Monthly Archives: June 2007

Friday Random Ten: music to rest the joints to

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I’ve got the longest run of the season coming up on Sunday, and can begin a gradual taper next week. These old bones need the rest.

Don’t read too much into my great fondness for #1. #5 is my favorite Eagles track, #3 is from one of those folk groups whose records my mother played for me when I was small, and they’re thus permanently part of my consciousness. #7 includes a line I thought immensely profound when I was nineteen: “we’re too young to reason, too grown up to dream.” (Now, it seems silly, but that’s what a couple of decades will do for ya.) #8 is from a local Pasadena artist whose work I’ve long admired. The Paul Colman Trio are a fairly obscure Christian band from Australia; I caught them opening for Third Day a few years back and they stole the show.

1. “Damn, I Wish I was Your Lover”, Sophie B. Hawkins
2. “Uncle John’s Band”, Indigo Girls
3. “Keep On the Sunny Side”, Ian and Sylvia
4. “Echo Park”, Joseph Arthur
5. “The Last Resort”, the Eagles
6. “Jealousy”, Natalie Merchant
7. “Slave to Love”, Bryan Ferry
8. “Fire and Rain”, Michelle Bloom
9. “Run”, Paul Colman Trio
10. “Satan, Your Kingdom Must Come Down”, Uncle Tupelo

Bonus Track: “The One Who Knows”, Alison Krauss and Dar Williams

A few political notes

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I don’t blog much about politics here, but I have followed the recent rulings from the Supreme Court with a mixture of dismay, jubilation, confusion, and above all, fascination. I have lots of very right-wing friends who are going through Bush Alienation Syndrome; they ought to comfort themselves that “their” president kept his promise to appoint justices in the Scalia and Thomas mold!

If the perception is true that we are a deeply divided nation, we also have a very deeply divided court. Lots of 5-4 rulings lately, with almost all of them featuring a solid liberal bloc that rarely splits apart (Souter, Stevens, Breyer, Ginsburg) and a solid conservative bloc (Alito, Roberts, Thomas, Scalia). Anthony Kennedy is the wild-card, almost invariably in the majority, taking over the role once held by Sandra Day O’Connor. This is his court, and he must be having a marvelous time. I wonder if Kennedy’s eight colleagues, seemingly committed to their two ideological camps, spend time “courting” him. I have this happy image of two groups of four heading out to lunch at two separate restaurants, each urging a vacillating Kennedy to come and dine with them.

But the right-wing killed immigration reform in the Senate today, and the Court struck a serious blow to desegregation efforts in public schools. My weary and disgruntled conservative friends ought to buck up a bit; they’re having a good week!

And since we’re talking politics, I’m still thinking that it’ll be John Edwards and Mitt Romney in the general election next year. Or maybe I’m just partial to exceedingly handsome and articulate men who are routinely underestimated and dismissed as lightweights! John Edwards is still getting my money, even as Dennis Kucinch still has my heart.

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Jack and Jill again: a response to Father Figure about mentoring and attraction

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It’s genuinely flattering that I get several e-mails a week from people who have read my posts and are asking me for input on issues ranging from chinchilla care to student crushes to youth ministry to older men/younger women relationships. I want to make it clear to those who do write me, however, that I assume all unsolicited email is “bloggable”. I am not able to offer replies or advice outside of the format of this blog. I will, of course, change names and details in order to protect the writer’s anonymity. That seems a fair policy.

Got an email last week from a fellow who calls himself Father Figure. Father Figure is married, and though he doesn’t specify his age, seems to be forty-something (I take great delight in calling myself a forty-something these days). He writes:

You seem to be very perceptive on the area of
crushes developing on mentor/father figures.

How does the mentor/father
figure disengage from such a relationship as he sees
himself being attracted to the young woman [half his
age!] who’s paying so much attention to him?

The last three years have been among the worst of
my life, mainly from being unable to forget about the
attention that this young woman gave to me for a few
months, but also from incredible guilt for the way
that I totally broke off contact with her. Even now I
tend to feel that if I see a mutual friend, I should
casually inquire about her, not so much because I want
to know, but out of concern that if the conversation
gets relayed back to her, it will hurt her that I
didn’t even ask about her. Her own father died or
left the home when she was a young girl, and it seems
that in some ways she related to me as a sort of
“safe” father-type figure. The problem was that I
fell for her, and so I found the only way to deal with
my feelings was to stop contact. But my breaking off
contact [when we had been fairly close friends] must
have come across to her as rejection of her as a
person. Hence, my profound feeling of guilt.

