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Her.meneutics is edited by associate editor Katelyn Beaty and online editor Sarah Pulliam Bailey.

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February 12, 2010

Female Olympians, Missing in Action

When it comes to female athletes, why does the media have a one-track mind?

Laura Leonard

The dreams, the sacrifices, the glory, the pageantry, Bob Costas — I don’t care if the Winter Olympics are the “less fun cousin” of the Summer Games, for the next two weeks I intend to plant myself in front of the TV and watch as much of the action in Vancouver as possible, starting with tonight’s Opening Ceremonies.

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In Olympic tradition, 216 athletes will march behind our flag tonight as members of the U.S. Olympic team — 123 men, 93 women. But, according to Olympic Women and the Media, a new book by University of Alberta professor Pirkko Markula, the women will have received only 5 percent of pre-Olympics media coverage, and will receive only 25.2 percent during the Games, despite composing half of the team. When those female Olympians do receive attention, Markula notes, it tends to be for their appearance rather than their skill.

Case in point: American skier Lindsey Vonn. She’s competing in her third Olympics at age 25, is the current world champion in the Downhill Super-G, and a two-time World Cup season overall champion. She’s considered America’s best hope for gold in Vancouver. But when Sports Illustrated featured her on the cover of their Olympic Preview issue last week, Lindsey Vonn, world-class athlete, became Lindsey Vonn, Olympic sex symbol.

On the cover, Vonn wears her Team USA uniform, standard gear, and what at least resembles standard tuck form for her sport. The cover ignited a controversy over the sexualization of female athletes, though perhaps unfairly, since it’s nearly identical to the 1992 Olympic Preview cover, which featured male skier A. J. Kitt. But then Vonn appeared again in this week’s issue: the annual Swimsuit issue. Vonn, along with three other female Olympians, wears a bikini in the snow to promote her Olympic bid.

Sports Illustrated features women on its cover 4 percent of the time. For a weekly magazine, that means about 2 out of every 52 issues. And with the Swimsuit issue accounting for one each year, that doesn’t leave a lot of room for acknowledging female athletes.

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It’s a problem, certainly, that we can’t seem to talk about female athletes without talking about sex. Male athletes are certainly not exempt from this kind of objectification — think Tom Brady or Michael Phelps in GQ. It’s a problem that’s indicative of our culture’s tendency to glorify beauty and sex above all else. But it points to an important question: Is it even possible to admire athletes for their strength, grace, and mastery of their sport without inherently objectifying their bodies?

Athletes at peak condition can make their bodies perform feats that the rest of us can only dream of — flying through the air with feet attached to two strips of wood, landing a quadruple loop on top of frozen water, dunking a basketball over the heads of giants. This is why we watch: to marvel at the capability of the human body to push, and at times to defy, its own limits. When it comes to sports — as Shirl Hoffman points out in Christianity Today’s February cover story — we can all too easily make an idol of sports, and the athletes who excel at them, because they truly can amaze and inspire.

The tendency can be to reject any celebration of the physical as a distraction from what really matters. But God created our bodies as well as our hearts, and in those gold medal moments, athletic achievement can actually point us to God’s grandeur. We can watch a figure skater gracefully accelerate into a controlled spin and marvel at the awe of a God who created the human body with the ability to achieve such beauty here on earth. Its beauty points to something transcendent — to a perfect beauty, to God himself.

That’s what I’ll be watching for this Olympics. How about you?

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Posted by Laura Leonard on February 12, 2010 1:53 PM

Comments

Yay Laura.

Posted By: kerma | February 12, 2010 3:56 PM

Hallelujah! Great article. Yes, it IS possible to be feminist and Christian at the same time.

I loved this point: "But God created our bodies as well as our hearts, and in those gold medal moments, athletic achievement can actually point us to God’s grandeur.... to a perfect beauty, to God himself."

But, I wonder, since God is neither "male" or "female" in the human sense, whether it should be "to a perfect beauty, to God HERself." I think that's no more, and no less, correct than "himself." Neither "himself" nor "herself" fully captures the transcendance of God because our imperfect words can never do justice to the completeness of God. But, like the missing female Olympians, I think references to the female attributes of God, the attributes in whose likeness women are made, are missing too often as well.

