Good News!!!
Hey all,
I realize my last post was self-indulgent, but bare with me because this one will be too!!! Also, what blog/LJ isn't self-indulgent?!
Anyways, the Pioneer held a dinner to honor the best sports, news, and feature stories of the past year as well as the best column and photograph. And, surprise, I won for best column!!!!! I thought I might win for sports, since I'm sports editor, but I'm not complaining. For those interested, the column argued that the women's rugby calender in which they all pose nude was a troubling campus tradition that needed to be examined. For background, the team normally tries to advertise their calender as empowering, but I argue against that. I was trying to provoke questions about it with the piece.
Naked women grab our attention, no question. However, when those women are athletes, it’s the wrong type of attention.
The recently released Motherruckers calendar has become a campus tradition. The release party this year had 112 confirmed guests on facebook and fliers advertising the calendar pepper the campus. However, what is the cost of this attention?
Female athletes nationally struggle to be respected as athletes. While women make up 40 percent of sports participants, they receive only 8 percent of all media coverage. On top of that, when male announcers bother showing up to women’s games, they refer to the athletes by their first name more often then when those same announcers work a Men’s game, implying a familiar relationship that sounds like a father talking about his daughter.
The greatest threat to respectability, though, is when female sports figures are marketed as sex figures. Typically, female athletes are pictured posing, rather than playing their sport. They are not in movement or doing the thing they’re paid for, but still so that the perverse male gaze can engulf her.
In the May 19, 2008 issue of Sports Illustrated, there was an article on the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers followed immediately by an article on the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks. The lead photo for the Lakers article showed Kobe Bryant, sweaty and in the middle of the game, competing. Turn the page to the Sparks article and there’s Lisa Leslie and Candice Parker not playing, but standing and smiling back at the camera.
The situation gets even worse when magazines like Playboy and Maxim pay female athletes to pose nude for them. At the turn of the century, Anna Kournikova was the most highly paid woman in all of sports, yet she has still never won a singles tournament.
Similarly, the United States women won the world cup in 1999 for just the second time ever, but the focus of the sports world after the game was Britney Chastain’s celebration where she ripped off her shirt after booting the game winning kick.
Is this the way the Motherruckers want to raise money? Is this the only way they can get the attention of the Whitman campus?
Female athletes that have posed nude for magazines have tried to justify it by saying that the whole process made them feel empowered, but why do these women have to be naked in order to feel good about their body? Do we really want women feeling like they’re bodies are only valuable in sexual circumstances?
I don’t think any member of the Motherruckers would say yes, but that is the precedent that they follow when the pose nude for their yearly calendar. For a club team that wears the bruises they get during games as war wounds, this is a puzzling tradition.
The members of the Motherruckers are free to do what they wish, but maybe they could answer me this question: how many men look through the whole calendar versus how man many men have watched a whole Motherruckers game this year?
I realize my last post was self-indulgent, but bare with me because this one will be too!!! Also, what blog/LJ isn't self-indulgent?!
Anyways, the Pioneer held a dinner to honor the best sports, news, and feature stories of the past year as well as the best column and photograph. And, surprise, I won for best column!!!!! I thought I might win for sports, since I'm sports editor, but I'm not complaining. For those interested, the column argued that the women's rugby calender in which they all pose nude was a troubling campus tradition that needed to be examined. For background, the team normally tries to advertise their calender as empowering, but I argue against that. I was trying to provoke questions about it with the piece.
Naked women grab our attention, no question. However, when those women are athletes, it’s the wrong type of attention.
The recently released Motherruckers calendar has become a campus tradition. The release party this year had 112 confirmed guests on facebook and fliers advertising the calendar pepper the campus. However, what is the cost of this attention?
Female athletes nationally struggle to be respected as athletes. While women make up 40 percent of sports participants, they receive only 8 percent of all media coverage. On top of that, when male announcers bother showing up to women’s games, they refer to the athletes by their first name more often then when those same announcers work a Men’s game, implying a familiar relationship that sounds like a father talking about his daughter.
The greatest threat to respectability, though, is when female sports figures are marketed as sex figures. Typically, female athletes are pictured posing, rather than playing their sport. They are not in movement or doing the thing they’re paid for, but still so that the perverse male gaze can engulf her.
In the May 19, 2008 issue of Sports Illustrated, there was an article on the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers followed immediately by an article on the WNBA’s Los Angeles Sparks. The lead photo for the Lakers article showed Kobe Bryant, sweaty and in the middle of the game, competing. Turn the page to the Sparks article and there’s Lisa Leslie and Candice Parker not playing, but standing and smiling back at the camera.
The situation gets even worse when magazines like Playboy and Maxim pay female athletes to pose nude for them. At the turn of the century, Anna Kournikova was the most highly paid woman in all of sports, yet she has still never won a singles tournament.
Similarly, the United States women won the world cup in 1999 for just the second time ever, but the focus of the sports world after the game was Britney Chastain’s celebration where she ripped off her shirt after booting the game winning kick.
Is this the way the Motherruckers want to raise money? Is this the only way they can get the attention of the Whitman campus?
Female athletes that have posed nude for magazines have tried to justify it by saying that the whole process made them feel empowered, but why do these women have to be naked in order to feel good about their body? Do we really want women feeling like they’re bodies are only valuable in sexual circumstances?
I don’t think any member of the Motherruckers would say yes, but that is the precedent that they follow when the pose nude for their yearly calendar. For a club team that wears the bruises they get during games as war wounds, this is a puzzling tradition.
The members of the Motherruckers are free to do what they wish, but maybe they could answer me this question: how many men look through the whole calendar versus how man many men have watched a whole Motherruckers game this year?