For the consumer, combining sports and sex is normal, Aaron Gordon writes, but for athletes and coaches, it skews gender conceptions.
In the male sports fan’s brain, he finds a fantastic tale of brilliance and cunning, in which he manages to woo a professional cheerleader with his perfect balance of wit and biceps. The two engage in a long, physical courtship that makes all of his friends jealous and results in their disdain towards him (but also their everlasting respect). The male sports fan keeps the cheerleader interested in him by being smarter, funnier, and more intellectually engaging than the athletes she interacts with on a daily basis. She craves normalcy (except in bed, of course), and he can provide it. This fantasy lasts for the 10 seconds the TV network shows the cheerleaders after a commercial break. Then it’s back to football.
Sports are not sexy. (Except for soccer. Soccer is a very sexy sport. Ask females.) Football is played by men whose muscles could easily be confused for cancerous tumors. Basketball is played by lanky, gangly freaks. Baseball has a pretty high percentage of diagnosably fat players, plus the proclivity of tobacco, sesame seeds, spitting, and odd facial hair makes the culture closer to repulsive than sexy. As for hockey, Canadians find it sexy, so by definition, Americans do not. (But seriously, hockey players wear too many pads and have too few teeth for the game to be “sexy”.)
Naturally, men have decided to make our sports sexy by adding scantily-clad women. Cheerleaders exemplify the male desire to be near attractive women for no apparent purpose. Having criminally underdressed women dance for your amusement—without cramming singles in their undergarments, mind you—is the closest the contemporary male will approach royalty.
Combining the male lusts for competition and women is a natural, healthy thing. Teams and leagues do it. Beer companies do it. Across the pond, the goings-on of soccer players’ wives and girlfriends (WAGs for short; they’re covered so much newspapers made an acronym to save copy space) are arguably just as popular as the games themselves. Hell, there’s even a league that decided to have women run around in lingerie under some vague premise of competition.
There’s nothing wrong with combining sex and sports. It’s important to remember that when you read about coaches raping boys. Or other coaches raping boys. Or one of the most prolific athletes in the world notoriously admitting to an unhealthy sex addiction that destroyed his marriage. Or a famous quarterback accused of raping a college girl. Or a sideline reporter being sexually harassed by professional athletes. Or athletes sending pictures of their penises to women. These are just anomalies. Normally, sex and sports are combined in a healthy, complimentary way, right?
♦◊♦
There’s nothing inherently wrong with combining sex and sports. As I said before, we do it every day without notice. But, it does seem like there are an awful lot of scandals lately involving sports figures and inappropriate sexual behavior. Are we fueling it?
When we culturally combine sex appeal with our sports, we’re implying the two belong together. But it’s not equal opportunity sex appeal; the media generally sends attractive women and old, fat-or-balding men to cover sports. When Erin Andrews is conducting pre-game reports and kicks it back to Chris Berman in the studio, it’s pretty obvious to which gender sex appeal in sports tilts. Not only do we implicitly recognize sex appeal belongs in sports, but we implicitly acknowledge sports should be paired with sexy women.
Ultimately, sports are about the athletes, so we put the sexy women in proximity to the athletes. When NFL and NBA players come running out of the tunnel, they run down a dark, cement hall and into the bright stadium lights, through a line of stunningly beautiful women waiting for them to arrive, wearing bras and tiny skirts, doing leg-kicks. (Coaches often run with the players.) This is the male fantasy in a nutshell: entering a room with a gorgeous woman waiting for you, half naked. When the athletes stop playing, the women run onto the playing area to do more leg-kicks. Sports are structured around the athletes, which means all the attention is given to them. That includes the attention from sexy women.
When we, the consumers of sports, sit at home and watch cheerleaders dance, or Erin Andrews fling her hair behind her shoulders so the camera can see her face, we are combining sex and sports in a healthy, natural way. Athletes and coaches don’t have this perspective. To them, cheerleaders, sideline reporters, and almost any other woman they encounter in the game is there to see them, to talk to them, to simply be near them, and to ultimately make a living off their presence.
The amount of mental energy and physical effort I exert to attract women is depressing. Athletes and coaches (many of whom are former athletes) do none of this. The women are instructed to be near them, paid to talk to them and pretend to be interested in everything they say. I can’t be certain, but this dynamic would probably distort my conception of gender roles as well. Who knows, I might even take a dongshot or two.
—Photo americanistadechiapas/Flickr
Yes, Aaron, I commented on that article too which I also think is a whole lot of crap. I’m not impressed by the breast cancer campaign, it does not make me feel welcome and I said so in the comments of that “writing.” Pink crap and big dollar cancer donations (to an inneffective charity that does not need it – but hey it LOOKS impressive) don’t make me feel welcome. I work in PR – it looks like a PR stunt. Nor does lingerie football. And what’s with your comment about the NFL welcoming women “in ways I might not… Read more »
My favorite comment in the thread!! Thank you for the catharsis. I really don’t think most men get this. Some do, but most cannot even begin to process all of these dynamics you point out here. God this is a great comment!!
