- - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Is the Economist more compelling than its American peers? Mull it over in the Media section of Table Talk. - - - - - - - - - - R E C E N T L Y The Washington Post in decline By Harry Jaffe Newsroom bureaucrats suck life out of Washington Post (11/24/97) Hollywoodland By Catherine Seipp Hollywoodland for sale: O.J. house on the market (11/21/97) Big bucks for old books By Dwight Garner With this year's National Book Award, Charles Frazier wins -- and so do book collectors (11/20/97) Under the covers By James Poniewozik Holiday food mags push turkey porn (11/19/97) Sex with the perfect stranger By James Surowiecki A sex magazine for perfect strangers -- men and women (11/18/97) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE MEDIA CIRCUS ARCHIVES

going for gold! - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - Women's sports magazines duel over a hot and growing target demographic. BY INDA SCHAENEN | Finally we have the reason women can't break the glass ceiling and have it all: They're too busy reading Sports Illustrated! According to SI's director of publicity, Robin Shallow, the magazine's 3 million subscribers include 450,000 women, an increase of 15 percent over the last five years. Those who aren't reading SI are likely to be shooting hoops down the street or swimming loops around Manhattan. Forty-one million females -- including 12 million women and 30 million school-age and college girls -- regularly play sports, says Lucy S. Danziger, editor in chief of Condé Nast's recently launched Sports for Women. If these numbers shock you, you probably don't know who Mia Hamm is, and your fast-twitch muscle fibers are probably in lousy shape, assuming you even know where (or what) they are. Also, you probably didn't know that NBC's coverage of the 1996 Olympic Games in Atlanta was meant to draw in female viewers ("Honey, not tonight; Marie-Jose Perec is going for gold in the 200 meters"). Certainly, though, the numbers are very real to those running the show at Sports Illustrated's WomenSport, Condé Nast's Sports for Women and the other new mags aimed at the growing, affluent, highly advertising-attractive market of female sports fans. Since 1972, when the passage of Title IX prohibited federally funded institutions from discriminating on the basis of sex, girls' sports (particularly soccer and basketball) have attracted increasing numbers of participants. When you add these athletes to the armchair groupies who have evidently been following men's basketball, football, baseball and hockey in the pages of Sports Illustrated, you too might be tempted to launch a women's sports magazine. To judge from the fast-paced, devil-take-the-hindmost tone of boundless possibility, eternal energy and celebratory playfulness that prevails in these mags, women are doing all kinds of things that seem completely crazy and probably are. But are kickboxing, paragliding and snowboarding any crazier than secretly slicing yourself with a razor blade or throwing up after a big dinner? Women, it seems, have always done nutty things: Intense physical play is simply a healthier kind of craziness than the self-destructive habits inflicted upon women by a mysogynist culture and economy. Or is it? Some readers of these magazines might conclude that the sportiest of women are simply burying the life-denying impulses even deeper. Kristen Ulmer, featured in Sports for Women's November issue, was nearly swept off the Grand Tetons in a 100-mile-an-hour avalanche during a ski run. Billed in the profile as an "adrenaline junkie," Ulmer also likes to soar in the sky harnessed to a parachute, crawl up cliffs and chat with obscene callers. She takes on challenges, never gives up and fears only tedium. She's happy, fulfilled and financially independent. All seems rosy -- until the very end of the profile, where Kristen muses on the idea of life after sport: "At some point my body isn't going to work as well," she says, "and I'm going to have to find something ... I'm really afraid of waking up one morning with a spongy butt. No way I can retire. I'd be lost, confused. I wouldn't know who I was." Could it really be that part of what motivates Ulmer to scale craggy peaks and routinely endanger her life is the vision of herself with a spongy butt? Abhorrence of the mature female form is bad enough; worse is Ulmer's confession that without sports she would be lost to herself, overboard and flailing in the doldrums of adulthood, her identity shrunk to a pip. N E X T+P A G E+| Long-distance purple prose