Women and Sports in the United States: A Documentary Reader

SEPARATING THE MEN FROM THE GIRLS

women as sexual objects instead of serious, competent professionals. And so the discriminatory media treatment of women athletes in the United States has, to a certain extent, been reenacted within the machinery of the very sports media that women journalists represent. y SEPARATING THE MEN FROM THE GIRLS The Gendered Language of Televised Sports Michael A. Messner, Margaret Carlisle Duncan, and Kerry Jensen Introduction Feminist scholars have argued that in the twentieth century, the institution of sport has provided men with a homosocial sphere of life through which they have bolstered a sagging ideology of male superiority.1 Through the exclusion of women, and the association of males with physical competence, strength, power, and even violence, sport has provided a basis through which men have sought to reconstitute an otherwise challenged masculine hegemony (Bryson, 1987; Hall, 1988; Kidd, 1987; Messner, 1988; Theberge, 1981; Whitson, 1990). But starting with the 1972 passage of Title IX in the U.S., athletic participation of school-age girls increased dramatically. In 1971, only 294,015 girls participated in high school sports, compared with 3,666,917 boys. By the 1989–90 academic year, there were 1,858,659 girls participating in high school sports, compared with 3,398,192 boys.2 Increased numerical participation in sports by girls and women has been accompanied by changing attitudes as well. A nationwide survey found large majorities of parents and children agreeing that “sports are no longer for boys only” (Wilson and Women’s Sports Foundation, 1988). With increases in opportunities for female athletes, including expanded youth programs, better and earlier coaching, and increases in scholarships for college women athletes, some dramatic improvements in female athletic performance have resulted. In fact, the “muscle gap”—the degree of difference between male and female athletic performance in measurable The Feminine Image in Sports and Media 265 From Michael Messner, Margaret Carlisle Duncan, and Kerry Jensen, Gender and Society (7) pp. 121–137, copyright 1993. Reprinted by Permission of Sage Publications, Inc. 266 WOMEN AND SPORTS IN THE UNITED STATES sports like swimming and track and field—has closed considerably in the past fifteen years (Crittenden, 1979; Dyer, 1982; Kidd, 1990). In short, the dramatic increase in female athleticism has begun to challenge the assumption that sport is and should be a “male world.” Organized sports, though still dominated by men at nearly all levels, has in the past two decades become a “contested terrain” of gender relations (Birrell, 1987/ 1988; Messner, 1988). Much of the continued salience of sport as an institutional site for the construction and legitimation of masculine power lies in its role as a mass-mediated spectacle (Clarke and Clarke, 1982; Hargreaves, 1986; Willis, 1982). There has been a boom in female athletic participation, but the sports media has been very slow to reflect it. Bryant’s (1980) two-year content analysis of two newspapers revealed that only 4.4% of total column inches devoted to sports focused on women’s sports. Graydon (1983) observed that in the early 1980’s, over 90% of sports reporting covered men’s sports. Rintala and Birrell’s (1984) analysis of Young Athlete magazine, and Duncan and Sayaovong’s (1990) examination of Sports Illustrated for Kids magazine revealed that visual images of male athletes in these magazines tend to outnumber those of female athletes by a roughly two-to-one ratio. Moreover, text and visual images tend to frame female and male athletes “as fundamentally and essentially different ,” and thus to support stereotypical notions of natural differences between the sexes (Duncan and Sayaovong, 1990:91). In part of our study (not dealt with in this paper), we examined four major metropolitan daily newspapers and found that over a three-month period in 1990, 81% of all sports column inches were devoted exclusively to men’s sports, 3.5% covered women’s sports, and 15.5% covered both men’s and women’s sports, or gender-neutral topics. We also examined six weeks of a leading television newscast, and found that 92% of sports news time was devoted exclusively to men’s sports, 5% covered women’s sports, and 3% covered gender-neutral topics. This sort of ignoring or underreporting of existing women’s events contributes to the continuation of what Gerbner (1978) called “the symbolic annihilation” of women’s sports. Despite the paucity of coverage of women’s sports by the media, there are some recent signs of increased coverage, especially on cable television (Eastman and Meyer, 1989). If...