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I love this picture to the right. I believe that every young lady should learn cooking, piano and etiquette. Sadly, girls today are learn how to have sex in public grade school, learning the nightclub lifestyle from Walt Disney and being taught by the toxic music industry that life's all about dating, selfish pride and rebellion.

I have read many great articles by Christian men and women regarding the participation of women in the workforce, politics, and in the military. These are activities that most women didn’t participate in until fifty years ago. However, I feel there is one other major activity these writers have not addressed. For some reason, they've overlooked women’s participation in sports.

For quite a long time, women resisted the feminist call to play sports, since they just weren’t interested like men were. But this didn't sit well with the feminists; they felt this was the fault of male oppression. In the name of “equality,” feminist leaders poked and prodded and pushed women to join the games, until women in droves finally succumbed to the pressure. I think this should give us strong reason to pause and consider the question, “Should women participate in sports?”

Over the years I’ve noticed that Christian parents, as much as any parents, encourage their daughters to participate in sports. This is all the rage in our public schools, especially since the passage of Title IX by the feminists. Since most Christian parents send their children to the public schools, it doesn’t surprise many of us that Christians are influenced more by the secular school culture than by the culture of the Church. Worse, the Church itself is being more heavily influenced by the culture instead of the other way around. One of the trends in schools is the participation in sports by women; therefore it shouldn’t surprise us that so many Christian daughters today participate in sports. But is this really all that bad?

For those of us who believe we should train our daughters according to Titus 2, 1 Peter 3, and other Biblical passages, my answer is “Yes, it is not good.” I propose that sports greatly hinders the development of godly, Biblical, feminine character. Parents today expend extraordinary amounts of time and energy taking their daughters from one sports event to another, week after week, even to the point where it exhausts the family and family resources. The fruits we see are that today’s Christian women are often ill-prepared to be Biblically obedient wives and mothers. This brings to mind a couple of questions: “Why do we spend so much time preparing our daughters to play sports?" and "What does it prepare them for in the future?” My answer is that sports prepare women to be more like men. Instead of spending all that time preparing our daughters as the Bible directs, we are training them to be like men so they can better compete with men in traditionally masculine roles - i.e., compete with them in the workforce, in politics, in the military, and in sports.

Actually, I don’t have a problem with women playing recreational sports on an occasional basis, just with them playing competitive sports on a regular day-to-day basis. This rigorous physical and mental training tends to make women more masculine. I think it is prudent to often ask ourselves “Can a woman do this activity and retain a Biblically feminine character?” With sports I think it will be difficult in most cases. Even some of the traditionally more feminine sports like gymnastics and ice skating are now influencing women to be more masculine.

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Most men I know admire a woman who is reasonably healthy and fit; they are also attracted to a woman who is somewhat “soft” and cuddly. This does not mean she should be delicate like tissue paper; no, a woman should be reasonably strong, and the normal duties of life will make her that way. This is what we learn from the Proverbs 31 woman. However, if you look at pictures of female athletes who play sports or observe them on the playing fields, you will notice that many develop strong, muscular bodies. Female athletes also sneer, wince, push, and fight just like the men. I notice these things all the time in pictures in our hometown newspaper. The sneers are most obvious; they make young women very unfeminine. The masculine uniforms and sweaty bodies aren’t very attractive, either.

I also notice when driving by our public school grounds and sports fields another phenomenon taking place: the young girls are trained in sports right along with the boys. To me, this can only be degrading to the boys. In some cases, girls regularly participate on boys' sports teams, and therefore compete against the boys themselves. During the past decade, more and more girls participated in wrestling; since there were no girls' wrestling teams, they joined the boys' teams and competed against the boys. I read about one school where the boys refused to wrestle the girls and forfeited their matches; there could be no greater embarrassment to them than to lose to a girl, not to mention it likely violated their sense of masculine chivalry. So not only is female sports participation degrading the feminine nature of women, in many cases it degrades the developing masculinity in boys.

At the recent summer Olympics in Greece, women’s wrestling was a new sport. There were several female wrestlers on the U.S. Olympic team; most of them received their training by wrestling with men in college, since there were no women’s teams. If you saw their pictures, they looked just like men smashing each other into the mats. Women’s handball was another sport that I’d never seen before, and the pictures I saw of the women fighting each other were sometimes grotesque. Similarly aggressive sports are women’s hockey, boxing, football, rugby, and others where oftentimes the women pretty much look and act like men. But even the less aggressive but more common sports like soccer, basketball, and softball tend to make women masculine and manly.

Some Christians might say that women should not compete in professional sports, but any other level is okay. However, professional athletes get their start somewhere. They begin in local school and community sports leagues like everyone else, and sometimes move on to college and adult leagues. Eventually, they may end up as semi-professionals or amateurs competing around the world in a variety of sports; but nonetheless, the masculinization process begins when they are young girls. The longer they play, the more likely it is that their femininity will be degraded.