Page 73 - Introduction to Electronic Commerce and Social Commerce

62 • Sport, Media and Society

While the use of banter may not be confined to men, Easthope (1990) argued
that it is used so often as a form of male exchange that it can be seen as a second

feature of masculine style. The defining aspects of banter relate to both its form and
content:

As humour or comedy, banter makes use of every kind of irony, sarcasm, pun, cli-
chéd reply, and so is an example of the joke . . . The content of banter has a double
function. Outwardly banter is aggressive, a form in which the masculine ego as-
serts itself. Inwardly, however, banter depends on a close, intimate and personal
understanding of the person who is the butt of the attack. It thus works as a way of

affirming the bond of love between men while appearing to deny it. (pp. 87–8)
Finlay and Johnson (1997) considered football talk programmes as instances of ban-
ter. They analysed the ITV Saturday lunchtime show from the early 1990s, Saint and
Greavsie, pointing to ‘the playful antagonism between St John (the Scotsman) and
Greaves (the Englishman), which is employed to legitimise racist and /or chauvinistic
remarks’ (Finlay and Johnson 1997: 137). The authors argued that the ostensibly ag-
gressive sparring was offset by unspoken understanding between the two presenters,
indicated, in part, by the proximity to each other in their seating arrangements.
Finlay and Johnson (1997) suggested that televised football talk operates in a
similar way to women’s gossip, which has been understood as having social func-
tion. The programmes establish a discursive space ‘in which men can interact with-
out women and begin to perform masculinity’ (Finlay and Johnson 1997: 140 –1).
However, they concluded that, unlike women’s gossip, football talk stops short of
genuine intimacy and the sharing of personal experience, instead focusing on the
game and the professional lives of the players.
To understand televised sport as a gendered genre is to acknowledge that what
may appear to be gender-neutral is, in fact, culturally coded as masculine. Neverthe-
less, other elements of televised sport are more associated with programme types
attracting female viewers such as close-ups and never-ending narrative structures.
Sports competitions go on and on, after all, much like soap opera. Gender is not
fixed, and nor are the ways in which males and females view televised sport. Gen-

dered styles are often based on stereotypical views of masculinity and femininity
that mask the blurring of boundaries and the presence of shared identities and inter-
ests. The following case study explores characteristics of the televised coverage of
women’s and men’s football.

The Changing Face of Football on Television

A precedent in the media analysis of sport was set by Buscombe’s (1975a) British
Film Institute television monograph, which focused on the televising of football on