It’s a painful situation for Father Figure, and clearly equally painful (if not more so) for the young woman whom he has pushed out of his life.

My first thought is that those of us who do enjoy mentoring young people have an obligation to set strong boundaries with ourselves. I meet with and mentor a small group of young people; some are former students and some are former “youth groupers.” I mentor both men and women. One of my chief jobs as a mentor is to never, ever forget that my relationship with my mentees is one of mutual respect, but not one of mutual support. I am there for them in a way that they cannot and should not be there for me. In my relationships with my mentees, I make very little mention of my private life (less, in most cases, than I do on this blog). When I do talk about myself, it is usually only in order to share an anecdote from my past that may prove helpful to the mentee.

The mentor/mentee boundary is not as rigid as that between therapist and patient. No one is on a couch, and there’s no strict psychological protocol to observe. But I always remember that this young man or this young woman with whom I am sitting in my office or drinking coffee under a tree here on campus is there as an opportunity for me to be of service. My mentees are not potential “best friends forever”. That doesn’t mean I don’t like them, and heck, it doesn’t preclude me from starting to care very deeply for some of them. I love working with young people; it gives me a great sense of purpose and satisfaction to do so. But my students are not my dearest friends, and I don’t confide in my mentees as they confide in me. That’s not about power, that’s about respect for boundaries.

I wrote a long time ago about the story of Michael Gee, an adjunct professor and journalist who was fired from his teaching position after posting to a website his feeling that one of his female students was “incredibly hot.” As part of that post, I wrote about how we as teachers and mentors can respond to students whose bodies might be distracting to us. I wrote about an old student of mine named “Jack”, whose cigarette stench and body odor made our office hours together difficult; I wrote about “Jill”, whose unusually revealing clothing posed a different challenge. Jack and Jill were wonderful students, solid “A” students, both interested in having me mentor them. Jack’s smell was burdensome; Jill’s state of near-perpetual underdressedness posed a similar problem. With both students, my job was the same: to not allow their bodies to become my focus. I made a conscious effort to be there for Jack in all of his malodorousness, and to keep my eyes on Jill’s face. I’m not an instructor in grooming, fashion, or deportment; if I am only able to be present for those who are bathed and reasonably covered up, then I am a piss-poor mentor and teacher and ought not to be in this job. I learned a lot from Jack and Jill.

Perhaps it’s because I’m happily married, perhaps it’s because I’ve worked so hard to establish excellent boundaries, perhaps it’s because I’m in my forties now — but for whatever reason, I don’t any longer have the trouble “Father Figure” has had with this woman he mentored. That’s the result of some hard work on my part, and also the result of being willing to ask for grace to come into my life and guide my mentoring relationships.

With the Jacks and Jills of this world, there’s a prayer I use. It was one I learned many years ago, and it has served me in good stead. I use the same prayer with the potentially attractive as with the potentially hostile:

“God, show me this person not as I see them but as you see them. Help me to be for them what I am called by you to be. Remove from me my fears and my selfish desires, and show me how to love them as you love them”.

Yeah, we have a problem with singulars and plurals here, but you get the point. I really do use that prayer, though much less often than I used to. God has been faithful to me, and I can say that when I have prayed that prayer sincerely, it has always been answered. I have never had to break off a relationship with a mentee because I was worried about my own growing feelings of attraction towards him or her.

Does that make me better than “Father Figure”, who did choose to break off his mentoring relationship with a younger woman to whom he was increasingly drawn? No, not really. It was far better for him to abrogate their relationship than to act on his feelings. But while seducing her would have been a profound betrayal of his commitment to her (and, of course, to his marriage), breaking off their contact (which had become important to her) without telling her why is a serious form of abandonment. There’s a general rule in working with much younger people, even when they are in their twenties: if you as a mentor cut off contact or withdraw from them, they will almost always assume that it was something they did. They will very rarely conclude that the problem was with the mentor; they will assume that they did something to drive him or her away. They may feel ashamed or guilty without quite knowing what they’ve done. It’s a serious wound, and I’ve seen it inflicted many a time.

Father Figure inquires as to what he should do. In the best case scenario, he would be able to resume his mentoring relationship with this young woman, taking responsibility for keeping his own feelings and desires strictly in check (and asking for spiritual help in order to do so.) Given that the young woman is an adult, his next best option — but not the best — is to be candid with her about his reasons for terminating their time together. He’ll have to be very emphatic that the responsibility is his and his alone, and that she did nothing wrong. It’ll be hurtful, but she’ll at least have (oh, overused word) the beginnings of some closure. The worst thing to do would be to continue to be distant and unvailable without giving a reason why.

