Confession/shocker: I don’t ordinarily read the Seattle Times‘ sports coverage. This Times link actually came to me via several of the ladyblogs I read, but it’s worth checking out even if you aren’t a sports fan.
The setup: A new web site for Florida State University’s women’s basketball team depicts team members in strapless silk evening gowns and jewelry, seemingly en route to a glamorous gala. The tagline: “Confidence. Strength. Beauty. We’ve got it all.”
Which raises an inevitable question: What does beauty have to do with basketball?
As Broadsheet notes:
There’s nothing subversive about the site. It’s not like they’re shown playing a game in their gowns, makeup smeared by sweat and dresses torn to tatters at their feet, or absurdly attempting to pass a ball between their legs while wearing a floofy floor-length skirt. This isn’t a critical commentary on the sad limitations of beauty ideals, it’s a desperate attempt to conform to them.
Or, as Jayda Evans at the Seattle Times‘ Women’s Hoops blog notes more pointedly, to portray female basketball players as sexually available, feminine, and most importantly, not gay:
I’m just concerned the sexualized look continues a different, damaging constant in women’s hoops—homophobia.
Director Dee Mosbacher was in Seattle in October for the screening of her film “Training Rules.” It’s a documentary about former Penn State coach Rene Portland, who allegedly had three rules for her players: No drinking. No drugs. No lesbians.
The film is fascinating in its inside look at how homophobia has a choke hold on women’s sports in general. How it’s used against each other in recruiting, tagging programs as full of lesbians, and how schools/coaches over feminize themselves to not appear lesbian. All under the “innocent” veil of wanting to show women athletes can be “powerful, beautiful, strong and accomplished.” Or, to put it more simply, heterosexual, too.
Interestingly, most of the glamor photos depict the female players as demure, nonthreatening, passive, even frail—exactly the opposite of what I think of when I think “powerful … strong, and accomplished.”
