Now that Venus and Serena have shown us women can be strong and sexy, and Annika has teed off with the boys on the PGA tour, is it finally time to kiss female sport gender stereotypes good-bye?
Not quite yet, says U of T sociology professor Dr. Helen Lenskyj. In a lecture entitled “Getting our gender correct: sexuality, femininity and sport” given on Feb. 2 as part of the joint Faculty Seminar/Gender Matters Seminar Series, Lenskyj tracked two decades worth of history of media’s images of women in sport to show that, while some ground has been won in the battle over female gender and sexuality stereotyping, “not much,” as she said, “has changed.”
The lecture series comes shortly before U of T’s formal celebrations later this month in recognition of the 120th anniversary of women on campus as students as well as the twentieth year marker of the establishment of the campus Status of Women equity office, making Prof. Lenskyj’s lecture on gender stereotypes in sports a timely topic.
Describing her talk as an illustrated enhancement of her 2003 book Out on the Field: Gender, Sport and Sexualities, Lenskyj focused on how the media perpetuates gender stereotypes and had many examples on hand to back up her argument.
Lenskyj traced the move in advertising away from what she called “the classic apologetic female sports figure” seen in the Eighties style aerobics queens without muscles or hint of sweat, to more inclusive representations of women in recent ads such as the use of real life female professional football league players with tackling gear on and hair messed up. But, as the changes in female representations show, ground has been won in the battle against sexism, but the war, Lenskyj says, is far from being won.
“There’s been some progress-there’s been some steps forward but at the same time there’s been some steps backwards,” she said. For the most part, however, “sport continues to entrench gender differences, it continues to entrench male privilege.” The status quo remains unchanged, with examples found in the attractive ice sweeping girls some NHL clubs have introduced to boost ratings, to the continued emphasis on women athletes as mothers and toenail polish wearers.
And, while sex continues to be used to sell sports, it’s an exclusive image of femininity, and a heterosexualized one. “The ‘feminine’ in any sport related context is a code word for ‘heterosexual’,” Lenskyj asserted and told the audience that, “[the sports world] continues to entrench what I call flagging or threatened heterosexuality,” referring to what she says is “the backlash against progress GLBT [gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender] groups have made in fighting gender stereotypes over the last 10 or 20 years.”
As for solutions to this stall in on the way towards reworking the sports world’s gender and sexuality barriers and stereotypes, Lenskyj says she favours promoting an “inclusive” model to sport, one which she says “wouldn’t just look at high performance sports [such as the Olympics] as the goal. There would be room for everybody, a range of sports, a range of body types, a range of abilities.”