I am absolutely certain that I will not cross a line with my students and youth groupers, either in act or in fantasy. I am confident that my intent will remain clear and my goals pure. Is this hubris? No, because I don’t rest this certainty on my own will alone. I’m a mortal human being, and I know all too well how quickly my own unchecked desires can run riot. My confidence lies in my faith in a faithful God, a God who will not give me any challenge I cannot handle if I ask for His help. I also have faith in my peers who hold me accountable, who ask me questions about my motives, who watch me. If I seem to be crossing a line, they’ll gently inquire and remind me of where it is that my priorities lie, what my obligations are.

If I can only mentor the unattractive, the well-groomed, the polite and unchallenging, I’m not doing my job. (Of course, the reverse is true: if I seek out only the beautiful and the brilliant to work with, something else is amiss!) If I were to find my own feelings getting in the way of my work with a mentee, I am confident that I would be given the strength to overcome those feelings. And by overcoming, I don’t just mean the strength to not act upon them. I mean the strength to eradicate them altogether. My wife is the human being in whose company I am happiest. If I were to be more excited about spending time with a friend or a mentee than with my wife, that would be a colossal red flag. And I am prayerfully, quietly confident that God would give me the strength to redirect my desires and my thoughts themselves if I asked Him to. But if for some reason that sustenance didn’t come, then I would have to terminate the mentoring relationship.

Thursday Short Poem: Hicok’s “Poem for my Mother’s Hysterectomy”

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I read this Bob Hicok offering last week in Plougshares, and can’t get it out of my mind. I wasn’t sure I wanted to put it up, but decided to go ahead and do it. I lecture every semester on “hysteria” and the absurd notion of the “wandering uterus”, and will confess that as the just over six-foot son of a woman who did undergo a hysterectomy a decade ago, much of this rings viscerally familiar.

Poem for my Mother’s Hysterectomy

The bell in you out of which I was rung
long ago removed, I cannot go home.

What did they do with your uterus?

I think of it as a hat or a bird,
resting on a head or flying away, over those mountains,
on the other side of which I have never been.

Maybe that’s where the navel of the Earth is,
and these womb birds go there out of memory.

I am that of you: a six-foot-tall memory, graft
that took and learned to drive, pick locks, lick
on other women the door you opened for me.

Why did they call you hysterical
when rage is essential for a pulse, to beat the drum
of being alive?

I know this dream; my face in a jar, saying
I can be anything I want, just not
me.

For you, who had seven children
and wanted more, it must have been
like having your face removed,
the Catholic mirror asking, What has your emptiness
to give?

I miss you as the only water I breathed, as a way of living
at the center of things.

You gave me nine round months, time since
is straight as a knife.

I’ve never asked, What was I in you; a tickle fish, thorn
in your side, a goat
kicking the night?

If I left graffiti in there, a sign or mark,
and was the monster you worried I’d be as sharp-toothed
as the one I am?

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“Why not rather be cheated?” A note on lawsuits, divorce, and Anglican court battles

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In a rather surprising ruling, the 4th Circuit of the California Court of Appeal ruled in favor of the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles yesterday. For those not in the loop, three conservative parishes within our diocese have broken away over the issue of homosexuality; in opposition to same-sex unions and the ordination of non-celibate gay clergy, these parishes have sought to leave the diocese — and take their church property with them. Yesterday, reversing a lower-court ruling, the appellate justices said that the church buildings belong to the diocese, not to the rebel parishes. Y’all can leave, in other words, but the bricks and mortar stay.

It’s a setback for the break-away traditionalists in California, and perhaps nationwide. Though the Times reports that the rebels haven’t decided on whether to appeal to the state Supreme Court, I can’t imagine that they won’t. The stakes are much too high to let things come to a tidy end here.

I have mixed feelings, of course. On the one hand, I’m a strong supporter of same-sex blessings and of the full integration of non-celibate gays and lesbians into holy orders and into the full, rich life of the Anglican Communion. I’ve also known Bishop Bruno for years, going back long before his stunning upset victory in the 1999 bishop coadjutor election. (You’d have to know a lot about dull diocesan politics to know what a shocker that was. He beat the favored candidate of All Saints Pasadena, and it took a couple of years to patch things up between the new bishop and the largest parish in the diocese. Let’s just say that there were some very, very disgruntled people at All Saints when Jon was elected; they’ve become “gruntled” since.) So as the bishop’s friend and admirer, I support him in his decision to do battle.

