John Irving titled his essay "Wrestling with Title IX". This title incorporates a cute pun to grab the reader's attention while acknowledging the difficulty of the issue.
Irving's thesis is that while Title IX began as a great piece of legislation that discouraged discrimination against women's sports, subsequent interpretations in 1979 and 1996 have turned title IX into a quota law and is discriminatory in practice towards men's sports teams.
Irving's purpose in writing the essay is to bring to light the harmful results of the implementation of title IX, and persuade the reader that title IX needs to be reformed.
He begins the essay with a short history of title IX and states that it is now functioning as a "quota law" (Irving 194). Irving offers a short explanation on how the implementation of the law has hurt men's sports, and then offers an overwhelming amount of facts, examples, anecdotes and statistics. His final section of the essay is an attempt to address the accusation that he is "anti-feminist". Irving attempts to refute this accusation with a list of feminist causes that he supports. Unfortunately the paragraph comes across a little shallow, but it does serve to diffuse some of the anti-women claims. Irving ends with an appeal to "play fair" (Irving 197). This is a simple tactic used to calm down the reader's emotions, who can argue against a desire to "play fair". Irving's solution to the problem is to simply reword/reinterpret the legislation to eliminate proportionality.
My impressions of the article were generally favorable. I agree that title IX needs to be fixed and is hurting men's and women's sports, however many of his arguments focus on the extreme examples and the solution he offers is rather simplistic for such a nuanced problem.
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