Not Just a game

Politics have historically been an enormous part of sports. Many of the world’s most famous athletes have used sport as a platform for change as the article Not Just a Game by Dave Zirin states. Zirin believes that sports and politics should always intertwine. He points to the fact that famous athletes such as Muhammad Ali and Bully Jean King used sports to promote social change. He then proclaims that the problem in sports today is that players do not use sport as a political device. I however disagree with Zirin’s views. First, I see sports as a way to escape the reality of everyday life and politics. I believe that this is a positive aspect, not a negative one. Take the example of the New Orleans Saints return to the Super Dome after Hurricane Katrina. People had gone through such hardship and they chose that football game as a way to escape reality, if only for a few hours. The next point of disagreement I have with Zirin is his stance that athletes should stand up for causes, just as Muhammad Ali and Billy Jean King did. My response to that is: What cause? These athletes today are making millions of dollars per year and have money and power to do pretty much anything they wish. No athletes today are being blatantly segregated against in the way that Muhammad Ali and Billy Jean King were. No one today is being drafted to go to war the way Ali was. Times are changing and Zirin’s ideas have not evolved from the 1960’s. It is time to move on and face the new challenges that today brings us.

Lingerie Football, Sport, fad,

Pat Griffin discusses in her LGBT sports blog about the Lingerie Football League and the offensiveness she takes against it.

Such offensiveness involved is the media portrayals of women, example, hyper-sexualizing women, the names of the teams ( Fantasy, Desire, Bliss, Passion, etc). All of which as a class we have studied and are now able to interpret what the real context behind the Lingerie League is. In my opinion it is just a spectacle. Something to entertain the male sports loving fan demographic, which is also an incredibly lucrative industry by itself.

The women within this league may be serious athletes or they do not care about the portrayal of themselves on national tv. They are scantily clad, which Griffin notes, "there are lots of skin, lots of T & A". Women showing a lot of skin will for sure entice a mail crowd to enter an arena and see them. But nobody is taking this seriously (maybe the players, maybe), the audience is primarily only going there to see the women in skimpy clothes. Griffin says that the wardrobe malfunctions lures the fans in like crashes lure nascar fans.

We also have to look at the players themselves. The women from what i am seeing are very attractive (some), fit, athletic(?) (never seen a game). One can agree that the players were chosen mainly for sexual atrractiveness, Pat Griffin states that "it seems clear the players were chosen for their appearance and heterosexiness as much as for their football skills. everyone of them on the LFL website has large breasts and small buts, not one with muffin tops and love handles". We can compare appearance of the women to the men in the NFL... not all guys have six packs or well defined pecs, assumingly, i don't really want to check.

So this spectacle clearly involves, also, the female apologetic. We also look at the idea of female athletes becoming more masculinzed. These women do not fit that idea, they were brought in for a specific reason, to look sexy in lingerie and play some football for the entertainment of the male viewers

Lingerie Football As Women In Sport

Our reading this past week and topics we have discussed in class lately have related to the ideal women's body as an athlete and the desire to look a certain way and portray a certain image without losing their femininity, but when reading Pat Griffin's march 21st blog about the Lingerie Football League and relating to one of the participants coming out as as lesbian really struck my interest.

As Griffin stated in the blog, "that it seems clear that these players are chosen for their appearance and heterosexiness as much as their football skills. Everyone of them on the LFL website has large breasts and small butts. Not one has muffin top or love handles. This is easy to see because that is what the photos focus on: lots of skin." And i have to agree that this seems to be a logical technique of the league to gain more fans and viewers, especially for the easy possibility of a wardrobe malfunction while the game is being played. But as our readings discussed it happens with women's sports where they are required to unrealistically thin for their participation, a main sport that would be included would be gymnastics, where the women basically have no fat, no hips, but are well set on their upper half. With the LFL they are required to demonstrate a certain body image as a sole purpose for circulation of the league. When it comes to women's sports it has a lot to do with how the media reinforces the bodies of these athletes. And when these women's sports are finally given the representation that they have worked so long to gain recognition for the media does not entirely show their athletic abilities but instead focus on their sex portrayal as athletes, which is not fair.

And this is exactly what has happened with the Lingerie Football League, these women are not seen as athletes but as sex symbols wrestling and fighting with each other, apparently what everyone is dying to see these days. Is this used as a cover up so that it is almost acceptable to be seen watching a female sport and being interested in it? Maybe.