On the other hand, I know a thing or two about divorce. And having managed to get through three divorces without any serious legal fights, I know that the smart thing to do is to be generous towards those with whom you are ending a covenanted relationship. In the end, as my third wife and I agreed when we split, “it’s just money.” And no, neither of us had so much cash that we could afford to be recklessly cavalier about the subject — we just both knew that new houses could be bought, new silver patterns selected, new retirement accounts opened. Adding my three divorces together, I’ll reckon I walked away from somewhere around half a million dollars (most of it in real estate, of course). Could I find good use for $500,000 today? No doubt! Would it have been worth a nasty court battle, or two, or three? No.

I love what Paul says about lawsuits in 1 Corinthians 6:5. It was a great comfort to me during my last divorce, which was amicable and kind and generous on all sides:

The very fact that you have lawsuits among you means you have been completely defeated already. Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated?

So many people say “I’m not going to court over money, it’s the principle of the thing.” But Paul is truly subversive here; he calls on us to allow ourselves to be wronged and cheated rather than turning to secular courts to resolve our disputes — particularly our disputes with fellow Christians.

Why not rather be wronged? Why not rather be cheated? That’s the question I ask equally to both sides in the property dispute between the church and its traditionalist rebels. It’s the question I would pose to Jon Bruno, and to the vestries of the three renegade parishes. I would urge the rebels to abandon their property rather than sue to keep it; I would urge my friend Jon to let the dissenters take that same property rather than sue to get it back. If both sides act with glorious generosity, who knows what good might come of it?

A note about the difference between teaching and blogging

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It’s a busy sort of day, and I don’t think I’ll have time for a serious post.

I do want to remind folks of something: the fact that I am a college professor doesn’t mean I blog the same way I lecture. As an academic, I have a responsibility to be fair, to explore multiple points of view, and to ground what I say in verifiable evidence. But that obligation stops the moment I step off campus. I am not required to blog with the same scrupulousness with which I teach.

Yes, many of my students read this blog. But they are at least nascent adults, capable of distinguishing my in-class analyses from my personal pronouncements here. Do I have prejudices that bubble forth here? Sure. Look, in my classes I don’t take half an hour to wax eloquent about veganism and the sins of meat-eating. In my classes, I don’t suggest that most men who are drawn to much younger women are fundamentally fearful of being challenged by an actual equal. In my classes, I don’t talk much about my own colorful past.

I blog under my own name because I can’t think of a clever title for this blog. (The closest I came was “What Rough Beast”, but quoting any line from that most famous of Yeats poems is almost certainly a sign of excessive pretension, something I get accused of anyway.) Do I hope to influence a few people with my writing? Of course. Do I see my writing here as an extension of what I do in the classroom? Perhaps, but under radically different rules. Here, I can let down my guard, and abandon the strictures of dispassionate objectivity that are, frankly, often rather confining. Pasadena City College pays me to teach, I pay for this blog (and most of the posts I post are posted from my own personal computer, not from college equipment.) The rules are different.

So if you disagree with something I’m saying, say so civilly. But I am at a loss as to why some folks who seem to disagree with virtually everything I say and find me “narcissistic”, “repetitive” and “Puritanical” continue to come around and read and comment. Look, people, I’ve never understood the pleasure some seem to get from making themselves angry! Some of my commenters here remind me of a dear lefty friend of mine who listens to Rush Limbaugh and Bill O’Reilly every day, just for the pleasure of getting infuriated. To each his own, I suppose, but to me that’s an odd sort of thrill to seek. What joy is there in seeking out the annoying and the exasperating?

Is there a danger some of my students will conflate my blog persona with my classroom persona? Of course. Mind you, I’m not compartmentalizing. I don’t pretend to be something I’m not in either space. But navel-gazing on the part of a professor in the class is inappropriate; navel-gazing on a blog is acceptable and expected. What I write here, folks, is opinion — occasionally grounded in a stray fact or two, but for the most part rooted in my own melange of personal experience and spiritual faith.

In my teaching, I am committed to coherence and consistency; in my blogging, I am really committed only to the former. And sometimes, as regular readers have noticed, not even that.

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No summer school office hours

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One of the things I loathe about summer school: no office hours. I’m teaching three classes back-to-back-to-back and I don’t have five danged minutes to meet with students. No time to go over papers with them, no time to meet to chat. I try and get to my office early before my 8:00AM class, which is the one time I can set aside, but that’s awfully early for many of my students — especially those who don’t have my class until the afternoon.

