I know, I know ... I've been a real slacker. But today I actually have time for a drive-by.
My subject of choice, however, is not politics - well, not in the strictest sense, anyway. It's sports. Or, to be more exact, the infuriating preponderance of sports-related websites and magazines that wallow in sexism.
I'm a woman. I'm also a sports fan. Baseball is my passion, but I also enjoy football and basketball. I'm crazy about the Winter Olympics, too. I'll even watch golf on TV. (OK, soccer I'll never get. As my husband says, soccer was no doubt invented by someone whose kid couldn't catch a ball.) And my reaction to today's cancellation of the NHL season was, "Didn't they cancel it months ago?" But for the most part, I love sports.
What I do NOT love is sports websites and magazines that feature swimsuit issues - can anyone explain to me what half-naked models rolling around in the surf have to do with sports? - or slobber all over pulchritudinous female athletes (most notably the young, blonde, utterly-incapable-of-winning-a-tournament Anna Kournikova). I quit on Sports Illustrated's website years ago, out of protest over their swimsuit issues. ESPN.com became my sports site of choice ... until I saw this.
The most maddening part of all is that there really are no other viable alternatives. What kind of business model do you suppose these sites have that encourages overt sexism? Are they trying to alienate female consumers?
My queendom for a sports site that doesn't assume all male fans are horndogs - and that's savvy enough to realize that there are an awful a lot of female fans out here, wallets in hand, waiting for the ESPNs of the world to stop treating us like objects.
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2 comments:
We've had a lot of kerfuffle with Australian athletes getting into the same sort of stuff - basketballers wearing tight outfits to make themselves more marketable, women athletes posing nude, etc. The only way women athletes are lauded is if somehow they could exchange their running shoes for a bikini and be drooled over.
On the subject of women and sport, there was a discussion here last week about netballers and pay equity with footballers. In Australia, netball is the highest participation sport in the country, with AFL barely a national sport, but footballers earn professional salaries and garner an immense tv coverage. Australian netballers are among the best in the world, but get little coverage other than on our national broadcaster, and that is limited. You should have heard the commentators, though, criticising the netballers' desire to have pay equity!!
The implicit judgement was that netballers aren't exciting, aren't interesting and aren't marketable. Well, that's just because the broadcasters aren't interested in promoting women's sport!!
/end rant
pax
Jane
In fairness, it doesn't occur to them that we might find this alienating. They expect us to suck it up, the same way we suck up the objectification / commodification / humiliation / alienation / exclusion / marginalization of women in, at this point, virtually every other sphere of existence.
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