BTW, as I'm thinking of "Hallelujah," k.d. lang's version at the opening ceremonies last night was breathtaking. Surely her voice is a gift from God.

Posted By: Christian Lawyer | February 13, 2010 12:44 PM

Great piece. I hadn't planned on watching, but this makes me want to. :)

Posted By: Sarah | February 15, 2010 11:31 AM

Unsure as to the point you're actually trying to make here...is the objectification of the human body bad or good?? You seem to attempt to address this, but the text, internally, seems to contradict itself. Sexual exploitation as a goal is, naturally, wrong and insulting for women...I liked where you were going at the beginning, but then you got away from you thesis (if you had one).

Posted By: Anonymous | February 15, 2010 4:02 PM

"Objectify" is a crucial, complicated word here—too crucial and complicated, I think, to be used as if we all know what it means. I would love to see a her.meneutics post that really explores this word—or, better, improves on it, as it has more than a whiff of Latinate abstraction, suggesting most of us actually have no idea what we mean when we use it (even if we "know it when we see it"). Just to raise one of many questions, is it possible to engage with images of anyone in mediated form, whether print or electronic, and not objectify them, whatever their gender, attractiveness, clothing, or activity?

Posted By: Andy Crouch | February 16, 2010 3:53 PM

The reason that men get more coverage than women in sports is that men are better athletes. Except for figure skating, where the grace and, yes, the beauty of the athletes and the sport itself, favors women over men, male athletes are superior in every way.
Also, the coverage of the Olympics is very female oriented. I liked it better in the old days when they covered more of the events themselves and not all this "up-close-and-personal" stuff. I personally could not care less about the athletes on a personal level. I am interested in a great performance.
This article is much ado about nothing.

Posted By: Brian | February 17, 2010 10:04 AM

Brian, I have to disagree with you that male athletes are superior to female athletes. Female athletes are just different from males, and that's okay. There's nothing that says that women have to be like men or have to measure up to some male athletic standard. We're just fine as we are.

Posted By: K. | February 17, 2010 4:43 PM

Men have had millenia of practice to develop their athletic skills. Woman have only begun to train seriously in the same way for the last few decades. And we're catching up. As a former competitive swimmer (so NOT Olympic-caliber), this fascinates me:

"Well before the 1972 Olympics, in which he won seven gold medal and set seven world records, Mark Spitz (left) established the world record for the 400-meter freestyle .... His record-breaking time in 1967 was 4:10.6 ... That same year, Pamela Cruse set the women’s 400-meter freestyle world record at 4:36.4 ... or almost 26 seconds slower than Spitz’s time.

Today, some 40 years later, the men’s 400-meter swimmers are still faster than the women, but the gap has narrowed by about four seconds -- the fastest male is just 22 seconds faster than the fastest woman. The fact that the gap is narrowing is only mildly interesting.

But here’s a fact that’s far more interesting: Today’s record-holder in the women’s 400-meter freestyle, Laure Manaudou of France, swims the event faster than Mark Spitz did when he initially set his world record in 1967!

Manaudou’s current world-record time of 4:02.13 ... for women trounces Spitz’s record time of 4:10.6 in 1967. In a sport where records are usually broken by small fractions of a second, a woman today can swim over eight full seconds faster than the men’s champion did not too long ago. ... Actually, Spitz’s 1967 time was broken earlier by another woman (Tracey Wickham, Australia) in 1978. So in this event, it took a woman just 21 years to out-swim that legendary hunk, Mark Spitz. Who woulda thunk it?"

http://www.brosen.com/files/f3f1a6e3f34aa6f01d6585bd2fe1f69b-0.html

Posted By: Christian Lawyer | February 18, 2010 8:11 AM

Brian, your comment is exactly why we need more discussion on this! It certainly is an issue. For young girls we needed/need to see role models who aren't just models and half naked singers and reality stars. You can go on liking whatever sports and athletes you want to, but for the rest of us, we appreciate women being showcased more. I think the Olympic coverage so far has been great. I watched Curling for the first time!

Posted By: SJ | February 18, 2010 12:10 PM

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