Query: anyone work at an institution where summer school profs have office hours? I feel as if my students are getting short-changed as they don’t get the access to me that kids do during the regular semesters. On my own time, I can squeeze in five minutes here or there, but it’s tough to make up.

A long response to “Debra” about older men, younger women

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As I’ve mentioned several times, I get more email about my “older men, younger women” posts than all the other things I blog about put together. (Student crushes is a distant second, and chinchillas are third).

I got a long letter a couple of weeks ago from a woman in her late forties named “Debra” (not her real name). She tells a by-now very familiar story:

Now, here’s my situation. Within the past couple of years I’ve become
aware of a man a couple of years older than me. From what I can see,
this man is very much like me in many ways–in fact, so much so that
he could be my male twin.

I’m attracted to him. From a distance, I find him intelligent, thoughtful, humorous, honest,
emotionally open, openminded, and kind. And, up until last year, he
was like me in one other important way: he had no relationship. He was
an intelligent, witty man in his later forties, yet he had never been
married and made frequent complaints in public about how all of his attempts
at relationships with women (and he made it clear without using a
sledgehammer that yes, he was attracted to the opposite sex) had ended
in disaster.

Then, last year, suddenly something changed. Out of the blue, Mr. Sad
Sack began seeing a woman. A woman who lived on the opposite coast
from him. Two and a half months
after they began dating, she packed up all her belongings and crossed
the country to move in with him. As of now, they have been together
for a year, and have lived together for ten and a half months

Why do I come to you to ask you what you think of all this? Simply
this: He is 47; she is 22.

This is a long post, so more below the fold. Continue reading →

A no-doubt dull report on this morning’s run, and a note on why I hate fishing

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If there’s one paved run I enjoy more than any other, it’s the run up to Cogswell Dam along the West Fork of the San Gabriel River.

This morning, the alarm went off at 4:40AM, and I was at the trailhead out on state route 39 above Azusa by 5:55. After putting on the sunscreen and the body glide and triple checking my gear, I headed up the road.

It’s about eight miles of paved road up to Cogswell, so a round trip is sixteen miles. I needed more miles today, so I ran about two miles up, turned around, came back to the car, and started over again.

Though it was very early on a Sunday morning, there were already a number of folks with fishing poles — some of whom had clearly camped over night — along the West Fork. The river is stocked with Rainbow trout, Speckled Dace, and something called the “Arroyo Chub.” I like the name, and when I’m in a self-deprecating mood, I apply the monicker to myself. (When you run with folks who are truly rail-thin most of the time, even a few extra pounds leaves one inclined to pick such a label.)

Even before I became vegan, I had no interest in fishing. I can’t imagine an outdoor activity I would like less, frankly. My second wife loved the outdoors, and was an avid fan of camping and fly-fishing. We honeymooned at a remote lodge on the Mackenzie River in Oregon, about thirty miles east of Eugene. We fly-fished every day. I found the waiting around tedious beyond words, and the actual catching of the fish (something I never succeeded in doing, but something she was really good at) to be ghastly. I wanted to be running, or at the least hiking through the woods, keeping my heart rate happy in the triple digits. My ex-wife wanted to stand in the water in waders like something out of “The River Runs Through It” (which, incidentally, was her favorite film). I ought to have known that marriage was doomed.

So today I made my way past the fisherfolk, and eventually hit Cogswell dam itself. Cogswell is a glorious example of 1930s WPA engineering. The last time I was at Cogswell was nearly two years ago, after our record rainfall of the previous year. I was heartsick to see how low the water level was today behind the dam, lower than I’d ever seen it before. It’s only June, and it’s six more months until we can begin to hope for some good rain. I’m so anxious about fires, and anxious about the impact of this drought on the ecosystem. (Of course, my first thought is for the small mammals who are my special loves, but I know the whole danged food chain is suffering right now.)

I was feeling good, so I decided to go over my scheduled miles, and I ran the trail behind the dam for a bit; the fire road continues for about a mile and a half past Cogswell until it comes to an abrupt end. It was only at that dead end that I turned around and headed back. My goal was to cover the distance home at “marathon pace”. I covered the nine miles back in an hour and fifteen minutes, which is right about the 8:20 per mile pace I want to try and run in San Francisco next month. It’s a far cry from what I used to be able to do, but it’s a reasonable goal to have for where I am these days.

