Page 167 - Sport Culture and the Media

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might be suggested, taking the earlier point further, that there are many parallels
between sports photography and pornography, and it is fruitful to pursue ques-
tions of the extent to which many sports photographs adopt a direct or indirect
mode of sexual address akin to the pornographic, and the ways in which the
active/passive dichotomy is played out in both sport and photography. By follow-
ing this line of argument, I shall not attempt an analytical separation of the erotic
and the pornographic. In The Erotic in Sports, Guttmann (1996: 179) concludes
that ‘the best way out of the definitional cul de sac seems to be the frank
acceptance of subjectivity’ – that is, that one person’s ‘smut’ is another’s ‘thing
of beauty’, and vice versa. It is still, though, worth probing the question of the
power of both photographic subjects and viewers in the sphere of sexuality. All
texts, after all, can be differentially interpreted, but all also have structural
properties that invite particular decodings and deter others. That sport and
sexuality have a long association is indisputable, as Guttmann points out in the
opening passage of his book on the erotic aspects of sport:
When Greek men and boys journeyed to Olympia to compete in the great
panhellenic festival that honored Zeus, when Greek girls ran races at the
same site for an olive branch and a portion of sacrificial cow, everyone
seems to have understood that physically trained bodies, observed in
motion or at rest, can be sexually attractive.
(Guttmann 1996: 1)
Dutton (1995), similarly, notes the erotic dimensions of ancient artistic
representations of the sporting body in sculpture and painting. So, if sport
and sex have been constant companions for millennia, the opportunity
afforded by the modern mass media (which, according to Cohen and Taylor
(1976: 106) included the emergence of an industry devoted to the ‘hobby’
of masturbation) to develop this relationship must involve some linkage
between the photographed sporting and sexualized bodies. Both sports photo-
graphy and pornography are fixated on the body, minutely examining its
performative possibilities and special qualities. Both are concerned with arousal
– either of the photographic subject straining to perform at their best or of the
viewer in deriving pleasurable excitement from the image before them.
Pornographic images tend to take two forms. In ‘hard core’ pornography
there is plenty of action – a person or persons is doing something to another
person or persons. It might be suggested that there is a precise equivalent
in sports photography of what is called in hard core pornography (both
moving and still) the ‘money’ or ‘cum’ shot (L. Williams 1989) – the visible
male ejaculation that is the culmination of male-oriented pornography, which
parallels the ‘ecstatic’ captured moment (as discussed in Chapter 4) when a
winning goal is scored or a decisive play is made (Miller 1990, 2001). Sometimes