Interrogating inequalities in Sports Media: Examining gender (and race?) representation in Sports Illustrated

According to Sports Illustrated, 2013 was a great year for sports. Or at least that's the image projected: nearly every cover of the magazine last year depicts a sports hero in action, sliding into home, narrowly avoiding a tackle, gearing up to throw a pass that will inevitably reach its target. These magazine covers make it look like 2013 was The Year of the Sports Hero. So when is the year of the woman? Obviously not 2013.

Peyton Manning's 2013
Sportsman of the Year  cover:
Rugged, intense, oozing
masculinity, and absolutely no
cleavage in sight.

Of the sixty issues of Sports Illustrated printed last year, only two of them featured women on the covers. That's only 3.3% of the covers; 96.7% of Sports Illustrated covers in 2013 were male athletes. You may say, "Emily, I get it, and it's cute that you did some math, but shouldn't women just be happy that female athletes are represented on two of the Sports Illustrated covers?" Oh, Dear Reader, I wish that two female athletes were represented on the covers. But please notice that I never said the glossy women on the glossy covers of these glossy sports pages were athletes, though one of them is in uniform. 

Sigmund Freud would have something to say
about this cover (Sports Illustrated, 10/07/2013)

"Please, Emily," You may say, "Stop with the facetiousness and just get on with it." Well, if you insist. The woman in uniform is not an athlete. She is not muscular or sweaty or depicted in a position of power or glory. No. The woman in uniform is none other than America's lingerie-clad Sweetheart, Kate Upton. She's wearing a fitted version of an Atlanta Braves uniform and is casually perched on the shoulders of two African-American Braves players. So what does it say, then, that in this circumstance, sex is absolutely being used to sell magazines? Still not sold on this idea? There is a hot white woman, blonde hair and blue eyes, the epitome of Aryan ideologies, posed suggestively on the broad shoulders of two African American men. Upton is wearing her signature "come-hither" expression, and the men are both grinning and leaning towards her. Problematic? Absolutely. By positioning Upton above the two African-American athletes, not only is this cover propagating the idea of a sexualized image of women in sports, it's also presenting a very interesting and fundamentally important race dichotomy. Placing Upton physically above the men illustrates the race/gender binary that is to this day at odds in American society-- she is superior to them, an insinuation that is implicit in her physical positioning, but also in her pigmentation. Though I feel uncomfortable treading into slavery territory, there's a status that Upton, as an attractive white female, has acquired that these male athletes have not. 

Another interesting way that sex is being utilized in this cover is the positioning of the men's baseball bats. Freud would absolutely love the phallocentric nature of this magazine cover. I mean for goodness sakes, both of the men are holding their big, hard, wooden (yeah, I went there) baseball bats between their legs. Sports Illustrated is an excellent manifestation of Freud's theory of the phallus as it appears in American Culture. When addressed in his texts, Freud addresses the phallus as an obsession, something that permeates the subconscious of every individual, so to have something so blatant as two men with literal rods between their legs isn't subtle, or particularly clever, but seems to be an effective marketing tool. The crotch-bats (of these two African American men, no less) and a hot blonde  propagates basically every stereotypical American male wet dream ever, and very clearly illustrate the hyper-sexualization of US sporting culture.

Kate Upton's 2013 SI Swimsuit Cover

"Whoa, Emily." You're probably thinking, blushing, "You are really making a lot of really bold assertions. I'm sure Sports Illustrated isn't intentionally objectifying women." You're right. You are totally right. I'm sure that it's an accident, then, that the other Sports Illustrated cover that features a woman is the infamous Swimsuit Issue. And it's totally a coincidence that we have the return of the Prodigal Model. Yes, that's right, it's Kate Upton again. Still hot, still blonde, still portraying unrealistic American standards of beauty to everyone who looks at the cover. You know, all in a day's work. 

I'm not attacking Upton for her chosen career, or the fact that she's blonde and has boobs. That's all great. More power to her. But the way those things are portrayed by the sporting industry is in need of a major makeover. Female athletes will never get the respect that they work for as long as magazines like Sports Illustrated keep presenting women as nothing but a pretty face and their nice assets (pun intended; not only is Upton well endowed, she's also got quite a financial endowment due to her father… word play is the best). But for that to happen, there needs to be a shift in consumer culture, as well. Magazines keep printing pictures of men being rugged and chiseled and women being sexy and naked because people keep buying it. Though our culture has made great strides towards gender equality, magazines like Sports Illustrated are perfect examples of how far we still have to go. Where was Becky Hammon's Sports Illustrated cover? Where are the photos of Eli Manning in body paint smoldering at the camera? I'm not saying boycott all magazines and go live in a hole until people are miraculously equal. In fact, if buying the Swimsuit Issue makes you happy, Dear Reader, then by all means, do it. Just be aware of the inequalities in your consumption.

Sources:

http://cnnsi.com/vault/cover/select/2013-01-01/2013-12-31/dd/1/index.htm

http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/psychoanalysis/freud.html

Reflecting on the Shame of College Sports: Should NCAA Div 1 Basketball and Football players get paid?

