I was suprised to see this story in Sports Illustrated, home of the “swimsuit edition”:
Sex sells? Not so fast: Women’s sports need substance, not pretty pictures. Here is an excerpt:
Sex doesn’t sell.
Jan Stevenson got naked in a bathtub of golf balls back in the 1980s, Brandi Chastain took off her clothes for Gear magazine before the 1999 World Cup, and swimmer Amanda Beard is going to be in Playboy next month. But according to a ground-breaking pilot study, none of that did — or will do — a single thing for women’s sports. Sexy pictures don’t make people more likely to read about women’s sports, they don’t make anyone more likely to attend a women’s sporting event, and they sure don’t drive any season-ticket sales.Seriously — sex doesn’t sell women’s sports?
“Well, no one would ever argue with the notion that sex sells,” said professor Mary Jo Kane, the director of the Tucker Center for Research of Girls and Women in Sport, at the University of Minnesota, and the brain behind this stereotype-shaking study. “The question is — what does it sell? It may in fact be that males will pick up Playboy when there’s a picture of a naked female athlete, but is what they are consuming a woman athlete or some woman’s body as an object of sexual desire?”
So far, the answer has been the latter. Yes, conventional wisdom has always said sex appeal — in all parts of our culture — is the greatest lure. The way to get a man to look at a female is if she’s hot. You’ll know Beard is an Olympian because she’s in Playboy. Some attention is better than no attention, especially for a gender that gets between 6 and 8 percent of space in sports sections.
Since the dawn of newsprint, women athletes have been portrayed in ways that emphasize “femininity and sexualization over athletic competence,” Kane said. During the 2000 Olympics, Marion Jones won five medals; Amy Acuff won none, yet she was photographed by American papers about 20 times more than Jones and Acuff graced the Playboy cover in Sept. 2004.
Everyone knows that the main disseminators of sports news are men. At Penn State’s Center for Sports Journalism, Marie Hardin surveyed 200 sports departments and found that, on average, their breakdown was 89 percent male, 11 percent female. That includes clerks and administrative assistants. Maybe male editors prefer the ideological representations of women because it doesn’t threaten their masculinity. Maybe they prefer pretty pictures.
Still, research says that sort of coverage trivializes women and their sports. Now, Kane’s research says playing into those portrayals is actually undermining women’s sports. They’re hurting because their core fan base is not into a bikini-clad Natalie Gulbis.
“They’re actually offended by images of sex,” Kane said. Females across the board are drawn to images of athletic competence. So are men, in the 35 to 55 age range, who think of their daughters. “They don’t see,” Kane said, “how a passive, sexualized pose is celebrating an athletic body. How do bare breasts increase respect for and interest in women sports?” [Emphasis in final two paragraphs added.] …
I learned about the article via After Atalanta, where Ken writes:
Dr. Mary Jo Kane’s research (with Heather Maxwell) on sexualized media images of female athletes was released a few weeks ago and there has been come publicity about the ongoing project to assess the situation. I have seen a story here and there about it, but you know it’s making waves when a Sports Illustrated columnist picks up the story.
The gist of the research: sexy pictures of athletes may draw some eyes and numerous internet hits but they do not increase the popularity of women’s sports.In fact they may be harming women’ sports because such pictures are actually a turn off to real fans. So the rationale offered by many female athletes who do pose in nothing or next to nothing in various men’s magazines that they are bringing attention to their respective sports is now going to ring a little falser (even before the study some of us had doubts). …
More information about Kane’s study is available here. If I can find a link to the study itself I’ll update.
–Ann Bartow
