Is Beauty an Olympic event?
Well, the female boxer’s have won a gold for being badass in my opinion anyway.
Emily talks about the constant connection between sex, being female, and sport in relation to the Olympics.
Women in sport videos playlist
This Dame:
Sporty does not equal manly
I have a lot of feminism and sports thoughts.
So yeah, let’s dispel this useless thinking that being good at sports is masculine, and embrace sportyness for all the genders :)
Women in sport playlist: http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL9C499184CC03D492
This Dame:
Tumblr: http://uswhoresdontneedyou.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://twitter.com/ThatPeskySubi
Wimmin’s sports
A video about sexism in women’s sport, despite me being the least sporty person ever. I preferred it when it was all egg and spoon and sack races anyway.
Also I promise this video was ready earlier, but my internet connection would not upload it. I’m choosing to blame the Olympics.
This Dame:
Tumblr: http://somekindofbecca.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/beccarothwell
Reblogging for those who weren’t awake when I posted this at 1am…again. - Becca
Wimmin’s sports
A video about sexism in women’s sport, despite me being the least sporty person ever. I preferred it when it was all egg and spoon and sack races anyway.
Also I promise this video was ready earlier, but my internet connection would not upload it. I’m choosing to blame the Olympics.
This Dame:
Tumblr: http://somekindofbecca.tumblr.com
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/beccarothwell
The L word: Lingerie football a ‘cheap, degrading perv’ says Kate Lundy.
It’s the kind of sport you’d look at and say: only in America. Except that the Lingerie Football League, which is literally self-explanatory, has also set up shop in Australia.
It’s just as it sounds: hot women in skimpy outfits - and skimpy puts it lightly - masquerading as serious, tough football players in a bastardised version of America’s most beloved sport: gridiron.
And the Federal Minister for Sport, Kate Lundy, is certainly no fan, describing it as a “cheap, degrading” perv.
Writing for Mamamia, Ms Lundy said: “Lingerie Football isn’t just a distraction; it’s an assault on sport.
“We can do so much better than LFL. And most importantly, our daughters deserve more.”
Having watched the LFL for, scientific observation, we found it surprising how seriously it’s taken. Male commentators treat it with every bit of legitimacy as the NFL.
But Ms Lundy says it’s a blight on the Australian sporting landscape to see the LFL launch here, with two exhibition matches scheduled for June.
“The LFL is about giving viewers an opportunity to perv on women in gear that looks like it’s come from an adult shop,” she said.
“It’s called the Lingerie Football League because it’s almost exclusively about the underwear.
“I can’t abide a spectacle that degrades women and threatens to undermine the progress of women in sport in Australia.”
A staunch feminist defends women’s right to choose … to play lingerie football.
By Lauren Rosewarne, University of Melbourne
I’m a fan of the retention of pubic hair. I don’t much like the idea of breast implants. Thoughts of vaginoplasty coax me into an involuntary Kegel exercise. I’ve no idea why any woman would bleach her vulva.
But feminism has to be about more than a laundry list of what individuals find unpalatable. I’m a feminist because I believe that women should have choice. Certainly as many choices as men. While the choices that are acted on might seem retrograde, offensive, and possibly even bad for equality, the existence of choice should be non-negotiable.
My immediate response to lingerie football is an eye-roll. It’s tacky and it’s cheap, but my strongest reaction is that it’s so yawn-worthily predictable. Everything about it, down to the manufactured protest, is so hideously auto-cued.
Truth be told I wasn’t even slightly interested in writing about it. At first glance the lingerie football controversy seemed like yet another incarnation of the tiresome “sexualisation” arguments. Public feminism is too often dominated by finger-waggling and whining about girls and women being sexualised. As though girls and women are dupes with no agenda and no self-determination and no ability to pull on a boob-tube without the horrible hand of patriarchy forcing their hand.
Such feminism bores me, saddens me and neglects to acknowledge that equality comes in many shapes and sizes. Even shapes and sizes we don’t all adore.
But two aspects of the lingerie football did spark some interest. One is the complicity feminists have themselves in drawing attention to this spectacle and two is the inconsistencies in some of their objections.
