Stuck in the minors

So it would seem that the solution is simply to get women into competitive sports. The problem is not physical weakness, it's cultural conditioning. Take girls to soccer practice, watch Women's National Basketball Association games with them on television, teach them they are just as good as men. Get them developing their physical skills from toddlerhood on through high school, abolish "girls rules" and enforce Title IX. Then watch what Dowling calls "learned weakness" disappear. This idea is the core thesis of "The Frailty Myth," and it's certainly a valuable one. As sports historian Mariah Burton Nelson writes, "baseball and other manly sports are more than games. They constitute a culture -- the dominant culture in America today." Learn to compete, girls, and the world is yours. Prove your body is just as strong as a man's, and men will have no reason to think of you as inferior. Certainly, female sports participation can lead to vital personal and political changes.

But on the other hand -- and this is something Dowling doesn't address -- this plan isn't much good if women limit themselves to the sports based on skills at which men will always excel. Games that depend on upper-body strength will be dominated by the sex that has a stronger upper body, and as long as we are weight lifting, sprinting and high jumping, we are trying to do sports designed on a male model, sports that demand height and muscle that men tend to have more of than women do. Even in sports that are thought of as women's -- gymnastics and figure skating, for example -- men do higher jumps and more rotations in the air. In one way or another, these are almost all men's games.

And as much as I hate to say it, men also beat us at speed, height and lower-body strength. On average, they are 10 to 15 percent taller than we are. Their times are simply faster. Truth is, women's bodies do not measure up in the primary ways we measure physical power in this society. Dowling asserts that we might indeed measure up if only given a real chance, and she may be right -- but she is still measuring achievement against the male yardstick.

Women live longer, withstand cold better, sweat more efficiently, have a low center of gravity and float really well. But right now there are very few sports that stress these abilities. Distance sports do, and women have consistently excelled at them. (Shelley Taylor-Smith holds the record for swimming around Manhattan; Seana Hogan beat the men's record by almost an hour cycling 400 miles.)

The problem is, these sports are not popular, and these superiorities are not ways we measure strength; they don't hold much currency. The recent controversy over John McEnroe's claim that he or any decent male player at the college level could beat either of the Williams sisters at tennis proves that sexism is alive and flourishing, even in sports where women have achieved unbelievable feats. What we need are new sports and more media coverage -- not just of the sports that women excel in but of the ones in which we can actually beat men. Yes, it'll be a long haul to get "Monday Night Football" fans to tune in to distance swimming, but people are watching the WNBA, the World Cup and all that tennis, so there's certainly an audience for female athletes that no one would have believed 15 years ago. And many of these sports we so revere have only been around for 100 years. We can invent others; we can shift our attention; we can remake a cultural institution that was built on the basis of the male body.

It's great to play with the big boys, but demoralizing if you always lose to them. Women's physical equality will never be acknowledged until we change our sports -- and our definition of strength itself.

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