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"Offensive Play" Those who doubt there’s sexuality The Orlando Predators, reigning champions of Arena Football for two years running, had a billboard promotion at the beginning of this season showing a close-up of the more than ample breasts of a local woman known as "Laurie." The billboard caption read, "Fake Right. Fake Left." Now I know people around the country are saying, "What do you expect in a state that is the home of a mammary-themed restaurant chain?" But in fact there were people locally who found this in bad taste. Last week the story took another turn as the aforementioned "Laurie" was arrested as part of an alleged prostitution ring being operated out of a local "men’s club," the current euphemism for topless bar or strip club. The Predator’s GM had no comment on these developments. Others have. Juliet Macur, a sportswriter for The Orlando Sentinel, asked if in fact sport and sexuality go together. The answer is of course, yes, and they have for a long time. Since at least the middle ages when the "Joy Maidens" cheered on their daring knights at the local Saturday afternoon joust there was at least a whiff of testosterone in the air and an implied romantic or sexual payoff at the end of the day. The fact of the matter is that the American sporting culture reeks with sexuality of all sorts. Last fall when I taught my American Sport History class, the students worked their way through Michael Oriard’s fascinating Reading Football, which deals with the rise of intercollegiate football in the United States. One of the clear sub-themes of the work is the connection between masculinity and football and the clear link between masculinity and sexuality. Indeed, this connection has been elaborated over and over again in the culture of both college and professional football, both on and off the field. Tests of manhood are constantly referenced by coaches. Insults of one’s players or one’s opponents have clear implications concerning their sexuality. The one polite reference "You throw like a girl," is designed to insult the male and those who use it rarely notice how it denigrates females. The less polite, "You pussy," is a clear denigration of women and extremely popular in the male jock culture. Less overtly crude, but in some ways more perverse, is the fully accepted use of female cheerleaders in various states of under-dress, as well as dancers and pom pom girls similarly clad. Baton twirling sex objects like the Purdue Golden Girl and her many campus cousins illustrate the ties between titillation and sport auxiliaries. If you have any doubt about the sexual character of these female roles, sit near a group of men at a sporting event and listen for the discussions of T&A during the timeout and halftime performances. In popular and folk culture, the quarterback who makes the winning touchdown or the sharp-shooting basketball player who wins the game always gets the girl. This scenario is also a staple of more serious literature and omnipresent in film. These are images that have been a part of the sporting culture in America since the rise of intercollegiate athletics in the 19th century, and institutionalized in the persona of the "Baseball Annie" in the early 20th century. With the rise in the popularity of women’s sport, the issue of sexuality in sport has taken some different turns. Immediately on the appearance of women’s sport in the 19th century, questions of the compatibility of femininity and athleticism were raised. Indeed this should not have been a surprise, as sport was already so deeply identified with masculinity. This led initially to claims that sport was harmful to the reproductive capabilities of women, and then later to the charge that any woman who was athletic was more like a man. Lesbianism is a label that has been put on women’s sport, and when it first was used it was clearly meant to be a pejorative term. Any all-male discussion of women’s sport invariably and perhaps inevitably includes such a discussion of the sexuality of the female athletes. It seems to me that recent examples of female athletes posing nude, at least in part, stem from a desire to indirectly answer the charges of lesbianism, except in the cases of those women who celebrate their lesbianism. Brandi Chastain’s nude in Gear magazine, five-time Olympic gold medallist Jenny Thompson’s recent photo in Sports Illustrated, and the photo of the U.S. Women’s Swim Team clad only in the American flag, all were part of a discussion of this trend on ESPN’s Outside the Lines last week. Chastain said that she was simply celebrating her body and did not see posing nude as sexual in nature. Such use of nudity by female athletes may also be a way of calling attention to women’s sport in a sports media culture that still is dominated by males. If the media is not willing to adequately cover the sport itself, then bring the male editors and reporters into the tent another way. Americans use sex to sell everything else in American society, so there should be no surprise when sex is used to market women’s sport. In a sporting culture that is permeated with sexual symbolism, is driven by the male quest for power and dominance, and is a major commercial enterprise, it would be more surprising if sex was not a part of the equation than the fact that it is. However, to understand is not to acquiesce in or accept these developments. Objectifying sex or turning it into a commodity only serves to further dehumanize the culture.
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