Last month, the Washington Post reported a new trend constituting a step back for both feminism and homosexual liberation ("Going Behind the Back," January 24). The Post brought to the public the latest method of negative recruiting in women's basketball: suggesting to recruits that opposing coaches are lesbians. The ethics of any negative recruiting tactic are questionable. However, the real tragedy is that this particular tactic has been effective in swaying players' decisions, which means we have a long way to go before reaching equality in both gender and sexual orientation.
Society has long discouraged women from participating in sports on the grounds that female athletes are too masculine. In the 1940s, the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League outfitted their players in short skirts and required charm lessons, as depicted in the 1992 film "A League Of Their Own," to ensure their players met society's standard of femininity. Today, with Title IX, the WNBA, and a Sports Illustrated that features females other than swimsuit models, people should have gotten over that fallacy. But now it shows up in a brand new form: the fear that participation in athletics makes women more prone to homosexuality. This implies that the most masculine quality a woman could have would be sexual attraction to other women.
The Post reports that parents are genuinely afraid that their daughter will play for a lesbian coach and that these coaches will attempt to sway players to their own sexual orientation. The problems with this assumption are numerous.
First, homosexuality is not an orientation into which one could be swayed. We can allow for the possibility that being in a community of other gay women could give a lesbian the courage to come out into the open. But there is no formative period between high school and college where a basketball player would be weighing their options between homosexuality and heterosexuality. Sexual orientation is innate, it's permanent and no one can do anything to change that.
More subtly, this tactic rests on the assumption that society views lesbians as more than just women who are attracted to other women. The inference is that a gay woman is incapable of separating her sexuality from her professional life. This is one more step in a process of categorically attributing qualities other than actual sexual preference to homosexuals as a group.
The same phenomenon occurs on another level in this situation. The assumption hovers in parents' minds that lesbian coaches are more prone to commit sexual harassment than a straight male coach would be. History seems to be quite progressive on this topic. After all, 50 or even 25 years ago, the safest hands a parent would want their daughter in would be those of a woman. An older man presented the threatening possibility of sexual harassment. But in the 21st century, the lesbian suddenly snags the archetypal role of the sexual predator. Further, the belief is out there that homosexual harassment is wholly different and infinitely worse than heterosexual harassment.
This isn't the first time these fallacies have unfairly surrounded the gay community. In the controversy over gay Boy Scout troop leaders, homophobes assumed that gay men would push their preferences on their scouts. Moreover, some associated homosexuality with pedophilia. Correlating these various qualities with gay people isolates them as a group from "normal people." Through this line of thinking, homosexuals become sub-human.
The one piece of good news is that women's college basketball has become competitive enough to require negative recruiting techniques. Men's basketball coaches have long been using similar tactics, although sexuality has not been as prevalent a grounds for attack. Men are in no way considered unnatural in the realm of athletics, and thus their sexuality isn't questioned as deviant. Women's negative recruiting suggests both that women are unnatural in sports and that lesbianism is deviant sexual behavior. Nobody wins in this situation. The NCAA believes that homophobia could be causing women to avoid entering the coaching profession. Female players are giving up their first-choice schools to satisfy homophobic parents or because they themselves are attempting to avoid a non-exisent threat.
This situation is absolutely nonsensical. What really needs to change is the mindset of everyone who is swayed by these recruiting techniques. But the easier place to start is in examining women's coaches who use sexuality as a negative recruitment tool. This practice threatens not just the individual but also the very institution of women's sports.
(Kimberly Liu's column appears Mondays in the Cavalier Daily. She can be reached at kliu@cavalierdaily.com)
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