Saturday, February 19, 2011

Unisex...An Unfair Advantage?

Just when one thinks the penultimate in public-school-education foolishness has been reached, such as distributing condoms to students while admitting they don’t always work and that abstinence is 100% effective but too old-fashioned even to consider, Iowa furnishes another example of why schools in this country are falling behind those in the rest of the world. Administrators appear to be idiots so why shouldn’t the products be…at least suspect?

Item: Girls are allowed to wrestle on what are essentially boys’ teams in Iowa. A potential champion (record of 35-4) recently defaulted on his way to an apparently excellent attempt at winning the crown in his weight division because he was being forced to wrestle a girl. He said it was a matter of conscience and faith, the former presumably because of the nature of things (men don’t purposefully hurt women or grab them in curious places, at least in public) and the latter because of his religious beliefs.

It’s doubtful that girls are allowed to play on high school football teams in Iowa for the obvious reason that they would be smashed. Strangely, the spectacle of a high school boy writhing with a high school girl (with their body parts massaging each other in strange places) on a mat in front of screaming thousands (wrestling is big in Iowa) seems so weird as to be unbelievable. Political correctness, the zany abstract that is damning America these days, is running amok. Aren’t there any girls’ wrestling teams in Iowa?

Unisex is the darling of the generations more or less pseudo-birthed by the “baby boomers” back in the hippy-dippy 60s. This concept is responsible for much if not most of the rape problem (real or imagined) in the military these days. Genders should not be mixed in situations devoid of privacy, especially in the ages-17-28 crowd. Anyone with walking-around-sense knows this but that sense is not available to the Congress or the current president…or in Iowa’s education establishment.

The young man’s decision is easy to understand and would likely be held by at least 99% of other young men in the same situation, although, of course, the girls presumably had to overcome other boys to get to the state finals. Is there something in the water in Iowa? The decision hardest to understand is that of the girl’s father, who apparently is willing to have his daughter mauled by a boy – or vice versa – in a public place. Or…what would any mother think of having her daughter appear in such a spectacle…or a son body-slam a girl?

Can one expect in this enlightened age that the genders in high school and college will soon be mixed in all sports? Probably not! The first girl to receive a concussion in football or a broken leg sliding into second or a beaning at the plate or a hard left-hook breaking a jaw in what has up to now been considered a guys’ game, with the understanding that girls have the same competitive opportunities (Title 9) in their own groups, may well decide the question. Without any doubt, girls will be far more vulnerable than the boys to injury.

Should boys be allowed to play on girls’ basketball or softball teams in Iowa, assuming there are such teams? Would that be any different from allowing girls to wrestle boys? Of course not! The drive to make everyone equal to everyone else in every area, including gender, is wearing thin for the simple reason that the incorrigible differences (inequalities) are unmistakably apparent to anyone with a grain of common sense.

Gender-integrated military boot camps have been tried at least twice for combat training, first in the 1970s (Carter administration) and later in the 1990s (Clinton administration). In both cases, they had to be discontinued because men and women are not usually equally capable of the physical and emotional grind necessary to preparation for breaking things and killing people. Simple!

Family values are supposed to be important in Iowa…but one wonders. Any father who would allow – yea, even encourage – his daughter to be slammed around by a boy as a matter of public entertainment or for any other reason is either sick or dumb…maybe both.

And so it goes.
Jim Clark

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