Another Point of View

Another Point of View by Charles Hallman

Does sex sells women’s sports?

The WNBA announced recently that its games will be seen in over 200 countries this season. Yet the 11-year league is barely noticed statewide.

When the league tied itself with the opening of the latest Shrek movie with on-line, on-air and in-arena promotions, it lends credence that the WNBA, now going into its second decade of operations, is still identified as a niche sport – you wouldn’t catch the NBA co-promoting itself with some movie. “The increase in our global television reach is a reflection on the league’s world-class quality of play,” WNBA President Donna Orender gushed in a press release.

I am not ashamed to say that I love watching the WNBA. Ever since I watched my first women’s basketball game back in the late 1970s, I was hooked. Prior to that, I saw women’s hoops as does most males – it was boring. I wished I knew then that I know now – it is the best basketball played under the rim.

Unless you nightly surf the channels for WNBA games and updates, as I do, or regularly hope to find Lynx front page game stories in local daily newspapers on a regular basis, you are in about as much luck as watching a Sahara snowstorm. For example, the Minnesota Lynx will be on local television a grand total of six times and three times nationally on ESPN2. Comparably, the Minnesota Twins games are replayed more times in a single day than you will see of an entire Lynx 34-game regular season.

With Charlotte folding up its tent during the winter, the WNBA is now down to 13 teams. Even as many teams struggle financially, Orender continues to talk expansion. “We are getting closer,” she blindly believes.

“The WNBA is a work in progress,” Lynx Vice-President Angela Taylor explains. “We want to figure out what our best market is, what the best way to get fans to the building, the best way for people to come watch the best women’s basketball players in the world,” continues Taylor. “We want to make sure they have wall-to-wall, exciting, excellent time.”

Before the season began, the Lynx distributed informational door-hangers to 100,000 homes throughout the Twin Cities as part of its “Family Fun” campaign, hoping to improve upon its 12^th place last season among WNBA teams in attendance.

“When people come in our building for those 2 ½ hours, we want them to have an incredible time,” Taylor points out.

According to a 2005 WNBA study, 75 percent of its fans are White, and 82 percent are female. “These are our backbone,” says WNBA Vice President of Team Development Kristin Bernert. But if league officials truly believe that the WNBA is a global product, that they have a diverse group of players, which it has, and then the league must promote it as such.

The players can appeal “to young, old, boys and girls; men and women, and to diverse cultures and races, from Black to White, to Hispanic and Asian,” Taylor adds. “We want to appeal to everybody and not exclude anybody.”

Unlike the typical male pro athlete who often is portrayed as selfish and arrogant, WNBA players are ideal role models, continues Taylor. “The best thing about our players is that they are the girl next door. They are the young lady you go to church with; the young lady you’d be happy to have over for dinner. They appeal to that family atmosphere.”

“We have charismatic athletes (and) an entertaining game,” adds Orender.

But are these young ladies charismatic and entertaining enough that people want to see them playing basketball? “Our focus is the game,” says Bernert. “To not display the power of those athletes in all our marketing tools would be a mistake.”

Finally, if they’d come, men would enjoy watching WNBA action, believes Taylor. “Men appreciate great competition,” she concludes.

But do men appreciate it when it involves women? According to preliminary results of a Women’s Sports Foundation-funded study, they really don’t.

When it comes to female athletes, too often sexist imagery, or well-worn stereotypes is used to promote their athleticism. Even when men athletes sometimes are shown in beefcake poses, their athletic prowess is never confused.

“Sex does not sell for us,” University of Minnesota Senior Associate Athletic Director Regina Sullivan says. She recalls once the women’s volleyball team was invited to play in a beach volleyball match wearing bikinis but school officials turned it down.

In its early days, the WNBA showed its star players in out of uniform poses.

“Portraying females in ways that emphasize their skills as athletes, not as ‘bathing beauties’ is what sells tickets,” the Women’s Sports Foundation once wrote on the issue of images of female athletes. The national organization currently is funding a U-M Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport study on how women athletes are seen by males and females, and if such images influence them to attend women’s sporting events.

“I have been wanting to do this type of study for over a decade,” admits Tucker Center professor Dr. Mary Jo Kane. Kane and research assistant Heather Maxwell since last November have met with four focus groups, who saw visual images of current or former women pro athletes and gave feedback afterwards. They presented their preliminary findings during the Tucker Center lecture on marketing women’s sports in mid-April.

Six categories were used:

--“Athletic Competence” – Los Angeles Sparks forward Chamique Holdsclaw playing in a WNBA game

-- “Ambivalence” – Former Minnesota Lynx and current Detroit Shock guard Katie Smith posing in street clothes, holding a basketball

--“Girl next door” – Golfer Michelle Wie holding a golf club in an evening gown

--“Sexy babe” – Tennis star Serena Williams in a provocative pose, wearing a swimsuit

--“Hyper-hetro” – Former soccer player Mia Hamm with her husband

--“Soft porn” – Indy car racer Danita Patrick lying seductively on a car hood

Reactions to these images vary depending on the gender of the participant, explains Maxwell. Females saw Holdsclaw’s action photo as “accurate and motivating” while males unfairly compared her to a male basketball player.

Smith was “funny/silly,” Wie looked “beautiful,” and Hamm was “pretty” and “uninteresting.” Williams “chose to do that” and “looks like she’s having an orgasm,” while Patrick was “selling sex” and “(had) nothing to do with her sport.”

Even though the groups were paired according to age and gender, persons of color did not take part in the study groups. “When I sent out a flat e-mail across campus and screened the responses, race wasn’t on the screener,” notes Maxwell. “So I didn’t know who the people coming into the focus group were until they arrived.”

However, she added that the harshest comments seemed directed at photos of Williams, one of two Black female athletes featured, and hinted that race may have played a factor in such criticism.

Maxwell, who plans to submit her final report this fall, surmises thus far that females want women athletes shown in competence images, while men love seeing female athletes in sexy photos but aren’t moved to attend women’s sporting events.

The ‘sex sells’ philosophy is ever present. A June 2005 Turnkey Sports study found that over 31 percent of those asked believe that the Indy Racing League should promote Patrick’s “sexy” attributes, while only 17 percent felt that her “athletic” attributes should be focused more.

Women’s sports still is seen as unimportant. Sports editors typically boast that readers prefer men sports over women’s sports, which receives about eight percent of all media coverage. U-M graduate students Kent Kaiser and Erik Skoglund recently studied Twin Cities newspapers from 1940 to 2005 and found that front-page column and photograph inches increased for men’s sports but decreased for women’s sports during that same period.

Furthermore, men’s sports also use sex in its marketing schemes. The NFL and the NBA both have no problem having female cheerleaders dress and dance in provocative ways that has nothing to do with traditional cheerleading. Before its commercial breaks during Minnesota Timberwolves telecasts, Fox Sports Net North shows silhouettes of cheerleaders making borderline soft porn moves.

Will changing how female athletes are shown bring more fans to games? Will it bring more hardcore fans – namely males? Will they eventually see female athletes as such rather than athletic eye candy? Will sexist imagery ever become a thing of the past? And if not, does it have any effect in increasing attendance at women’s sporting event? These answers Maxwell hopes to learn through her study by asking the following questions.

“What would motivate you to attend women’s sports?” she concludes. “What image would be motivating?”