Recently, Gretchen Reynolds of the New York Times reported some exciting news for the ladies: new scientific evidence is debunking the myth that a woman’s menstrual cycle negatively affects her athletic performance.

Female athletes, especially those involved in collegiate and professional-level sports, have long struggled to be taken seriously and treated as equals to their male counterparts. Many positive advances have been made, but with several universities still finding ways around Title IX – the law that banned sex discrimination in all federally funded education programs – it’s clear that the fight isn’t over.

The “mystery” of menstruation has been an integral part of the argument against women in sports. Many coaches, and even athletes, still believe that women are unable to perform to the best of their abilities at certain points in their cycle due to hormone fluctuations. However, there is disagreement about exactly what time of the month a woman will experience her athletic low, and past scientific studies on the issue have been contradictory and inconclusive. Female athletes are also often told to either begin using birth control pills or stop using them in order to alter their hormone levels.

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In 2008′s least shocking expose, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution dredged the sweat-stained pit of college academics and came up with, essentially, a national “dumb jock” joke.

Hating on athletes is pretty standard practice for the squishy intellectual set, probably because we’ve got a few bones to pick about getting stuffed in lockers and picked last for dodgeball. (As an aside, has anyone actually been stuffed into a locker in the past thirty years? The jocks these days just steal our iPods.)

But, whether we hear it from major newspapers or the bottom of locker no. 104, the news is the same: at the corner of college athletics and college admissions, something is gravely ill. Read More »