"The National Collegiate Athletic Association's enthusiasm for fighting corruption in college sports is partly driven by the fear of federal intervention. That fear came a step closer to being realized last month, when the House Ways and Means Committee fired off a tough-minded letter demanding that the N.C.A.A. explain how profit-seeking, win-at-all-cost athletic departments operate on campus.

...[A] n N.C.A.A. report released last week touches on some of the same issues cited in the blistering letter from Congress. The problem is that athletic departments have more influence on university affairs than they should. They often use that influence to undermine the institutional mission.

Run by celebrity coaches who can earn more than $1 million a year - and supported by adoring fans, boosters and trustees - the campus sports machines easily overshadow the college faculties and presidents, some of whom seem frankly fearful of speaking up about abuses. The athletic departments derive much of their power from the widespread but mistaken belief that they pay their own way, and even earn money for their universities, through television revenues and other sources."

"Discerning the true intent of advocates of women's sports programs is particularly important because of the success of such advocates in dramatically expanding the size of these programs. In 1972, fewer than 300,000 high-school girls participated in competitive sports and fewer than 32,000 women competed in intercollegiate sports. In contrast, during the 2000-01 academic year, 2.78 million high-school girls participated in sports and over 150,000 women participated in college sports. Champions of women's athletics see only good in this dramatic upsurge, asserting that women's athletics fosters "physical and psychological health...and increased personal skills" and that the growth of women's athletics has translated into "significant health, emotional, and academic benefits for women and girls."6 Unfortunately, such crusaders for women's sports often hide the downside of the remarkable success of their cause. More specifically, they often hide the way women's sports fit within a larger cultural pattern that has been highly corrosive of marriage and family life - and likewise hide the high social costs of that weakening of marriage and family life. Americans who care about the health of our social life may even suspect that the lack of candor among advocates of women's sports reflects indifference, if not outright hostility, to wedlock and family life.

...In a hyper-sexualized culture, parents of daughters quite understandably pay attention when advocates of women's sports promise that participation will translate into a lessened risk of sexual activity and pregnancy.17 And solid data do back up that promise. Nonetheless, when sociologists at the State University of New York investigated the reasons that participation in sports reduces sexual activity, they reached conclusions that might give parents second thoughts. For what the researchers discovered was that participation in high-school sports significantly decreases sexual activity among young women precisely because it weakens their attachment to traditional gender roles. (In marked contrast, the researchers found that participation slightly increases sexual activity among young men by strengthening their attachment to traditional gender roles.) 'Sport resources...,' explain the researchers, 'allow girls to discard aspects of the traditional gender script that prioritize heterosexual appeal.' They further remark that the "exposure to a nontraditional, androgynous gender script" that sports give female athletes 'might lead one to predict same-sex sexual activity among female athletes.'"

For years elite opinion has maintained that women are happier in marriages that represent a union of equals and where spouses share identical responsibilities in the workplace and at home. Even as very few couples actually live this way, a study by two noted University of Virginia sociologists debunks the feminist spin, finding that women - even those who espouse egalitarian ideals - are far happier in marriages that have a traditional division of labor.

Looking at a subsample of 5,000 couples drawn from the second wave (1992-94) of the National Survey of Families and Households, Bradford Wilcox and Steven Nock measured women's marital happiness, women's satisfaction with the emotional attention they receive from their husbands, and the time husbands spend with their wives against a number of independent variables associated with various theories of marriage.

Their findings reveal that the more traditional the woman and the more traditional the marriage, the happier the woman. Women are happiest when they tend to hearth and home and their husbands bring home the bacon (earning at least 68 percent of family income). This did not surprise the researchers because they also found that men who were married to homemakers are more likely to spend "quality time" with their wives. These traditional wives also expressed greater satisfaction with their husbands' emotional interaction with them. In contrast, women who aspire to having "companionate" marriages, thinking "equality" will deliver what they really desire - the emotional engagement of their husbands - actually end up spending less time with husbands than their traditional peers. And these wives are less satisfied with the understanding they receive from their husbands.

Also contributing to women's marital happiness is a dynamic generally missing from egalitarian marriages: a shared commitment to marriage as a social and normative institution, where each spouse views matrimony as a binding commitment that "should never be ended except under extreme circumstances." Wives also reported higher satisfaction with their husbands' affection and understanding when couples share high levels of church attendance.

The consistency of these findings across their statistical models led the researchers to suggest that cultural shifts in the last generation, from declines in church attendance to acceptance of divorce and premarital sex, have taken a toll on women's happiness. Yet they point to rising expectations of women for marital equality as especially problematic: "Our findings suggest that increased departures from a male-bread winning/female-homemaking model may also account for declines in marital quality, insofar as men and women continue to tacitly value gendered patterns of behavior in marriage."