With the player of the LFL coming out as a lesbian, it may seem controversial for this specific sport as these women are playing football in very little skimpy clothing. But I feel as it is a step forward in women sport as they are already expected to have a certain body image that is almost unattainable to most women as it seems unnatural and now with her announcing her sexual preference she is allowing others to see that this sport does not have to be so sexually oriented but instead a sport that women do enjoy and should be given the respect and credit they deserve.

Not Just a Game

In the Sports, Media & Society blog, Melanie Formentin writes about renowned sports writer Dave Zirin's article about the role politics play in sports. He states a few key points in this article:

1) Militarization of professional sports is a huge issue. Fans don't even think twice about the political displays they see at sporting events, or watching sporting events. (military fly-overs, gun salutes, military nights, etc)

2)Pat Tillman's death and the controversy revolving around it. The cover up was mean to preserve the aura of Tillman as a sports star combined with a military hero, yet actually he was strongly against the war by his death.

3)Commercialization was another big issue talked about. 1992's "Dream Team" gold metal ceremony sported Michael Jordan with an American flag draped over his right shoulder. Little did spectators know, that this was meant to hide the reebok symbol on his jersey.

These main points bring fort a lot of emotions in regards to social media and subliminal messaging in the sporting realm. Political messages are involved in every aspect of our lives, and it's safe to say the those messages are the best at hiding in other forms of our culture. It also involves a sort of branding. People sympathize with stories about heroes and their hardships. Billy Jean King was another example listed in the article. Not only does this relate to our lecture on women's basketball in connection with breaking gender barriers, but it shows that the power of sport is extremely profound in our culture, and is able to cause a vast amount of change in ideals, and promote/instill ideas in our culture's minds.

My question is if this sort of subliminal advertising/media branding was/has been used to promote agendas of Title IX, either for or against?

Sex Testing in Sports

After reading an article on Mokgadi Caster Semenya of South Africa, I looked into the highly controversial problems dealing with gender determination. It is a very sensitive subject when dealing with athletes that fall into these categories, and can end a career upon embarrassment.

Sex testing was introduced at the 1968 Olympics. It came about as the result of Polish men were competing in various women sports. There have been man other cases throughout the year including Mokgadi's. Its came under criticism lately because of the fact that only women have been submitted to the testing. They have officially stopped from testing every athlete at Olympic and World Championships, but the IOC still has the power to test individual athletes if a problem does arrive. The process was stopped because of the humiliation and the unequal treatment between the male and female sex.

The testing is a very long process that goes farther than the slender hips, Adam apple checks, and muscular bodies. It is determined through chromosome testing which has been highly controversial too. Competitors whose test results showed chromosomes other than XX were considered to have failed the test and were consequently barred from competing as women. As the IOC Medical Team stated "I consider that our duty as doctors comes before everything, even Olympics, and that if we find such hybrid beings, we must if possible treat them and at the very least, help them to accept their fate as we ourselves do when we discover a shortcoming of some kind in ourselves. … these people are to be pitied, for throughout their lives they will be inadapted and thanks to sport, they probably tried to achieve a difficult assimilation into an often hostile, and even stupid, society." One of the most popular cases happened at the 1976 US Open where Renée Richards was banned from playing, until further testing was concluded. Richards appealed the ban, and ended up winning in here favor. It was constituted under the right for transsexuals rights.

There are many suspicious cases dealing with the sex testing controversy; there are guidelines set up now that to be constituted under a specific class you have to follow if your considered one of the hybrid athletes. As in the reading on ICON Teetzle-Equality, Equity, and Inclusion: Issues in Women and Transgendered Athletes' Participation at the Olympics, "Classifying individuals as strictly male or female in sport, as well as in the rest of society, and offering only two options for competition, fails to recognize and take into consideration the spectrum of individuals who fall somewhere between male and female, including the 0.1 – 1% of the global population born with ambiguous genitalia, those who have changed or transcended their sex assigned at birth, and those who identify with a sex other than female or male." I personally feel that there need to be a class like this in future Olympics, it would be a huge movement for transsexual athletes.