Sexist advertising, miscreants like Kyle Sandilands, and organisers of events such as the Lingerie Football League rely on controversy. They bank on the fact that there’ll be a ready throng of feminists ready to pitchfork them. They know that faux-news channels will be primed to pounce on an exposé, knowing – without a shadow of doubt – that there’s always an outraged feminist ready to give a sound-bite.
Marketers know this, they bank on this and time and time again feminists play into this malarkey.
Worse than just gifting lingerie football undeserved airtime however, every time feminists complain about the sexism of a product, a target audiences gets solidified. Nobody actually cares if feminists boycott lingerie football. Au contraire: a boycott all too often makes a product instantly attractive. Suddenly a whole lot of people who would never have thought about lingerie football are suddenly militant about their God-given right to cheer on a scantily clad tackles. To buy tickets, to buy merchandise. Suddenly folk who are exhausted by the thought police, by the wowsers, are hornilysalivating to get to a game.
One of the arguments proffered by feminist objectors is that that bringing bras and panties to ballgames somehow sullies sport. Shock horror but sport is already “sullied”. Pretending that sex and sport are somehow mutually exclusive is delusional and evidence of commentators who have neglected to turn on the television anytime in the past decade.
Male players are sexualised every time a camera lingers on them while they train sansshirt. Many sports that have cheerleaders: women paid to wear little to entice an audience into noisy fervour. Male and female athletes pose in calendars. And on the covers of magazines. And appear in television commercials. The sport/sex fusion happened long ago.
Lingerie football is a product. A product that people can choose not to purchase, can choose to ignore. Notably, it’s a product which some women have freely chosen to be a part of.
Lauren Rosewarne does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
The potentially harmful effect of ultra-thin models and air-brushed female celebrities on the body image and self-esteem of women is well-documented. Could the increasing participation of women in professional sport prompt the media to portray female role models in a different, more beneficial light? Anecdotal evidence suggests not. To take just one example, prior to the 2010 Winter Olympics, female Olympic skiers and snowboarders appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated in - you guessed it - bikinis. A new study of 258 US school girls and 171 female undergrads by Elizabeth Daniels has investigated how women and girls feel when they see sexualised images of female athletes.
The participants were allocated to one of three conditions - they either looked at five images of female athletes in a sporting context in their full sporting attire (the basketball player Anne Strother; the skateboarder Jen O’Brien; the tennis player Jennifer Capriati; the surfer Lisa Anderson; and the football player Mia Hamm), or they looked at five images of female athletes in a sexualised context with lots of flesh on display (the basketball player Lauren Jackson; the ice-skater Ekaterina Gordeeva; the swimmer Jenny Thompson; the softball player Jenny Finch; and the tennis player Anna Kournikova), or they looked at five images of bikini-clad magazine models given random names.
After looking at the first and last of their five allocated photographs (this was Lauren Jackson and Anna Kournikova in the sexualised athletes condition and Anne Strother and Mia Hamm in the sporty athletes condition), the participants were asked to write a paragraph “describing the woman in the photograph and discussing how this photograph makes you feel”.
The key finding is that the girls and undergrads who viewed the sexualised athlete images tended to say they admired or were jealous of the athletes’ bodies, they commented on the athletes’ sexiness, and they evaluated their own bodies negatively. Some also said they found the images inappropriate. The participants who viewed the bikini-clad glamour models responded similarly, except they rarely commented on the inappropriateness of the images, as if they’d come to accept the portrayal of women in that way. Daniels said that sexy images of female athletes “are no more likely to prompt viewers to reflect on their own physical activity involvement or appreciation of sport than sexualised model images.”
By contrast, participants who viewed the female athletes in a sporting context tended to comment on the athletes’ determination, passion and commitment; they wrote about feeling motivated to perform sport; and they reflected on their own sporting participation or sports they followed. “Infusing more performance images of female athletes into the media may be helpful in promoting physical activity among girls and young women,” Daniels said. “Currently, female athletes are largely absent from magazines targeted at teen girls.”
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Daniels, E. (2012). Sexy versus strong: What girls and women think of female athletes. Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology, 33 (2), 79-90 DOI: 10.1016/j.appdev.2011.12.002
Post written by Christian Jarrett for the BPS Research Digest.
