Female athletes remain distastefully on display despite efforts by marketing campaigns to redefine the female image.
Media has a powerful hand in the way we perceive the world and how we visualize things subconsciously. Perceiving female athletes is no exception when their images are manipulated in the media, and some recent marketing campaigns are trying to prove that those perceptions can be changed.
Nike's new women's sports print and digital ad campaign glorifies large, strong, muscular women. The campaign starts off as a promising venture, an idea to reinforce sport's positive effects on appearance and to reshape the ideal female image from a waif-like figure to a strong, toned build. Then, the message becomes ambivalent. Words are printed around an oversized, muscular woman's backside sporting a pair of figure-hugging Lycra boyshorts. The words read: “My butt is big, but that's fine, those who scorn it are invited to kiss it.” The strongest impact of the ad is the visual photograph, the zoomed in portion of a woman's backside, which presents an angle that automatically becomes sexualized.
In breaking the stereotype of how women should be portrayed in the media, this ambivalence poses a tough question of what is the balance of strength and femininity a woman must maintain in order to be socially accepted as a woman while not over-sexualizing or exploiting her body.
Back in 1963, Betty Friedan wrote in her groundbreaking work,
The Feminine Mystique, “that the highest value and the only commitment for women is the fulfillment of their own femininity…But however special and different, [this femininity] is in no way inferior to the nature of man.” Although equality has changed drastically since this book's first publication, defining and fulfilling femininity has proven to be an obstacle in portraying women in the best light. But the question of what femininity means is changing.
The
Oxford English Dictionary defines femininity as having qualities traditionally associated with being female, especially delicacy and prettiness.
Mary Jo Kane, director of Tucker Center for Research on Girls and Women in Sport said, “We need to change what we mean by femininity. Femininity should be defined to embrace physicality around strength.” We do not have to be delicate, passive creatures to be considered feminine. Focusing on physicality and strength, she said, will empower women, especially those involved in sport. She continued, “Media should represent the reality of sports, combining beauty, strength and power; showing a female athlete when she fails and when she is victorious; and accurately depicting what and who women are in sports.”
In addition to the marketing aspects of image, female athletes appear to be more comfortable combining sex appeal with athleticism at the peak of their careers. In recent years, several athletes have appeared in magazines such as
FHM,
Maxim and
Playboy with an acceptance that doesn't prove to be threatening to their careers. German Olympic gold medalist Katarina Witt caused an uproar when she posed nude in
Playboy in 1998, a decade after she won her Olympic medals. In promoting her new book,
Only with Passion, Katarina Witt has said that young women and female athletes today “feel they must choose between having a family and having a career. Between being a competitive athlete and being feminine and beautiful. Between being taken care of by a man and being strong and self-reliant.” With these things, to be a confident and independent person while also fulfilling the traditional roles of womanhood, women feel they must choose one or the other. Attributes that appear to be opposites, such as femininity and athleticism, need to be options that are intertwined.
In response to the athletes who choose to expose their bodies on magazine covers and centerfolds, Kane said that it's their decision to do so, but for those who choose to show off their bodies for the sake of gaining respect for women in sports, this action trivializes and marginalizes women in sports.
One of the major questions in this central discourse becomes why do athletes pose in these magazines and why is Nike promoting this type of campaign? If consumers are buying products because it is marketed in this way, they are feeding off of sexualized images of female bodies. In the marketing strategy, consumers receive a false assumption that suggests certain products can make the consumer equivalent to the model shown in the ad. The ad exposes a sexuality that lures consumers into buying the products because it's a physicality to aspire to. Similarly, athletes pose to lure viewers, specifically male viewers, into what they are doing – to bring attention to their sport. But the notion doesn't reflect their sport or their athletic accomplishments. Instead, it eroticizes their bodies and undermines their efforts to publicize female athletic strength and prominence in their sport.
In its position on the issue, the Women's Sports Foundation said that “portraying females in ways that emphasize their skills as athletes, not as ‘bathing beauties' is what sells tickets. Advertisers or promoters who use sexist imagery to sell women's sports are actually selling women athletes as sex objects rather than athletes.”
Kane said, “I've found no statistical correlation to readers of
Playboy increasing ticket sales for the WNBA.”
In “August 2004 Olympian Too Sexy for their Own Good?,” Thomas Huang writes that Olympian high jumper Amy Acuff posed in
FHM to help showcase women as athletes. Acuff said, “I see the body as a miraculous machine, and I don't see sexuality when I see a woman's body. I see strength, athleticism and beauty. … I don't see it as shameful. We're promoting pride in our bodies.” In the article, Michael Dolan,
FHM magazine's deputy editor, agreed, saying “So much of what you see is their athletic ability. Hopefully, if the piece succeeds, it shows them a bit more in three dimensions.”
Kane is optimistic and said that the way society views women in sports is changing for the better. Even so, she said, “there is also a backlash.” Appropriately, “athletes presented off-court are portrayed as classy ladies, yet there are instances where female athletes' images in the media have an alarming parallel to soft pornography.”
Over-sexualized images of female athletes in advertising coupled with athletes who sexualize their bodies in magazines are trying to reclaim a type of femininity not associated with being athletic. The Women's Sports Foundation said that “the so-called ‘image problem' is really a code term for ‘homophobia' – fear of homosexuality. The function of the media is not to sell ‘heterosexism' or ‘sexist images' for that matter. All heterosexuals are not attractive, and all lesbians are not mannish. The function of the media is to cover sports and athletes rather than assume their sexual preference.” As a society, we need to open our minds to see that a woman can be powerful and athletic and still be considered beautiful and feminine without those exploitations or social constraints.
In publicizing women in sports, we need to think what the image is saying – does the notoriety the image evokes relate to the reason the athlete is being featured – for her athletic distinction. And will consumers question the ads that sell their favorite Lycra shorts? Any publicity is not always good publicity, and if the media reflects and perpetuates the reality of women's diverse sports characteristics – from grace and beauty to physical strength, endurance and power – publicity in the name of sport can be achieved.
Editor's Note:The opinions expressed in this article are those of the author, and are not presented as an official position of the Women's Sports FoundationRead MoreMedia - Images and Words In Women's Sports: The Foundation Position
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