Page 177 - Sport Culture and the Media

158 || SPORT, CULTURE AND THE MEDIA

and women’ as ‘fitness conumers’. We have noted that many feminists have
complained about an undue emphasis in the sports media on the sexual and
physical appearance of sportswomen. What, then, are the implications of
looking at sportsmen in this way? Is this a move towards a kind of equality –
every athlete, male or female, gets ogled because for professional sportsworkers
this experience just ‘goes with the territory’? Is it likely to unite female and male
athletes in resistance to being treated like strippers and ‘page 3 girls’, so that
now men know what it is like to be regarded as a sex object, something will be
done? Or does the more general power differential between men and women
mean that sportsmen find being sexually objectified less oppressive, and that
once they have posed for the calendars and pin-up shots men can still be taken
seriously and not identified exclusively with the way they look, but women
remain – as Duncan (1994) pointed out above – subject to the ‘panoptic’ gaze?
These issues are complicated further when we take into account the rather
heterosexist assumptions of most critical analysts. To what degree do these
equations change when we are addressing the homosexual or bisexual gaze?
What if the viewer feels homosexual desire (gay or lesbian) for the photo-
graphic sports object or, more disruptively, if that object of desire has ‘gone
public’ about their own homosexuality? Thus it can be seen that changes in the
way that athletes are portrayed in sports photography and in the relationships
between viewer and photographic object/subject (a distinction made on the
basis of how much room the person being photographed has to project some-
thing of themselves rather than be the ‘plaything’ of the viewer) have relevance
for the whole field of gender relations, sexuality and, as will be discussed later,
racial and ethnic identities.

Imaging sporting masculinity

Looking at and imaging the male body is an integral aspect of the culture
surrounding post-war popular music. Every year, new pop icons (usually
white), from the Bay City Rollers to Hanson, Bros to Take That, New Kids
on the Block to the Backstreet Boys and ’N Sync, emerge to take the mantle
(usually worn for only a short time) of the pop sensation at the centre of
current adolescent female desire. More ‘mature’ audiences are also catered for
in various genres through (again, usually white) male figures like Jon Bon Jovi,
Chris Isaak and Mick Jagger, although black musicians like the late Marvin
Gaye and Lionel Ritchie also have their followings. ‘Queer’ figures such as
Michael Jackson and Prince stand out as anomalies – as, presumably, queer
figures should (Seidman 1996). So, while we are used to gazing at images of
male and female pop stars (such as Madonna and Jennifer Lopez) in an overtly