Give female athletes attention for their talent, not their sex appeal
I don’t get angry easily. Yet, a few months ago, I could taste iron, my body’s plea to stop biting my tongue, as my friend nonchalantly remarked, “Alex Morgan is so sexy… and she’s a decent player too.” As a sports fan, as a woman, and as an advocate for equality, I grew angry.
The conversation started with me eagerly telling my friend I snagged a last-second ticket to see the U.S. women’s national soccer team play Switzerland. I was thrilled to have the chance to watch some of my female idols in action, and even more thrilled to have the opportunity to support world-class sportswomen who don’t tend to receive as much recognition or media coverage as they arguably deserve.
I anticipated this friend in particular would share my excitement. A massive soccer fan, he follows the women’s national team semi-regularly, something many fans fail to do on the basis of gender and imbalanced media coverage. So, when this soccer-savvy male still actively chose to recognize national player Alex Morgan for her sex appeal and degrade her skill level to “decent,” mirroring the media’s tendency to fuel extra hype for sex-symbol female athletes, I couldn’t help but succumb to a wave of irritation and disappointment.
If even the most high profile and gifted sportswomen are more commonly recognized for their looks than their talent, what does this say about discrepancies between male and female treatment in general?
Some may say any sort of recognition and media attention is better than none at all. However, every time we recognize a female athlete for her looks instead of her skill, we are continuing to demean and delegitimize female athletes, perpetrating the already too-common stigma that female athletics are a joke.
Google “Alex Morgan” and seven image results appear on the side. Three of these photos are of a skimpily clad Morgan in a Sports Illustrated swimsuit photo-shoot. The other four photos still fail to show Morgan as an athlete in action, instead displaying her casually smiling. Contrastingly, Google men’s national player “Clint Dempsey,” and all of the resultant images show Dempsey in action on the pitch. Male and female athletes simply do not receive the same kind of attention.
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Male athletes don’t have to be “sexy” to be marketable or adequately recognized; they just need to be talented. However, it seems as though female athletes must be both talented and good-looking to receive substantial media attention, and even then the attention may be drawn more for their looks than their skill.
Such unequal treatment undoubtedly contributes to women’s sports’ struggles to garner its deserved amount of attention. Yes, it’s unrealistic to expect women’s sports to achieve the same level of recognition as men’s sports, but it’s also slightly absurd the women’s national soccer team, ranked number one in the world and gold medalists of the past three Olympics, still struggles to even sustain a professional league.
Unfortunately, in the words of play-by-play announcer Jones Angell, “old boys sitting around on their couches don’t want to see women on sports or have women tell them about their sports.” Thus, physical attractiveness earns attention, not pure world-class athletic talent, which is both degrading and extremely restricting for female athletes.
Women have been confined to specific spheres for too long. Societal discrepancies used to confine women to the domestic sphere, limiting females to “accepted” and “appropriate” tasks like cooking, cleaning, and rearing children. Now, women are still limited in the work force, as they attempt to break through the glass ceiling in the corporate ladder. Even in the sports world, these sex-based limitations seep through and influence the kinds of attention female athletes receive.
When we call one of the greatest female soccer players in the world “sexy…and decent,” we are limiting her to being attractive and not legitimately athletic. When we recognize any female athlete for her sex appeal more than her skill, we are limiting her value to her physical looks, stripping her of the talents she has spent her life developing. When we do this to numerous female athletes repeatedly, we are restricting women’s sports as a whole, perpetrating the idea we as a society value a woman’s looks over her world-class talents, which is simply wrong.
As U.S. women’s national soccer team member Heather O’Reilly said, “hopefully one day what we’re doing on the field will be what draws the media’s attention, but I don’t know if we’re there yet.”
As long as our society continues to choose to recognize female athletes for their looks instead of their skill, we will not yet be “there.”
In the interest of equality, the spirit of giving credit where credit is due, and the desire to expand the sports world, may all sports fans, regardless of gender, begin actively pushing to get “there.”
