Page 200 - Sport Culture and the Media

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from facial expressions and body language, the soap opera reflects
and reinforces the cultural imperative which requires women to do the
emotional work in their relationships.
(Rose and Friedman 1997: 4)

In contrast to the traditional positioning of women as concerned above all
else with emotions and relationships (as is exemplified by the current revival of
the 1960s term ‘chick flick’ to describe films that deal deeply with human,
especially romantic, relationships in contrast to the spectacular ‘shoot ’em up’
and car-chase action of the typical ‘guy’s movie’), Rose and Friedman (1997: 4)
describe the traditional ‘masculine mode of spectatorship’ as one expected
‘to avoid the emotional register, emphasizing instead the classical masculine
pleasures in voyeurism and objectification, and constructing a more linear,
goal-oriented structure of looking’. So, if men are culturally trained not to get
too emotional and involved in their viewing activities, we would expect tele-
vision sport – until quite recently a predominantly male viewing choice and
still one dominated by men in terms of which sports get watched on TV and
when (Sargent et al. 1998) – to be sober and cool, appreciating the technical
excellence of the athleticism on show, and balanced in its appreciation of the
merits of all competitors and teams. Such a television sports spectator would
scrupulously honour the Olympic ideals of fair play and respect for taking part
rather than for winning. The familiar picture of the unhinged and hysterical
male viewer supporting an individual or team as they engage in live sports
competition is hardly in accord with this view. As Rose and Friedman go on
to say:
The sports gaze depends not on distance, fragmentation, or objectifica-
tion, but on identification, nearness, and participation. The male viewer’s
relationship to the image is in fact quite similar to that of the female
soap viewer: he is alternately absorbed in multiple identifications and
distracted. Rather than emphasizing a voyeuristic and objectifying gaze,
television sports seems to invite the viewer to engage in a distracted,
identificatory, and dialogic spectatorship which may be understood as a
masculine counterpart to soap opera’s ‘maternal gaze’.
(Rose and Friedman 1997: 4)
In suggesting that male (and, presumably, female) television sports spectators
have a similar relationship with the moving sports text as do aficionados of
screen melodrama (McKay and Rowe 1997), Rose and Friedman could be pro-
posing either that sports fans want their television sport that way or that the
practical logic of securing and holding mass audiences in television inevitably
impels the text towards a deeply emotional engagement between text, subject