Those of us interested in the general welfare of gender equity in sports will be happy to know that the role of women and men in sports has been equalized.

I’m sure many of you may have been in doubt of this, as male football programs in American colleges raise more money than a Jerry Lewis Telethon and reap the benefits. With the exception of this year, the women’s basketball players are traditionally introduced before tipoff to the mad cheers of a “throng” of about seven fans. People have made the claims that women are physically inferior to men, despite the fact that it some contests women are clearly dominant.

For example, for the most part a Men vs. Women football game would be slanted towards men because more men are likely to have experience playing football. But if the competition was, for example, to see who could shave bare a square yard of their own skin fastest, men would not win. In fact, they would know to not even compete.

Men know that if they even attempted such a feat, by the end of the competition they would be virtually mummified by an entire family pack of Charmin. So you see, most athletics are gender biased.

But I am happy to report from Camp Hantesa (Motto: “Pumping your shower water directly from the center of the earth.”) in Boone, the sight of last weekend’s Salt Company Retreat, that gender equity in sports has been attained through a game known as “Pull Apart.”

Pull Apart is a game whose elegance is in its sheer numbers. To prepare for the game, approximately 100 men will huddle together in the Official Pull Apart Playing Arena known as the Camp Hantesa (inexplicably pronounced HAN-eh-shaw) Mess Hall, and intertwine themselves.

Now when I say “intertwine themselves,” I do not mean the kind of casual intertwining you would do when mingling with the Royal Family over tea.

I mean the kind of intertwining where you twist and contort your bodies so as to concurrently grab hold of each and every one of the other 99 men in the arena and hold on like you are clinging to the bow of the Titanic.

This event of intertwining promotes the kind of close contact that, outside the context of the sporting arena, would usually be appropriate only for your mate or Richard Simmons. (For another example of this in sports, see a pairs luge competition.)

Once the men are bound together as tightly as humanly possible, they begin chanting and grunting to one another and drinking up the sheer testosterone of the moment — somewhat like they might when watching “Rocky.”

Meanwhile, the women drool and pace around the huddle — this is like the scene from “The Lion King” when Simba is cornered by a wild band of hyenas — and prepare to attack the men with the organization and resolve of a school of frenzied piranhas.

When the game begins, the clock counts down from 10 minutes and the women go to work.

For victory, the women must band together and separate (by means of brute force) every man from each other so that each of the men of the huddle is pulled, one by one, to the side away from the rest of the pack.

Once a man is pulled away, he may not return to the others (in this way the process is a metaphor to dating). The women may use any means necessary, which includes biting, tugging, pulling, stretching, (again, a metaphor for dating) and worst of all — the most deadly of all weapons — tickling.

The men, however, have the goal to cling to one another throughout the course of the competition so that when the clock expires, at least two men somewhere in the mess are still holding on to each other.

This is, of course, futile (the third and most poignant metaphor for dating), and by the end of the game the surge of testosterone and chants (“Men! Men! Men!”) are entirely replaced by a cheering throng of pony tails and lip gloss.

If the game of Pull Apart teaches us anything, it is that underneath the soft exterior of perfume and facial masks, women are, at best, vicious.

Men, take a look at your woman this evening over dinner and notice her refined manners and honed social grace, but do not be fooled. If you gave that same refined woman the chance to compete in Pull Apart, she would gladly insert her manicured nails into your eye sockets and pull you out of the pile by your underwear alone. You married men should remember that the next time you plan on “forgetting” your wedding anniversary.

So that’s the report on gender equity in sports today. Without a doubt, the playing field is equalized on the floor of the Camp Hantesa Mess Hall. Any man who says differently has never experienced the kind of “equity” that has your skin being pulled in seventeen directions at once.

And to think that these are the same people who want us to buy them stuffed animals and flowers. I’m not fooled.

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Aaron Senneff is a senior in computer engineering from Bettendorf.