Page 166 - Sport Culture and the Media

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1984 and 1988 Olympic Games, notes the frequently close similarity of images
of women in sport and in soft pornography.
There is also a dependent relational element in many images of sports-
women, with an emphasis on male coaches as authority figures, emotional
attachments to partners and, if applicable, children (whereupon the mother is
frequently turned into a ‘supermum’; McKay 1992). In other words, the ‘pure’
power of the action sports photograph can be diffused by distracting attention
from the pristine sporting moment and stressing other characteristics of the
female photographic sports subject, such as their parental role, how they look
after their hair or manage to perform in sport at the highest level while staying
‘feminine’ and ‘sexy’. Empirical findings, of course, vary according to place,
media and sports covered. Paul M. Pedersen’s (2002) content analysis of photo-
graphs of interscholatic athletics in Florida newspapers, for example, found
that females received only a third of total photographic coverage of athletics,
and that photographs of them were less well positioned in the newspapers and
more likely to be black and white than photographs of male athletes. However,
there was no significant gender difference in photograph type, such as in the
proportions of action, still, ‘mug’ and posed shots. It can also be suggested that
there is nothing inherently wrong with a link between sport and sex. There is
something improbable about paying massive attention to the sporting body as
an athletic instrument but then rigorously suppressing any notion that it might
be or do something else. The image of the sporting body may, then, also be an
erotic or aesthetic image, as much concerned with the athletic body as ‘sex
machine’ as the efficient engine of sports accomplishment. We might first
canvass possible responses to the sports text in which the photographic subject
challenges the viewer with Rod Stewart’s pop refrain, ‘Do Ya [perhaps, Dare Ya]
Think I’m Sexy?’

Sports bodies: hot and hard

In the section above, I introduced the action sports photograph in newspapers,
and the detected tendency for them to carry hidden ideologies of gendered power
through the disproportionate quantity and quality of images of active, ruggedly
individual men and passive, dependent women. Action sports photography con-
centrates on the ‘motivated’ body: it is doing something to itself and to other
bodies. Acres of print are devoted every day to tracking the sports body in motion
as it is invested with multiple meanings – the triumphant body, the dejected body,
the endangered body, and so on. There is another area of photography that
focuses on the body that has a less respectable profile than sports photography. It
is called pornography and is dedicated to the sexual excitation of the viewer. It