Page 179 - Sport Culture and the Media

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sporting performance rather than an invitation to libidinal pleasure. As we
have seen, to ward off the vulnerable passivity of the female sex object
uncomplainingly and undemandingly receiving the gaze (‘take me, I’m yours’),
the male image is (hyper)active. He is moving not still, standing not reclining,
confronting rather than seducing the camera’s eye. In potentially opening
themselves up to the ‘feminization’ of their body image by being portrayed in a
sexualized manner, sportsmen seek to counter such a process by doing some-
thing – anything – rather than just receive the gaze.
But what happens if, like Andrew Ettingshausen, the male sports photo-
graphic subject is caught unawares? Miller (1998a) examines in some detail
the notorious defamation case in which Ettingshausen successfully sued HQ
magazine in 1993 for publishing without permission a picture of him naked in
the shower. While he had allowed himself to be featured in other photospreads
for women’s magazines which clearly capitalized on his sex appeal (readers of
the Australian edition of Cleo magazine had once voted him the ‘Sexiest Man
Alive’), Ettingshausen (whose popular nickname is ET) argued that the implica-
tion that he had connived in the photographic display of his penis to a wide
audience showed him in a questionable light and threatened to undermine
his reputation as a clean-living family man and his employment as a school
development officer for the sport of rugby league. This case highlights three of
the key areas of sensitivity that we have seen apply in the area of photographing
the male sports body: preventing a view of the penis (an image much less
policed in the case of women’s genitalia), avoiding any suggestion of passivity
or helplessness (as was felt to be precipitated by the ‘unguarded’ shot) and
concentrating on its heterosexual rather than homosexual appeal. Despite the
relative novelty of male sports stars adopting an explicit mode of sexual
address, however, the case of ET was confined to the ‘specular’ availability of a
heterosexual man to similarly inclined women.
Yet, the very need to carry out such ‘hard ideological work’ to exclude
‘unacceptable’ images and meanings of the male sports body confirms its
semiotic vulnerability. As Miller (1998a: 107) argues, ‘The male pinup draws
out insecurity, instability, and contradictions in masculinity. Which kind of
gaze is expected to consume it? Contrary to conventional masculine icons, the
pinup pacifies the body’. Whereas once the imaging (in television as well as in
still photography) of the male sports body was assumed to be only of technical
interest to other, assumed heterosexual men, the appeal has been widened to
incorporate ‘single women and gays, because they have high discretionary
income’ (Miller 1998a: 107), not to mention the married women who control
most household expenditure and constitute a large and, until the mid-1980s,
largely neglected audience sector for media sport. For example, in the lead up
to the Sydney 2000 Olympic Games, the Australian version of the women’s