More Than Just a Group of Fans

For the past four years, I’ve watched the Super Bowl in a room full of girls. I know what you’re thinking. Wait, girls watch football? Are you sure they’re not just watching for the commercials?

Contrary to popular belief, plenty of women love sports. We watch baseball, basketball, soccer, the Olympics—for every game, I can think of a female fanatic, maybe two or ten or one hundred, whom I have encountered in my life. I know girls who play fantasy baseball—and win.

For most of my life, I never considered this extraordinary. I grew up in an athletic family, and what I lacked in coordination I made up for in enthusiasm. While other families went to Chicago to see the zoo or the Field Museum, my parents took us to see the Bears and Big Ten basketball. If we travel during the summer, the first thing my dad asks me is, “Katie, do you want to see a baseball game while we’re there?” I can count the number of big-name singers I saw live on one hand, but to name off the star athletes I saw at work? Impossible.

There are a million girls just like me, but we’re a well-kept secret. ESPN, American sports’ top advertisers—mainly beer and car companies—and the rest of the sports world, whether consciously or unconsciously, often objectify, stereotype, and ostracize women from a realm traditionally for men’s eyes only. It’s like sports media is a tree house with a big “NO GIRLS ALLOWED” sign tacked on the door.

The Institute for Diversity and Ethics in Sport (TIDES) releases yearly grades for gender and racial hiring in the sports world. Of the prominent men’s leagues, only the National Basketball Association (NBA) received an A in both areas in 2010, with women holding 44 percent of professional positions in the League Office (In 1995-1996 women held a whopping 49 percent.) Major League Baseball (MLB) received a B for gender hiring, and TIDES noted that their numbers have been steadily increasing since 2008. They gave the National Football League (NFL) an overall C and an eye-opening F for gender hiring in team vice president and senior administrative positions. Combined, these three leagues have over 90 teams, yet only two of them have female CEOs, the Houston Astros and the Oakland Raiders. How do we explain these numbers? Since basketball is a unisex sport (the Women’s National Basketball Association (WBNA) received the highest racial and gender hiring marks from TIDES), this may make equal gender practices more acceptable than in other leagues, such as the NFL, for traditionally men-only sports. But why does an organization like TIDES feel the need to monitor female hiring?

Unfortunately, sports media itself also lacks female presence. In 2008, TIDES reported that 2 percent of MLB announcers, 8 percent of NBA announcers, and 3 percent of NFL announcers were women. Watch ESPN for an hour and notice where they appear. The ladies are sideline reporters and anchors, both visible positions, and, more often than not, they’re attractive. (At a Big Ten football game I attended, the crowd cheered just as much for Erin Andrews, the pretty, infamous ESPN sideline reporter, as the team itself.) What the network seems to say is that what these ladies report on isn’t nearly as important as their appearance. The only time we see women analysts or announcers is during broadcasts of women’s golf, women’s basketball, and unisex Olympic sports such as tennis, figure skating, and skiing. That women pursue these jobs indicates their interest, yet they only appear in specific, female-friendly areas. Does the media consider women unqualified to analyze and comment on “male” sports?

What is often more damaging than this lack of representation are the depictions of women by media targeted at sports fans—Super Bowl commercials and, occasionally, even the words of prominent sportswriters. In these commercials and articles, painfully beautiful, out-of-reach bombshells, and nagging, emotionally turbulent shrews are two stereotypes that advertisers often choose to represent women.

Take Bill Simmons, a popular sportswriter for ESPN. During the 2010 Olympics, he coined the phrase “curlgar” (“curler” and “cougar” put together) for 44-year-old Canadian curler Cheryl Bernard. After Round 2 of the 2010 NBA playoffs, he gave out several “awards” to the two teams, including the “Jennifer Aniston Award for Best Selection of Cougars” and the “Kate Hudson’s Implants Award for Best New Addition.” Another praised ESPN sportswriter, Rick Reilly, ended a piece by calling for votes for the worst sports invention, then casting his own…for sports bras.

For every Super Bowl ad featuring a seductive, scantily-clad woman, there’s another starring a controlling girlfriend. For instance, one Bud Light ad features the male character crashing his girlfriend’s book club meeting, ignoring her tired explanation of the novel, and flirting with her quiet, attractive friend. In a Flo TV Super Bowl spot, the announcer shows a man shopping for lingerie with his girlfriend and diagnoses him with a removed spine. The girl says her one line: “Come on, silly!” in a childish tone, and the announcer advises the man to “change out of that skirt.” Dodge’s most recent Super Bowl ad shows blank-faced men listing the “tiring” things they do for their girlfriends, such as listening to their opinions of the man’s friends, being respectful to her mother, taking out the trash, and watching her “vampire TV shows.” According to them, these annoying deeds justify their purchase of a Dodge, the car they call “man’s last stand.” Although advertisers often purposefully make Super Bowl ads offensive, these messages can be found in more “routine” advertising as well.

The women in these ads are the obvious villains, forcing them to partake in traditional female roles such as shopping or tying them down in married life. They don’t look or dress like movie stars, and the commercials, placing them in kitchens, living rooms, and malls, ground them in the real world. These contrasting images can give the impression that celebrity women such as Indy car driver Danica Patrick, are perfect, but the real women men encounter daily are bothersome hassles. In order to be happy, they must spend their life fantasizing about the unattainable, because the girl they will marry will be nothing but an annoyance, blocking their enjoyment of sports, cars, and quality time with their male friends. Why do these images matter to women? For the most part, people start watching sports at a young age, and the younger we are, the more susceptible we are to believing the images society presents us with, and, therefore, the more susceptible women and young girls are to believing that they, too, are the villains of men’s lives. Consciously and subconsciously, the media and advertisements affect our self image.

These advertisers, in catering to only men’s desires, have lost touch with their audience. In reality, women make up a sizable amount of the audience for sports. According to Nielsen, they made up for almost half of the viewership of Super Bowl XLIV. The ads I referenced, among others, garnered criticism in both the mainstream press (including a British editorial) and across feminist blogs, and the Washington City Paper filmed a women’s version of “Man’s Last Stand.”

There is, however, hope in the field. Men wrote many of the articles I found criticizing sexist commercials and media. Kim Ng, the assistant general manager of the Los Angeles Dodgers, may soon become MLB’s first female general manager. (She has interviewed for the position three times.) Sara Chun, a Scripps sophomore, ex-athlete, and avid sports fan, recalled that in 2007, her high school’s boys’ soccer squad would wake up in the middle of the night to cheer on the U.S. women’s national soccer team in the World Cup in China. If both genders recognize the flaws in the system, and if men are recognizing women as valuable both as sports executives and athletes, then change for women in sports may be closer than ever.

REFERENCED COMMERCIALS:

www.youtube.com/watch?v=2RyPamyWotM

www.youtube.com/watch?v=V5qCzMWRvWE&feature=related

www.youtube.com/watch?v=MzofmEgfzas

REFERENCED ARTICLES:

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/commentary/news/story?page=lapchick/100505

http://sports.espn.go.com/blog/rick-reilly-go-fish/post/_/id/647/things-id-tweet-if-i-didnt-hate-tweeting

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/080605

http://sports.espn.go.com/espn/page2/story?page=simmons/100510&sportCat=nba

TIDES WEBSITE:

www.tidesport.org/