven sons into sport, to the detriment of their academics.

By the start of this century, the monumental study of college sports by William Bowen and James Shulman entitled The Game of Life documented the way women athletes had begun to mimic their fellow male jocks in all the wrong ways. Their grades had declined significantly. More and more were lodged near the bottom of their classes. Even those who came to college with modest grades were performing worse than could be expected. Fewer of them were going on to graduate school or participating in other activities. Generally, like so many male athletes, the females were concentrating more and more on their sport, to the exclusion of campus life. They had hopelessly succumbed, as Bowen and Shulman described it, to the "athletic culture."

The most recent revelations have been even more dispiriting. They come from a website called BadJocks.com. It was launched in 2001 by a disillusioned fan in Michigan named Bob Reno. He was immediately amazed at the huge number of athletes acting badly. But more recently, he has been shocked that women in sports are, as he puts it, "holding their own" as malefactors in the athletic realm. Mr. Reno has even catalogued a considerable number of cases in which female coaches are seducing their players. He calls it "the Desperate Housewives effect."

More recently, BadJocks.com has displayed scores of ugly photographs of hazing on female teams. I am presenting the Tonya Harding Memorial Award to the women's lacrosse team at Washington D.C.'s Catholic University, which had a male stripper in a thong pose intimately with some of the younger players. But Catholic is hardly alone. Other initiations on women's teams featured players being blindfolded, and beer guzzling, with some players apparently passed out. In some instances, players had drawn pictures of male genitalia on their bodies or their clothing or written crude sexual messages on themselves.

Dr. Susan Lipkins, an authority on hazing, told me that with women's team initiations, "the degree and intensity of the sexuality is increased.... The complete lack of respect for one's body is what is shocking. There is a dehumanizing aspect which is disturbing."

Oh, my. We had hoped when women started participating in sports in large numbers after the passage of Title IX that they would improve the institution, investing it with the finer feminine values. Well, the results so far seem to indicate that, instead, sports has won and womanhood has lost.

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