In relation to our readings every week in class, this week we covered the "body". These readings not only covered the extremes that women go to to reach these unattainable goals, such as a women's body with relatively no fat, no hips, and "very well set" on the top but also this category in the form of elite athletes and what they put themselves through in order to win and to be the best. In the reading, "Anabolic Steroids" we get a candid, inside view of a female body builder athlete and her experience with steroids. Tam Thompson originally began to experiment with ssteroids because she believed it would give her a "competitive edge". She also felt as though she wasn't showcasing her real strength; after one of her competitions she finished sixth out of nine women and stated that she knew she was stronger than these other women and then instead of training harder she turned to steroids. Just like men, women put themselves through many things in order to achieve the athletic status that they so desperately seek for. An example of this realtes to another reading this week, "Understanding the Female Athlete Triad", Christy Henrich, a young Olympic set gymnast, got some unsettling advice one day at a meet. Although Christy weighed a tiny 95 lbs one of the judges gave her advice, saying if she expected to win Olympic gold, she would have to lose weight! This seems somewhat obsurd to others mainly because Christy is small to begin with, 95 lbs to be exact. There is no reason why Christy should have to lose even more weight in order to achieve her goal of winning goal. Christy eventually died from developing severe eating disorders and weighed only 47 lbs when she passed away. In relation to sport, women and men are very alike. They both are attempting to achieve the impossible, striving to reach these unattainable goals that so many other athletes have been successful in doing. Unfortunately, as the years have passed on, more and more information is coming out about athletes and their participation with performance enhancing drugs along with other forms of things that will help these athlete(s) become the best. This is where these athletes are overconforming to the sport; it has become normalized now in athletics to use these substances to attain a higher athletic status. It is not uncommon at all these days to find out about an athlete who failed on their drug test, Ramirez as an example, he failed his second drug test and who have to sit out almost half the season, but instead decided to retire in order to avoid the consequences from his positive test. Even though men and women athletes have this drive in common, there is still a very wide gap in understanding of men and women's sports. The main ideology in our sport world today, is that men are better, stronger, faster; men's sports are better than women's aka more entertaining and less boring. That women can participate in sport, but are more likely to injure themselves and simply will never be as good as men. This reminded me of the NCAA games we watched just last week; we sat and watched not only the men's semi-final/final but as well as the women's. In the twitter blog, "men's basketball compared to the women's game", the narrator makes various statements about comparing the games of the men and the women's on television. Spectators of the games were not impressed by the men's abilities and lacking so much to compare it to a women's game; this was due to the terrible shooting percentages by both teams and the low scoring number of points. This is appalling to both men and women athletes. This is where the gap can still be seen in sports today, men's sports are seen as the top with women the latter. There is no reason why men's sport should still be considered to be above women's. Women are participating in sports more than ever now in the 21st century, and this number doesn't seem to be going any where in the other direction. The athletes who are active today need to remember that they are capable of acheieving their goals and making it to national competitions but these need to be reached in healthy and legal ways. Both men and women have the ability to push their bodies to the ultimate extreme but this does not always end well, as I stated earlier with Christ's example. We need to continue to make sure there is a clear distinction between what is acceptable and what is not.

Twitter Bashing

Without doubt, the 2011 National Championship game between the Bulter Bulldogs and the Connecticut Huskies may be consider one of the most poorly played games in the history of collegiate Basketball. Bulter and Connecticut simply could not find a way to score the ball consistently, therefore, the two teams combined for the lowest combined first half points ever in a national championship game. Bulter, returning to their second straight championship game, shot a disappointing 18.8 percent, setting the record as the last shooting percentage ever in the game’s history. Though the game was boring, interesting tweets concerning the game and women’s basketball were posted online, which some believe denies the women’s game of it’s legitimacy.
“It is not a stretch to say that the women’s national championship game will be far more interesting.” Said CBS analyst Roland S. Martin. “April 2011: The month that women’s college basketball caught up to men’s college basketball” tweeted “The Sports Guy” from ESPN. These kind of tweets may seem positive for women’s basketball, until one realizes that the only reason it’s being compared to a men’s sport is due to the boring and unexciting nature of the men’s title game. Upon this realization, I think it’s completely unreasonable to the women’s game, to compare it to the disaster that the men’s title game ended up being.

In the article “NCAA March Madness” by Coyte Cooper, she covers the multiple issues of gender inequality across NCAA sports. “Women’s basketball is marginalized whereas men’s basketball is framed as the norm” (7) states the article. I believe that this is very true. When one thinks about March Madness, the first thing that usually comes to mind is the men’s tournament, with the women’s tournament being completely ignored by most. With the discussions on Title IX and the individuals that have fought so hard for equality among the gendered sports, it’s sad to see that although women are allowed the opportunity to play, they are still considered to be a lower form of entertainment and only equal to a boring, dull and poorly executed men’s game. It’s not only unfair to the players, but to women in general to be put in that sort of environment, where their best is only as good as the worst of men.

Although Twitter has become a major social outlet for the general public and athletes alike, tweets like these, although may seem funny to some, only do harm to our women basketball players by making them inferior to anything but the worst of men’s performances. Hopefully in the future, tweets like these will cease to occur and equality among the media coverage and acceptance of the two tournaments will be the new norm.