This web site looks at women in sports advertisements. It
looks at famous women athletes and advertisements that portray the idea
of woman and models posing as athletes. It ties in these advertisements
with authors who have written on similar subjects. I have been an
athlete for the past 18 years, but have only recently noticed how some
advertisements aimed towards women athletes are extremely degrading and
sexualizing. So why are these womenhyper-sexualized in advertisements?
Perhaps, because athletics are historically a male dominated field, and
strength is considered to be masculine. Many women in sports feel the
need to be overly feminine to combat the masculine ties of strength.
Women athletes that feel the need to "compensate for their perceived
masculine comportment as athletes by enhancing elements of their
feminine appearance" are called feminine apologetics (Lowe 121). Lowe's
article focuses on female bodybuilders and the regulations that inspire
femininity. The only body enhancement women are allowed to have in
bodybuilding is breast implants, Lowe argues, in order to make the women
appear more feminine (Lowe 130). Lowe argues that the more masculine
the sport, the more feminine women participants try to be. For example,
bodybuilders often have long blonde hair, get spray tans, and wear an
absorbent amount of make-up. On the contrary, volleyball players don't
have to try as hard to be feminine because their sport is traditionally
a women's sport. What makes Brandi Chastain any different from male
soccer players who take off their shirts? (See top of next page) Why is
it a big deal for a woman to remove clothing in celebration but a common
site among men? Through this webpage I hope to explore some of those questions as I
focus on the question: How do advertisers use this sexual woman athlete
to sell their products to women? I use intertextually to see what the
advertisements say as a group. Intertextuality is "the way the meaning
of any one discursive image or text depends not on that one text or
image but also the meanings carried by other images or texts" (Rose
142).
Images (click)
Reetone
Yoga
Tennis
a class taught by Bob Bednar in the Communication Studies Department at Southwestern University