Page 172 - Sport Culture and the Media

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dramatic, often violent kind. Most of the images, when examined further, are
close-ups or medium close-ups, allowing the viewer to see the strained expressions
of the sporting combatant. None of the pictured sports – basketball, athletics, sea-
and wind-surfing, sailboarding, swimming, cycling, cricket and the football codes –
features a performer in a leather bikini. In the rest of the magazine there is neg-
ligible coverage of women’s sport, thereby creating a deep split between ‘serious’
sports photographs involving professional sportsmen and ‘decorative’ sports
photographs involving models pretending to be professional sportswomen. Hence,
sports magazines like Inside Sport (which, in this case, is part of a publisher’s
roster that includes ‘girlie’ magazines) take their place alongside young male-
oriented media organs (the term is used advisedly) like Loaded and Ralph in
sedulously resisting (as Davis found in her case study of Sports Illustrated) what
they see as the unwarranted incursions of feminism. Inside Sport’s self-
proclaimed ‘biggest issue ever’, on the eve of the Sydney Olympics (September
2000), had on its cover two models in patriotic body paint swimsuits (a ‘trailer’
for a photo spread inside that did interesting things with flags) and a photofea-
ture of Ali, ‘our 1999 Sportsmodel of the Year’, on a tropical island that func-
tioned as ‘the ideal pre-Games training venue for our preparation’ (Inside Sport
2000: 106, 109) As Stoddart (1994a: 8) points out, Inside Sport’s ‘editors openly
admit to using sexual images to sell copy to male readers’, by which, of course,
he means only ‘straight’ male readers (possibly with some gay women as niche
readership). Short of successfully persuading such publications to change their
target marketing strategy to include women and gay men, the only immediate
mainstream alternative is to follow the rather troubled path of women-oriented
sports magazines in the USA (Creedon 1994b).
In the case of the Carlton and United Breweries Best Australian Sports
Writing and Photography 1996, there is a little more variation in what is taken
to be a good sports photograph. There are more non-action shots and a small
number of women featured but, while there is less reliance on close-ups, it is
also the case that all but one of the women (the Australian Aboriginal runner
Cathy Freeman, with captioned name mis-spelt ‘Kathy’) who appear are filmed
at long distance. Not coincidental, perhaps, given the paucity of images of
women, is the absence of any expressive sexuality and eroticism in the photo-
graphs. Little in the way of sexual projection occurs in the action shots, as
viewers are encouraged to concentrate on what is being done rather than on
how appealing the athlete might look in doing it (although allowance should be
made for the full and unpredictable repertoire of human desire, which might,
for example, extend to finding bloodied faces and painful expressions sexually
arousing). There is nothing altogether surprising about this observation given
the active repression of homosexual desire in male sport (Pronger 1990;
Messner 1992). Thus, the ‘alibi’ for men gazing on other men in sports