There seems to be a large emphasis on the beauty and sex appeal of female athletes, especially in the past 20 years. Female athletes are seen as models who happen to play a sport. Although they wouldn’t consider themselves that, through the eyes of our society, they are.
Sports marketers have been trying to sell women’s sports with sex for as long as I can remember. Female athletes are looked at differently from male athletes; while a man is judged solely on his talent to play the sport he loves, women are judged for their physical appearance as well as their skills.
No offense to older female athletes like Billie Jean King and Cheryl Miller, but they weren’t causing whiplash in the necks of men across the country or globe. Now we have the Williams sisters, Serena and Venus, Maria
Sharapova, Ronda Rousey, Gina Carano and Elena Delle Donne who are admired for their looks first. If they happen to be good at their sport, that is just a bonus.
These women are marketed to help raise the awareness of their sport, but using sex to sell is taking two steps backward. I thought women wanted to be treated equal and be taken seriously as athletes and professionals.
Granted, many of these women do actually have talent, but athletes like Gina Carano and Anna Kornikova saw success and fame based solely on their looks.
Carano used her sex appeal to launch a film career after she lost her first fight in mixed martial arts. She was undefeated in seven fights before that, but it was highly rumored that she was given easy opponents at first so she could be the biggest name in the sport, building its popularity with her face and not her fists.
Since then, Ronda Rousey, current Ultimate Fighting Championships champion, has burst onto the scene by staying undefeated in her first nine fights. But when she was first introduced to the fight world, it was on the cover of ESPN The Magazine wearing nothing but the hand wraps she wears under her gloves. Although she has shown her talent is legitimate, UFC still needed sex to sell female mixed martial arts.
Anna Kornikova, the girlfriend of singer Enrique Iglesias, rose to the top of the tennis world in the late 1990s but it wasn’t because of her play on the court, because she never won a singles title on the pro women’s tour. She retired from tennis after a back injury but has made more of a name for herself as model after her playing career.
I have no problem with female athletes wanting to look good and be sexy, but to be known for that instead of their play on the court, in the field or even in the cage, shouldn’t be how it’s done.
Maybe as a society we all just keep getting better looking, but I just don’t want to see the gender equality that women have been fighting for take serious steps backward because of the way some of these female athletes are objectified. We all know sex sells but when it’s at the expense of your dignity and pride, is it worth it? I just hope these women know what they are doing by promoting their sport the way they are, because the marketing executives sure know what they are doing.
