Women Athletes: Figure over Physical Ability

Pictured above is Brittney Griner, now a professional basketball player for Phoenix Mercury, was one of the most if not the most successful women's college basketball athletes. Standing tall at 6'8"and having a 86 inch wingspan, this is no person who you want to defend down in the paint. She is strong, swift, and talented. She holds the title of being one of the total of six WNBA athletes to have a slam dunk during a professional game. These types of statistics shows her physical ability of dominance on the court over other players, and because she is so talented she is respected as an athlete. However, when a google image search for 'female athletes' is done, it does not show Brittney in any picture at all. All of the athletes that are shown are not being demonstrated for their athletic prowess, just simply for their body. Out of the first twenty pictures, only four display a women participating in her sport in an action shot. The others are mostly professionally taken where the athlete is wearing no more than a bikini. The pictures that are not professional are of track athletes and are what I would consider a paparazzi shot of them on the track because it is mostly of their backside or caught when the athlete may not have been looking. Scrolling down a bit farther, the first pictures with words on the picture state "The 10 Highest-Paid Female Athletes of 2013" and "The 100 Hottest Female Athletes Ever". To me that says that women in an athletic context are generally represented and recognized either for how much money or how attractive they are as opposed to talent, teamwork, and athletic dedication like how males are represented. Besides that, four of the six presented alternate search options after searching for female athletes are relating to the women's bodies such as 'abs' and 'wardrobe malfunctions' which to me shows a complete sexualization of the female body. The other two were for 'ads' and 'sports illustrated' which sports illustrated was cover pages of women athletes, only two of which were fully clothed. Then for 'ads' almost all of the ads, again, were of sexualized images. When searching 'famous female athletes' however, these are more predominantly showing women in their athletic setting preforming or showing a successful pose after defeating their opponent. This I feel shows that women in their sport mean not much more than their body unless they are successful and get paid a huge salary to do it. Even when doing a search for 'olympic female athletes' around half of the pictures are of women displaying their bodies in a sexualized fashion as opposed to showing them compete in a world encompassing sporting event. Doing a quick search for 'male athletes' I discovered it was almost the opposite representation to the 'female athletes' search. Five of the first twenty pictures are of men displaying their bodies in professional photographs and the rest are of the man participating in his sport. Another thing I found interesting was when the other searches options that come up at the top of the photos came up for the male search, they all were for individual male athletes while none of the six options for the female search represented individuals. 

What does this say about our society? In our Bodies, Babes, and the WNBA reading conveyed by Heywood and Dworkin, "It is the context of the image, not whether there is nudity, that is important, as the naked male and female images of…. And many others appearing in Life magazine in 1996 demonstrated- images that communicated power, self-possession, and beauty, not sexual access." I agree with this sentiment, and a few of the photos I found during the google search do represent these qualities but for the majority it is representative of sexuality. In an article published in 2011, a slide show is presented of the "6 Ways the Media Represents Female Athletes". The ideas presented start off with a statement by the author saying that the justification of hyper-sexualizing female athletes will bring more fans to the sport but in fact "as Mary Jo Kane reports in her article in this week's special Sports issue, far from piquing interest in female sports, hyper-sexualized media images actually serve to suppress interest in - and respect for - women's sports." I believe this to be true, just simply from the fact of things I have heard said from people I know on this campus. I told a couple guys what my topic of this blog was and they were not timid in telling me how stupid of an idea it was. I asked them why they thought it was dumb and they responded that nobody goes to women's sporting events, and that women athletes only mattered if they were hot anyways. I told them that women play sports because they like preforming on a team or individually, and pushing themselves to become more talented at their respective sport, not to display themselves. They agreed with me, but said that women's sports are not as exciting so they are not interested in watching their sports. This misogynistic approach to the concept of women's sports is telltale that women are not respected for their athletic ability. Their closed-minded and superficial approach to this topic is exactly why things are not changing and moving towards displaying athletes like the ad below: 

There is no reference anywhere in the ad mentioning the high quality of Nike products, or how the product will improve her athletic performance. It is literally all about her physique and empowering her body to be the reason she is independent and self empowered. Being an athlete should be about displaying ones passion for their sport not the body that being active creates. Going back to the six ways of media representation which are: Athletic Competence, Ambivalence, All-American Girl Next Door, Hyper-Heterosexual, Sexy Babe, and Soft Pornography. The representations start off with an on the field example and gradually shows a more sexualized approach in each example. These ideas have evolved over time as female sports and athletes have gradually become more present in the media. I believe this representation comes from society perceiving women as cute, small, and fragile, so they present them in the media as so. In Throwing Like a Girl Young says, "For feminine bodily existence, however, the body is often lived as a thing which is other than it". By this she is saying that her body is represented as object instead of subject. The female body in sports is not represented for its capabilities but for its perceived purpose of a sexual figure. It seems almost impossible to change that perception, but I believe it should so women in sports can be understood for being capable and strong when preforming and not simply what they look like off the field. 

Sources:

Heywood, Leslie. Dworkin, Shari.  "Built to Win: The Female Athlete as a Cultural Icon." Sport and Culture Series v.5. University of Minnesota Press.

Leftfoot, Lucas. "New Nike Women Ad– “My Butt Is Big”." NikeBlogcom. Nike, n.d. 

Simpson, Jake. "Why It Matters That Brittney Griner Is a Female Basketball Player Who Can Dunk." The Atlantic. Atlantic Media Company, 21 Mar. 2013. 

"Slide Show: 6 Ways the Media Represents Female Athletes | The Nation." Slide Show: 6 Ways the Media Represents Female Athletes | The Nation. The Nation, n.d. 

Young, Iris Marion. "Throwing like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body Comportment Motility and Spatiality." JSTOR. Springer, 14 Jan. 2013.