Calling the mixture of sports and sex natural and healthy and then backing it up with popular media examples (as if those are accurate reflections of men OR women) makes me utterly sad and queasy. Are we completely oblivious to female sports fan? I love sports but find it hella irritating that I can’t go to a Sports Illustrated website article without being asked to check out the latest “Hot Click.” Ugh. Thanks for making me feel welcome, SI. The only way women can enjoy sports coverage without being bombarded with sexualized images of half naked women is online webcast… Read more »
I’ve written about this topic before, how the NFL is trying to welcome the female sports fan (and they are, just in ways you might not realize at first glance)
https://goodmenproject.com/featured-content/why-does-the-nfl-care-about-breast-cancer/
I see the argument about how strange it seems to mix male athletics with showing attractive women. I’m wondering what the next step of the argument would be, then. I’m just thinking what channel-surfers men can be. The corollary would be that it’s perfectly sensible to keep those two things on separate channels, that they’re both just fine but showing them together ruins one of them somehow. Is that what we’re saying? Okay, so there should be a football channel and a cheerleaders channel, and the viewer can flip back and forth (or not) as he sees fit. Or, if… Read more »
I’ll go out on a limb here and suggest that athletes are NOT any more likely to behave badly than anyone else, on average. They just happen to have cameras and fans and attention around them constantly so that everyone sees them when they do something asinine. The NFL has 1200-1500 players on the rosters at any given moment. Take a random sampling of any group of people that size and you’ll find some criminals, some mentally disturbed, and some with just really terrible judgment. American sports has a split personality when it comes to athletes – we tend to… Read more »
This is an excellent point.
How very, very, extremely depressing. Objectifying women is natural and healthy?
SIgh. There’s really no hope, is there? There is just no hope at all.
I know. And I hate–in advance–the response you are probably about to get to this comment. So just know that I am with you. “Despondent” might be a good adjective for how this kind of stuff makes me feel…
Why do cheerleaders agree to do it? They get paid very little money (most teams compensate about $10/hr). Why do it? I’m genuinely curious in the answer to that question. I met a couple of Patriots cheerleaders once when they weren’t working for the team. They genuinely enjoyed their job (at least so far as I could tell, and it wasn’t an environment where they had any obvious reason to lie). I agree objectifying women, generally speaking, is not natural or healthy. But this is just in sports, in the entertainment world. Just the same as it’s not OK to… Read more »
Because in our society, especially in the US, girls are conditioned from birth to think that their value, their power, is in their looks, youth, and sexuality. Just as men are conditioned to think that they’re supposed to be emotionless walking dicks who think of nothing but sex, and that any man who acts otherwise is either lying to get laid or gay. Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with sexy people, or the desire to see them. I just bristle at the notion that they belong everywhere, used to sell everything. Cheerleaders add nothing to the game… Read more »
Fantastic comment!
I couldn’t disagree with the first paragraph any more. I respect your position and I know there is a rich literature supporting it, but there’s also literature saying that trend has changed over the past few decades. I was never conditioned to be emotionless or to only think of sex. In fact, I was conditioned to do the opposite and I think our own innate urges are what make it difficult sometimes. Likewise, I do not work with women who are rewarded for their looks, but rather the general concepts of excellence and initiative we associate with success in a… Read more »
I’m not sure I see the problem, most people like looking at attractive people. It’s not as if it is just men that do it. There was a student protest in London a few weeks ago and thousands of police officers were put on the march route to prevent any riots. 99.9% of these were 20/30 year old well built men. Which promptly meant most of the women in the office made jokes about men in uniforms and then took their lunch in pubs on the protest route so that they could stare at the various men. So these people… Read more »
My experience is much closer to yours, Adam. Thanks for commenting.
The difference is those men weren’t sent out half naked to be gawked at. Cheerleaders are *supposed* to be super hot and sexy. Women are not decorations, they just aren’t. If the sexiness is part of the environment (a man in uniform, women doing a fashion show), then that’s one thing… but adding women-as-decorations is just wrong. It would be just as wrong to do it to men. Objectification is a nuanced thing… in some contexts it’s perfectly natural and just part of social interaction. In this context (and many others, especially where women’s bodies are used by advertisers, as… Read more »
As one of my friends says, if sport was truly equal opportunity the cheer leaders would high kick in skimpy outfits, and the guys would play naked from the waist down apart from their jock!
I wonder how many tickets you would sell for those matches?
I’m not a sports fan, and so I ask this question genuinely, because I’ve been wondering about it… It used to be that there were only male reporters on the field, in the locker room, and behind the anchor desk, all during my childhood. And then I used to think it would be nice if women could have some of these jobs too, but didn’t think it would ever happen. When it did, they all seemed kind of bimbo-ish to me, but maybe there are some really good female reporters on the field who do not look like supermodels. Or… Read more »
i don’t think female reporters are any different than male reporters, in terms of talent. Some are talented and attractive, some are just attractive, and some are just talented. This is true of male reporters, too. To say that any attractive, female reporter is only there because of her looks is to ignore that there are plenty of talentless male reporters as well.
What are some of the names of unattractive female sports reporters, especially middle-aged ones?
I want to look them up on Google. I know there are older and not-so-attractive men in these jobs, and have seen them, but I can’t think of similar women. Can you give me any names? I’d feel a lot better being wrong and finding there really are a bunch of female sports reporters that are not all babes. As you say, this kind of balance among the males and the females in these jobs would be great to see.
Most of the reporters I know from the top of my head middle-age except maybe Erin Andrews. There’s Michelle Tafoya, Pam Oliver, Cherill Miller (Reggie Miller’s older sister), Suzy Kolber, and Andrea Kremer
Most sport is sex – to me at least. And I am the gatekeeper of what is sex and what is not sex.
Young men with calves of steel and washboard buttocks, running around sweating and chasing balls – how is that not sex?
It’s not that sex and sports go together–it’s that sex and EVERYTYHING go together. If we could figure out a way to do it, we’d combine sex with driving, with horseback riding, and even with brushing our teeth.
And bacon. Don’t forget bacon.
I disagree. I think men find sports sexy because of the MEN involved.
So does Mark Simpson: http://www.marksimpson.com/blog/2010/04/17/sporno/