Wednesday, November 30, 2011

[hetero] sex sells

As we have established through examination of our society and discussion in class sex sells; and not just sex, but hetero sex. And sports are no different. As pointed out in Bodies, Babes, and the WNBA we live in a visual world created of images, and much of those images are intended to have a sexual connotation or message to get the public support or acknowledgement they desire. While I agree that feminizing female athletes in ads can be demoralizing, and exploitive, I want to argue that they do the same thing men do, they just do it in a different way.

In Bodies, Babes, and the WNBA, they write about the different views of “old-school” and “new-age” feminists in regards to the media and the woman’s body image. Where as the older way of thinking was that the media is evil, and it is “the portrayal of women at their worst.” I agree with the newer way of thinking that “the media is the air we live and breathe, and we manipulate t for our own ends, and aren’t we so clever and aren’t we hot babes?” (78).

Masculinity is a culturally accepted sexy trait, but only in men. And when women portray a sense of masculinity, they can be seen as non-sexy, or as we have read, they can be portrayed as a “mannish-lesbian”, especially in sports. We have talked and read a lot about the different views of how women are displaying their bodies. Some say that they are doing so based on cultural and societal pressures, and other believe that they are showing their strength and showing off their hard work.

What I believe in regards to female athletes in advertising is that they are displaying their bodies in a heterosexualized world, and in order to equalize their sexiness, the pressures to increase their femininity are raised. Men also use sexuality to their advantage in our image driven culture. However, they may be able to stand in a dirty uniform with a powerful look in their eyes and get the same desired effect a female athlete may get by posing half nude in a ridiculous scenario. The general idea of sexiness in men includes a great deal of masculinity, testosterone, and at some times dirt and sweat. All of these can be encompassed in an athlete coming off of the field. But when this athlete is a female, the idea of sexiness is gone.

So, though I do agree that women are at times over sexualized, and can be portrayed in more pornographic ways then men, I feel that many times female athletes are in full awareness of what they are doing in manipulating their body image to show off their [hetero] sex appeal. In women “femininity=sex appeal, masculinity=achievement, as if never the twain shall meet” (88).

I don’t feel that women should necessarily take their sexualized and ‘feminized’ bodies out of our image driven world, but I think the whole idea of what is sexy needs to be reevaluated and more inclusive to masculine women, and feminine men.

How can we start with this? Where can we start? Does it need to be within women’s sports, men’s sports, both, neither?

3 comments:

  1. Where to make change? I think that because the problem--the objectification, heterosexually exclusive, women need to expose in order to expose their talents problem-- is manifested within the visual realm, that this is where we need to target change. Images hold a powerful weight in our society. Advertisements and magazine spreads currently reveal the inequities of the athletic field, so these pictures must experience a makeover.
    So no, women needn't be forced to take their femininity and flee. Instead, we the consumers, should inspire the image suppliers to give us images of athletes that are powerful or vulnerable because that is what the situation calls for, not because they are a man or woman. Perhaps once the images we see reflect the myriad sides to both humans and athletes our society will began to rethink its mindset.

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  2. This is a question that I’ve often thought about and have mused a couple of answers to, all of which may or may not be really helpful. To address the first aspect of this question, I feel like we must first change what we market to society. If we are marketing positive images that have healthy messages, I believe that positive change could easily happen because what our society is so linked/hooked on is images, we could make a difference starting there. To answer the next aspect of the question, I believe that it should first start at the home, when children show interests in sports. There’s no use in learning about the false structures of femininity and masculinity at an older age, that one could utilize more when one is younger. I believe that learning about these structures of masculinity and femininity at a younger age will prove to be a more powerful instrument in the long run.

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  3. Sports is a good place to start, since here women are infiltrating a realm traditionally considered to be male. Here women can finally marry sexiness and achievement in a display of power, control, and physical health. However, these are things some would consider to be "masculine" as well, in some sense. What if we began to use the media to train our youth to stop believing in polarizing masculinity and femininity?

    What I mean by that is that we've been trained to be hyper-masculine and hyper-feminine men and women, coming up in society. Up until roughly our time, men didn't cry in movies and women were spineless. People took the representations of gender they saw on screen and replicated it in their own lives. Cinematic traditions are way different today, of course, but how many men do you know that would cry openly at a sad movie? We've got a long way to go in terms of shying away from the "opposite" gender, from realizing that so many of the things we gender aren't feminine or masculine, just simply human.

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