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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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
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