Counting the four miles I did as a warmup, that gave me twenty-two miles of running for the day. I was done by 9:25AM, exhilarated and happy beyond words. I drove back down the 39 into Azusa, where I stopped to have Inge the Solara washed by the Azusa High girl’s volleyball team. They did an enthusiastic if spotty job, and while they were hosing and washing and rubbing the car, I ducked into a store and bought myself 24 ounces of coffee. Endorphins last longer, folks, if you add caffeine on top.

So now it’s off to the gym, and then home to some quiet time with the paper. Our son Dudley might get some extra afternoon out time today.

Serious blogging will return this coming week.

A note on Title IX, proportionality, and why some girls aren’t playing… yet

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I try to stay out of the ongoing arguments over Title IX, proportionality, and women’s sports. (I’ve mentioned Title IX once or twice) but I’d rather leave the defense of Title IX to those who are best equipped to do that — the good folks at the Women’s Sports Foundation.

But sometimes, the issues raised in the ongoing debate over proportionality (the principle that spending on men’s and women’s athletics by colleges should match the percentage of the respective genders in the student body) get me really interested. On Wednesday, the National Review published this piece by Jessica Gavora, who is associated with the nemesis of women’s sports, the College Sports Council.

Gavora is worried that having had great success in defending the proportionality rule in colleges (which has led many schools to cut certain men’s sports, like wrestling, in order to meet quotas), the advocates for Title IX are going to push for similar measures in high school. Gavora, like most conservatives, is a fierce believer in gender essentialism; she is convinced that girls “just don’t like sports” as much as boys do. Thus mandating equal funding for both sexes unfairly punishes boys for their “natural” competitive nature. After all, many conservatives seem to believe that most real women would rather be at the quilting bee (or shopping at the mall, or writing sonnets in imitation of Millay) than running, leaping, or striking at balls with their bats or their cleats.

Okay, so maybe that’s not fair. Here’s what Gavora says that I did find interesting:

The reason high schools are having trouble finding as many girls to play sports as there are boys clamoring to take the field is apparent to anyone who takes the time to look: Girls have more varied extracurricular interests than boys. Girls out-participate boys in every extracurricular activity — band, drama, debate, student government — every one, that is, except for sports. The extracurricular gender gap so favors girls that the Independent Women’s Forum calculated that if the government were suddenly to require the same gender quota for participation in other extracurricular activities that it does in sports, 36 percent of female choir members, 25 percent of female orchestra members, and 33 percent of female debaters would have to be eliminated.

The implication of this is clear: If high schools follow colleges and universities in instituting gender quotas in athletics, boys will be forced to pay the price in limited or eliminated opportunities. Girls are too busy doing other things after school to turn out at the same rate for sports.

Bold emphases mine. There’s a grain of truth in what Gavora says, though it’s hardly an argument against proportionality. I’m convinced that the primary reason some schools have a hard time getting enough girls to come out for sports is not because of a lack of interest, but because of a perception on the part of these over-scheduled, over-pressured young women that sports isn’t the best use of their time. I’ve written before about the colossal pressure we put on this generation of young women to be successful; all things being equal, it does seem clear that our daughters are more anxious to please and to achieve tangible signs of success than many of their brothers.

It’s not that girls are any less competitive, any less interested in getting sweaty and dirty, any less interested in victory than boys. But as they think about college applications, as they look to their parents and adults for cues as to how to succeed, they are more likely to be pushed towards student government, the debate team, the French Club, or massive amounts of community volunteering. That’s not a function of nature — that’s a calculation about what will look good. When applying to a selective university, these girls imagine that being president of the student body will look more impressive than being an all-league mid-fielder on the soccer team.

Not everyone wants to play sports, of course. There are plenty of boys (I was one in high school) who have no interest in being athletic, and I know perfectly well that there are lots of girls who find the idea of playing on a team to be a dreary one. But I know full well that those boys who are interested in playing are more likely to be encouraged to do so, while their sisters are more likely to be pressured to choose other, seemingly more “prestigious” extra-curricular activities.

Applying proportionality to the high schools will force a necessary cultural shift. We’re going to need to do more than demand that dollars spent reflect the percentage of girls and boys in the entire school. We’re going to have to challenge the “culture of perfection” in which so many young women labor, a culture which often discourages girls from putting their hearts, bodies, and souls into sports. (Courtney Martin writes very well about that culture, I reviewed her book here).

And we’re going to need to get some boys up off the damn couch, away from the video games, and into not only sports, but those activities now so often dominated by girls: debate, band, student government.

Bring on proportionality.