Since professional sports leagues – particularly the NFL, NHL, MLB and NBA -- have been conceived in the United States they have always been dominated by male athletes. Males after all, created them in order to allow for the competition of other male athletes. I stress the term athletes, because, for the most part, that is typically what we view these male players as. They are athletes first, and anything else secondarily. Certainly, many of them turn to provocative forms of advertising, like Mark Sanchez on the cover of GQ, or Dave Beckham’s cologne advertising, but they receive recognition by the media typically through their performances, not their provocative advertisements.
Women, on the other hand, seem to be more frequently brought to the attention of popular culture not by their personal successes but by sexualized representations of them in the media. Indeed, they are often brought to the attention of the media by their own by their competitive nature in their respective sports -- i.e. Maria Sharapova or Danica Patrick – but their continued depictions are often sexualized images of them. Certainly, they are recognized for their success, but we remember them rarely for their continued success, but instead for their overtly sexual images in publications and advertisements. Part of that is simply because they are so apparent and often so frequent.
Which begs the question, is there any room for women as simply athletes in competitive sports? Or does the media simply feel compelled (or even required) to paint them as sexual icons in order to appeal to appeal to a greater range of audiences?
In addressing that question, I’ll turn to the WNBA and the huge salary disparity between that league and the male equivalent, the NBA. The WNBA is often stereotypically portrayed as a league of tomboys. As such, it is neither as critically proclaimed nor nearly as talked about as the NBA. For comparison, the average salary for a WNBA player is around $50 thousand, compared to over $3 million for NBA players. The WNBA is rarely accepted to be as elegant as women in tennis, nor is it as widely accepted as female soccer. And further, rarely is it ever considered to be as lively as the NBA, simply due to the often-startling disparity in athleticism between the two leagues.
But rarely is the WNBA ever brought to the attention of the media through sexualized imagery, partly due to its ‘tomboyish’ preconceptions. Tennis (and to an extent soccer) doesn’t necessarily have these same preconceptions. Athletes such as Maria Sharapova and Anna Kournikova have ensured that tennis will remain a feminine sport.
And that may be part of the reason why the WNBA hasn’t seen nearly as much critical success as such sports as tennis. As Heywood and Dworkin indicate in their essay, the possible answer to the sexualized nature of female athletes in sports may lie not in naivety or their willingness to objectify themselves, but instead as a concerted effort to achieve equality with their male peers.
Athletes already know the criticisms and reject them… They know, and they do it all the same, both because they do not experience themselves as manipulated and powerless, and because like many others in the MTV generation who are fighting high debt-to-income ratios and diminished permanent job prospects, they see rightly visibility in the media as the only ‘real’ outlet for the achievement of selfhood this culture offers. (Dworkin, Heywood, 85).
Certainly, there seems to be some truth in that suggestion. Due to the male-dominated nature of most professional sports, female athletes are inherently at a disadvantage, both athletically and with regard to media coverage.
It then stands to reason that becoming a sort of sexualized public icon is one of the few ways in which females can really even the playing field. By openly flaunting their female figures, regardless of how exploitative it may appear, female athletes stand to close the substantial media – and, in turn, income gap – between them and male athletes.
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