According to Taylor Branch's article in The Atlantic, "The Shame of College Sports," the United States is the only country that competes internationally in big name sports at the collegiate level, which immediately presents a bias inherent to the argument of whether or not collegiate athletes should be paid to play-- those Americans and their sporting culture have some backwards priorities. On one hand, representatives from the NCAA argue that the "amateur status" of the athletes operates in direct correlation to the proverbial "sanctity" of the sport in which they participate, and paying the athletes would alter the game, that "commercialism was hurting college sports, and that higher education's historical balance between academics and athletics had been distorted by all the money sloshing around" (Branch). 

The flip side of this argument is presented flawlessly by a New York Times article that explores the sports economy in the United States, specifically the impact of money on college football. The assertion of this article is made blatantly clear within the first paragraph of the piece: "big money has taken over everything else in sports." Poignant? Certainly. Upsetting? Only in its truth. Uniforms, pre and post workout energy drinks, and even stadiums are being stamped with the name of the highest bidder: Duke and Louisville played their Elite Eight game during March Madness 2013 in Lucas Oil Stadium, for goodness sakes. Anyone who argues for the sanctity of sport has obviously not been paying attention to the growing logos on the jerseys of their favorite team or that they all wear the same brand of shoes.

Highest paid public employees by state: Most are college
coaches-- do athletes deserve to benefit from a trickle down effect?

I've thought a lot about whether or not NCAA athletes should get paid for their work, and though it would be nice to get a check every once and a while for entertaining hoards of adoring fans and being a major draw to a specific university, most athletes are getting paid via tuition to attend specific schools. Scholarships are, in a sense, means of getting paid, are they not? Many athletes also receive stipends from their given schools for housing, food and books-- that's another acknowledgement of the efforts being put into the school. But on the other hand, in most states, the highest paid public employees are football coaches (exceptions in North Carolina and Kentucky are basketball coaches), so why wouldn't their players, the ones who execute the actual work, get to reap any of the benefits? I think largely, my stance on the payment of NCAA athletes is centered around the phrase "student athlete." It implies a level of priority, that being a student should come above the sport that said student plays. If they're getting paid for a sport, then suddenly the priority shifts, since the sport, and not the academics, would present a major source of income. Programs all over the nation are already pushing unprepared collegiate athletes through the school for selfish fiscal gain (See also: the University of North Carolina "African Studies" Major that turned out to be a fake department, giving football and basketball players A's in classes that didn't even exist on campus, ever); if athletes were suddenly getting paid for their sport, there would be even more motivation for coaches and athletes to counterfeit their way through education. 

Also, paying college athletes would just cause the current sports paradigm to shift downwards: then high school players would be the new college players, unpaid, full of potential and ready to turn it into a career. And with college athletes being treated like pros, what would that make the professional athletes? Demi gods? 

High School Sport

In the early 1900's, the United States became one of the only nations in the world that funds inter-school athletic programs. According to Coakley, the "idealized" purpose of high school sport is to propagate learning experiences and social identities, as well as educate youth about participating in a team dynamic-- working with a group of people towards a shared common goal is a fundamental skill not only on the basketball court, but also in the workplace, in academic settings, and even interpersonal relationships. Of course, these fundaments of high school sport aren't necessarily objectives that are being met. Instead of simply encouraging students to be more well rounded individuals and team players, high school students are being forced to prioritize between their academics and their athletics, and in this unintentional binary, it's often the education that suffers. 

Demetrius Walker, former child prodigy

Though the intentions of high school sports in an ideal world are fairly pure and simple, sports have become such a large-scale national pastime that the sporting identity becomes one that's difficult to escape from, so students aren't just students, but "student athletes" (and there's a reason that the word "student" comes first). The meeting of these expectations is what's causing issue in American high school sports: instead of just encouraging students to get out, get active, and be part of a team, the obsession with sports in our culture is motivating students to push themselves to absolute limits starting at a very early age. 

As evidenced in the article about Demetrius Walker, an immense amount of pressure is being put on young athletes-- if they don't live up to their projected potential, there's a vast arena for disappointment. 

The main concern with the "student/athlete" identity is the blatant imbalance of priorities: though remaining academically eligible is important when it comes to not getting benched, often student athletes will regard workouts as more important than homework, and their education has the potential to be stunted simply because of their over-adherence to the sporting identity that the United States sports culture seems to want to cultivate from day one. 

