Frank Deford’s column “Is a focus on sports hindering our academic growth?”

The beauty of having broadband in China is that I can listen to NPR, much like I do back home in North Carolina. I love to hear Frank Deford’s rants on sports phenomena on Wednesday mornings, and true to form, he hits home with his latest column entitled “Boys will be boys: Is a focus on sports hindering our academic growth?” (Link to Deford’s column) Deford writes: “I certainly think that at least some of this scholastic imbalance (the gender imbalance among college students, where there is currently a ratio of 58 women to 42 men nationwide) may be accounted for by the fact that from an early age, boys are directed toward sports and rewarded more for their athletic prowess than for their classroom work. For boys, Readin’, ‘Ritin’ and ‘Rithmetic have been replaced by a new set of three R’s: Runnin’, Reboudin’ and let’s go to da Replay.”
I explored this exact issue in a AAA paper a couple of years ago, where I looked at the growing popularity of sports among Chinese men (and American men, European men, etc. — a global phenomenon) from the perspective of Sherry Ortner’s classic conclusion “Is Male to Female as Nature is to Culture,” where she concludes that the cultural understanding of women as more tightly associated with the body and physicality place them in a lower social position with respect to men. In the paper, I tried to argue that this has flip-flopped, as a global sense of masculinity has spread a conception of man that increasingly is defined by the body and the physical. This is most clearly seen in the rise of sports as a central element in popular culture, throughout the globe, but this also extends to other social aspects that increasingly has focused on the body. The exercise craze that is startingly novel in China is only a visible part of this global trend, and Frank Deford’s commentary brings it again to the forefront. In his commentary, he implies that the emphasis on the physical structures both men and women’s attitudes towards the intellectual, and cites how the increasingly visible ‘bad behavior’ of women athletes show how it is this emphasis on sports that may be at the heart of the problem of anti-intellectualism in the US (well, my interpretation of Deford – but his comments on air, not present in the written form, add that the “best-run sports franchises in the world, of course will be owned by Indians and Chinese … and women”; I think it was good that he left this off in the written form of the article, since this lumping together of Asians and women has tones of Orientalism).
In the AAA paper, I tried to show how the reason for this flip-flop of the nature/culture:masculinity/femininity in contemporary culture stems back to how global capitalism has transformed basic cultural identities such as gender ideologies. Yes, women have been increasingly devalued through the objectification manifest in global capitalism, but increasingly so have men been objectified; global capitalism seems to be emphasizing a “hyper-masculinity,” one that is universalized and naturalized through its accompanying ideological framework of science. OK, a little ambitious for a AAA paper, but hopefully I will have the time during my sabbatical to flesh out the argument so that it is coherent, logical, and hopefully convincing!