Page 173 - Sport Culture and the Media

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photographic texts is admiration of their sporting achievements rather than of
their musculature (Miller 1998c). Yet there are two images of sportsmen in the
Carlton and United Breweries Best Australian Sports Writing and Photography
1996 collection that do have a sexual quality. In each, the sportsman is not
active but is receiving and/or returning the gaze. One shot of the Olympic
swimmer Kieren Perkins floating in a pool has a faintly voyeuristic quality (he
cannot see the camera), while another posed shot of the face of ‘pin-up’ rugby
league player Andrew Ettingshausen with shower water pouring down can be
read as a ‘smouldering’ return of the voyeuristic gaze (a photograph of Cathy
Freeman, in a similar style and by the same photographic team, has less water, is
in extreme close-up and has a more androgynous quality).
These latter images introduce an important question and development. We
may wonder what happens to the image of the sportsman when positioned as
the recipient of the gaze in a similar fashion to that of the traditional objectifi-
cation of the female body. Of course, male bodies have long been gazed at
as objects of desire (for both homosexual men and heterosexual women)
with varying licence to do so, ranging from ‘secretive’ viewing of men’s sports
magazines by gay men (see Miller 1998c) to the open if often sanitized appreci-
ation of male bodies in pop culture. Until recently, there has been a reluctance
to objectify sexually the male sports body. This was left to the female sports
body, which (as noted above) has tended to be regarded as only tangentially
sporting. The gradual freeing up of fixed socio-sexual identities, the influence
of feminism, and the increasingly overt sexualization of culture and com-
mercialization of sexuality have resulted in a strengthening trend of openly
sexualizing sportsmen. Thus, just as some female athletes have allowed them-
selves to be represented in traditional soft core poses in calendars like the
Golden Girls of Athletics and the Matildas soccer team (in Australia), so the
Men of (Rugby) League Calendar (Rowe 1997c) offered up images of the male
sporting body to the sexualizing gaze (Lynch 1993). It even became possible
for sportsmen like Andrew Ettingshausen, as we shall discuss below, to feel
‘violated’ by intrusive cameras in a manner not dissimilar to that of many
celebrity women.

Politics and portraits

The increasing eroticization (making sexy) and aestheticization (making beauti-
ful) of the male athletic body does potentially change the gendered dynamics of
cultural power that I have analysed in this chapter. For example, Black + White
Magazine’s (1996) ‘The Atlanta Dream Issue’ consists of 170 nude portraits of
Australian Olympians bound for Atlanta in a non-sexually segregated media