BY KAYLA LOKEINSKY
For every grade school girl who ever wanted to play kickball during recess, there was always a little boy who told to go play with her dolls, because she was a girl and “girls don’t play sports.” You would think that these childish antics would be left behind as women transition from adolescents to adults, but this is not the case. Even now, as women take the sports world by storm, female athletes are still perceived as being weak in comparison to their male counterparts. This perception is commonplace because of the way the media portrays female athletes as being inferior to male athletes.
What is it that has imprinted this thought in the minds of the ignorant? Who was it that said pairing woman with the term athlete was simply ridiculous? Believe it or not, it isn’t the fault of pig-headed men, or close-minded fundamentalists, but of the media. Female athletes are not presented as athletes as all, but rather objects to be oogled at and made a spectacle of.
When scanning the magazine racks at your neighborhood bookstore, it is rare to come across a female on the cover of a sports magazine doing something athletic. Instead, they are shown as either objects of infatuation, or they are portrayed as mothering, rather than making a game-winning play. For example, Candace Parker, the Women’s National Basketball Association (WNBA) rookie-of-the-year and player-of-the-year, was featured on the cover of ESPN magazine wearing a glamorous white dress and cradling her baby bump. This photo doesn’t show Parker’s athletic ability at all, and it makes the viewer forget entirely what she is being featured for in the first place. It’s a picture that epitomizes the inaccurate portrayal of female athletes.
Countless female athletes are shown as objects of infatuation rather then athletes. Their femininity and sexuality are emphasized in order to contrast the stereotyping of women who play sports as butch. It is obvious that sex sells in the entertainment industry, but when this method is combined with female athletes, people tend to forget what these women are actually famous for. For instance, on the Weight Watchers For Men website, there was an article featuring Olympic gold medalist Jennie Finch entitled “Jennie Finch, Olympic Gold Medal softball pitcher and all-around hottie.” Those words at the end of the headline are completely irrelevant to the article and are not only offensive, but also take away from the main point of the article; that Finch is an incredible athlete, not an object to be fawned over.
In contrast, male athletes are rarely objectified in the media the way that female athletes are. Male athletes are never portrayed as being anything less than athletic gods. They are almost always featured on the covers of sports magazines making game-winning plays. For example, prior to the month when Parker was shown on the cover of ESPN magazine without any sign that she plays basketball, the previous five covers all showed men, in their sports uniforms and in action. Now, as a female who plays sports, I know that this kind of positive media exposure for male athletes greatly exceeds that of female athletes, and it is because of this that gender bias is present in the sports world.
Women have been fighting for equality with men for almost a century, and suffragettes did not march through the streets just to have the equality they fought for stripped away by the media. Until female athletes are highlighted for their accomplishments and not their femininity, the misconception that female athletes are inferior to male athletes will continue to stick in peoples’ minds.