Once the Cheering Stops: The Life of a Retired Pro Athlete

Sometimes when people ask me what I want to do after I graduate, I tell them that I'd like nothing more than to do nothing but watch Netflix for the rest of my life, which is absolutely not true. Don't get me wrong-- I love marathoning such quality titles as "That 70's Show" or "One Tree Hill," but there's no way I could ever spend all of my time moping around in sweats, watching Netflix and generally feeling sorry for myself before an inherent feeling of uselessness set in. For many professional athletes, however, post-retirement is alarmingly similar to my theoretical post-grad plans; often after they retire, professional athletes spend a lot of time indoors, perhaps streaming TV shows and movies for hours on end, and ultimately feeling sorry for themselves.
And why wouldn't they? Looking back on life and realizing that your life's "high point" was in your early to mid-twenties doesn't instill a sense of motivation or enthusiasm for the future by any means-- in fact, this exact sentiment is why so many ex-professional athletes cite depression as one of the main things they struggled with after hanging up their jersey for good. After retirement, unless an athlete has been very careful with their finances, there's a good chance that they will run into money troubles-- according to Sports Illustrated, 78% of NFL players are bankrupt within two years of retiring. The lifestyle they lead while playing isn't sustainable in the longterm, which ends up being something that many pro-athletes have had to learn the hard way. Another thing athletes struggle with after they retire is a colossal identity crisis. If a person spends their whole life fine-tuning a set of skills as specific as playing sports, then that's the most established part of their developed "self," so giving up the game is, in fact, giving up a large part of themselves. I am by no means a professional athlete, but when I think about being done with crew after college, I have a tiny freakout, because for the past three years, I've been recognized as Emily Connelly: Rower. I can't imagine if my whole life was focused around the sport and my career had a blatant expiration date like those of professional football or basketball players.
In the ESPN movie "Broke," the idea of professional athletes as competitors in every walk of life was very striking-- the living lavishly wasn't necessarily because all of the athletes get drafted to the NBA, MLB or NFL and then suddenly acquire a thirst for fifty-six thousand square feet and a cherry red Lamborghini, it's because culturally, it's what they're expected to want. In a way, competing with other men (always men-- when was the last time you saw a WNBA player in a Maserati? My guess is never, since in 2012 the average salary for a WNBA player was $72,000 annually… um…) is what US society expects their athletes to do, and in becoming big spenders, professional athletes are playing into cultural blueprints of expectations. In order to be that caliber of athlete, your competitive drive has to be immense, so why wouldn't translate into off-court interactions?
Transitioning from making millions of dollars a year to making virtually no money calls for a fundamental lifestyle alteration, but after participating in an enterprise of excess for however long one's contract (and body) allows, I don't imagine that cutting back comes particularly easily. When I quit my summer job before college, I had a hard time adjusting to my new means, and I worked at a grocery store. I can't even begin to fathom how difficult the fiscal shift is for retiring athletes.
I think the "here today, gone tomorrow" nature of professional athletes careers contributes to their longterm short comings-- when you're on top of the world, there's a feeling of invincibility, untouchableness. Many of the athletes in the movie discussed getting caught up in the spending and spending machine, and losing themselves in the process. The wise scholar Young Jeezy once said, "gotta stay true to who you are and where you came from, 'cause at the top will be the same place you hang from," which is a sentiment that was deeply manifest in Broke. In failing to plan for their futures and getting too caught up in appearances, the fall from grace for many professional athletes has catastrophic and painful repercussions. But as the only woman in the film said, "Nobody feels bad for you when you've squandered away millions of dollars." That's true. Us little people just sit here, think about how stupid they are with their money, and then find solace in the statement, "I would never do that." It's easy to make judgement calls when it's not (and likely never will be) your money.

Author's note: Young Jeezy is not actually a scholarly source. I know.

Sports, Politics, and the Olympics

Jesse Owens, Olympic gold medalist in the 1936 Berlin Games.
Owens won four gold medals, even in the face of adversity (America!)

Mass media and the Olympics seems like a given in society today, but it wasn't always so. In fact, mass media was such a novel platform for spreading ideas that when the German Olympic Committee decided to install closed-circuit television systems in the track and field stadiums, gymnasiums, and other Olympic venues built specifically for the purpose of the 1936 games, Adolf Hitler saw the games as the perfect opportunity to promote his fascist government and the ideas of a superior aryan race; he even went so far as to publish in his party's newspaper that Jews and persons of color shouldn't be allowed to compete. Although Hitler "cleaned up" the games after many nations threatened to boycott the games, removing the anti-semitic propaganda he had condoned throughout Berlin, there was still considerable debate among many nations about whether or not the Nazi Games were a "safe" competition. Turkish athletes refused to be formally introduced to Hitler, the Spanish government opted instead to host its own Olympiad (which was a failure), and even the United States considered requesting a boycott. However, it was determined that "the Olympic Games should not reflect political views, but rather should be a contest of the greatest athletes." Meanwhile, many African-American communities supported participation in the games, and for good reason: in the event of African-American victories, athletes would be undermining aryan supremacy. 

In the case of the Nazi Games, sports were being used as a vehicle for propaganda, one of Sage and Eitzen's 5 political uses of sport. One one hand, Hitler and the rest of Nazi Germany were using the games to promote their political views on a global spectrum. But not all propaganda is negative: countries that didn't boycott the games, such as the United States, aired the Olympics on national television so that everyone could watch US citizens "defeat" the proverbial bad guys. In contrast to Hitler's shameless self-promotion, the US used propaganda to create a sense of national unity.

Asserting that sports are devoid of all political interference is a ballsy claim, and one that holds very little ground when the history of sports are brought into consideration. As evidenced by the 1936 Olympic Games, sometimes sports are the most effective method to spread a message of power-- if that's not political, I don't know what is.