By Bradley Wright
This week’s issue of ESPN magazine featured the star basketball player Candace Parker, and when I saw the cover photograph, I chuckled, but when I read the article, I rolled my eyes and sighed in exasperation.
You see, I had recently been writing a lecture on content analysis for my social research methods class, and I was looking for a video example to illustrate the power of this technique. With content analysis, we identify existing documents, photographs, or other forms of data, and we analyze them much the same way we would other forms of data, e.g., survey data or participant observation. In cruising around the internet, I found a presentation by Mediaed.org entitled Playing Unfair: The Media Image of the Female Athlete. It’s a clip from a longer film in which various experts subject talk about how female athletes are presented in the media.
The experts on this topic (and I am not one of them) identified several themes in the media presentation of female athletes. These representations tend to deemphasize the women’s athleticism by portraying them in street clothes or in everyday activities; in contrast, male athletes are more often portrayed in their uniform, performing their sport.
The representations also emphasize the women’s sexuality more so than men’s, so pictures and text about the women are more likely to highlight their sexual features. They emphasize the women’s heterosexuality to counteract stereotypes of female athletes as lesbians. Pictures of them often include a boyfriend, husband, or children. Finally, female athletes receive far less media coverage than do their male counterparts.
Okay, back to Candace Parker. I work at the University of Connecticut, which is a perennial powerhouse in women’s basketball. (At this point, you should be cheering U-C-O-N-N). Candace Parker, unfortunately, attended our archrival, Tennessee, where she led them to two national championships. She’s now gone pro in the WNBA, and in her first year she was both rookie-of-the-year and player-of-the-year. She even dunks the basketball! In short, Candace is perhaps the best women to ever play the game.
ESPN magazine wants to feature her on its cover, and which picture do they choose? As you can see, it’s a picture that epitomizes the sociological analysis of women in sports. Candace is shown in a white dress, not a basketball uniform or playing basketball. The lighting and make-up are glamorous, and she’s pregnant—holding her hands on her womb to emphasize it. This is when I laughed—a perfect illustration of what the sociologists in the video spoke of.
As I thought about this image of Parker, I realized perhaps ESPN magazine routinely portrayed athletes in everyday life, and I had just happen to notice this week’s issue with a woman on the cover. So, I looked up the covers of the last five issues of the magazine, and four of the five had men in uniforms doing something related to their sports. The fifth had a male basketball player in street clothes, but he was dunking a basketball.
Hm-m-m-m, maybe this is an ESPN magazine thing, so I looked up recent covers of Sports Illustrated–again all men, in uniforms, performing their sports except for one cover featuring a woman. The swimsuit issue.
Then I read the article about Candace Parker, and this is when I started rolling my eyes. Here are its opening lines:
THE SELLING OF CANDACE PARKER
She's the total package: your sister's pal, your brother's prom date, supermom-to-be. She's also an MVP—of a league few watch. So can Candace Parker be the female Jordan? Lots of folks are banking on it.
Candace Parker is beautiful. Breathtaking, really, with flawless skin, endless legs and a C cup she is proud of but never flaunts. She is also the best at what she does, a record-setter, a rule-breaker, a redefiner.
Can you imagine any mainstream magazine taking a similar approach to a male athlete? “Baseball player Sidd Finch is a hunk. A complete hunk, really, with chiseled features, rippling biceps, and a larger-than-average penis that he is proud of but never flaunts.” Ah, I don’t think so. (By the way, you get extra credit if you recognize the name of the player.)
Content analysis has various advantages. It’s a way to study existing documents and portrayals in society. It’s usually less work than collecting survey, interview or observation data. It can be analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative approaches.
It has its disadvantages too, but more than anything, after looking at these articles, I’m just depressed about the media’s portrayal of women athletes.
Women in uniforms or playing a sport when they’re sweaty probably aren’t the most attractive things to guys. Magazines want to make the highest profit they can, so they post pictures of “attractive” women on the cover because they know more men will buy it. This is very degrading to women; women are just as capable of being great athletes (without being homosexual) as men are. I am a teenage girl that plays lacrosse, and I am pretty skilled in the sport (not to be cocky, just trying to make a point). I have worked for several years and I’ve been through countless hours of training to get to the skill level that I am at today. It’s offending to see that people feel the need to “pretty” girls up so they can make a profit.
I was just researching about genders in sports and this article definitely expresses our perceptions on genders. Males are perceived as the masculine type and it makes sense for them to be featured in there uniform showing their dedication to the sport. While women are suppose to be feminine and beautiful so they feature women in bikinis or being pregnant. It definitely has a big part of what the media believes society will like to see more, and perhaps because we emphasize a lot on gender roles that we don’t want to see a woman in her sport attire but something that represents her role as a female.
I am also researching about genders in sports for a class that I am in. And I have to agree that this article truly expresses society’s perception on genders. It seems to me that men are always seen in their uniforms, performing their craft. While women are pictured as one of two things; the complete put together mom/mom to be or the half-naked scantily clad bikini babes in the swimsuit addition of Sports Illustrated. But I can’t help but think about the whole idea of “sex sells”. I am a student at a business school and the mind set of making money and selling sex is something that a lot of people in the business world agree on. For me it is hard to see a problem with women being depicted in these ways seeing that it was their choice to model for these types of phot shoots in order to make money, and in that industry doesn’t money tend me to the end goal?
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In the realm of sports, performance is paramount. It is the measure of an athlete’s skills, abilities, and training put to the test. Poor performance, therefore, refers to a state where an athlete fails to meet the expected standards or underperforms compared to their potential. This can manifest in various forms, including inability to achieve desired results, declining performance levels, or inconsistency in performance.