"Regardless of the primary viewing audience of the commercial, women advertising characters tended to be shown as sex objects" (Monk-Turner et al. 202). This quote describes what this page will be about. I argue that women in sports advertisements are not only made to sell products to other women, but to sell bodies to both men and women.

As seen in from the ads on the previous page, most images of women were sexualized and idealized for the male gaze. This male gaze is discussed by Rose in relation to fetishism in a "quite particular visual, temporal and special" way (Rose, 122). The male gaze is how stereotypical men view photos in a way that is pleasurable for them. This pleasure in looking is called "scopophilia" by Rose (Rose 118). Sports Illustrated is a perfect example of this gaze, and in particular the swimsuit edition. The magazine (also posted on-line where I got my images), does a yearly swimsuit edition featuring women in swimsuits in seductive poses. They focus on both professional athletes and professional models. Two of the pictures (below) are of professional athletes, and the third is the professional model. If you can't tell which is the model and which are the athletes, Sports Illustrated has succeeded at demeaning women athletes and neutralizing the power they have when performing their sports.

Yet, images of female athletes are not just produced for and consumed by men. Ads featuring women athletes also ask women to identify, envy, and perhaps even desire the women shown. As I will discuss further on the next page, women's bodies are idealized and these ads help to create a new impossible to obtain body image. Our culture likes to believe that beautiful idealized women have more power and, "though women gain some individual material benefits by using sex appeal, this is within the confines of a male-dominated system that determines what is feminine and appealing" (Carty 134). Carty restricts women's sexuality to the male dominated world even if there is power gained, it is an illusion destroyed by aging, gaining weight, and numerous other things. Carty "argue[s] that these characterizations [shown in sports magazines targeted at men] are constructed in a way that sexualizes the [female] athletes to appeal to the male audience" (Carty 135).