Sports Coverage Needs Level Playing Field

Any discussion of sexual bias held by members of the opposite sex is much like one definition of a theologian by a philosopher: “a blind man searching a dark room for a black cat that isn’t there” (“Listen, Sport, Sexism Is a Foul,” Oct. 7).

I’m willing to accept that there are people who might not be considered gentlemen in the locker rooms of professional sports. I’m willing to consider the argument that women sportswriters need access to the animal cages in order to be journalistically competitive.

But I’m not willing to listen to Betty Cuniberti’s dogmatic contention that women are not interested in looking at naked male bodies or that when girls, even ladies, get together in the locker room after a good game of whatever, they don’t occasionally talk dirty.

Cuniberti tells us what a sacrifice it is for her to go into a stinky locker room, numbing her nostrils in the cause of a scoop, and yet in the next hastily drawn breath says that men shouldn’t mind standing around smelling like a Calcutta sewer, their bruised and battered joints begging for the balm of hot water, while she asks them why they fumbled on the two or dropped the pass in the end zone.

You can still be right, Betty. Throw ‘em all out (of the locker rooms), men and women. Because the only alternative, the truly equal resolution, would be letting the men in the women’s locker rooms.

And of course . . . that is unthinkable. I mean, if we were to learn that women actually sweat and smell, curse and weep with despair over a loss, shout and cheer and exult in victory, and just want soap and a shower before being asked a lot of irritating, sometimes insulting, often unnecessary questions, we might find out how truly equal we really are. From Cuniberti’s stated opinions, I don’t think she wants to believe that.

C.C. HOWERTON

North Hollywood