Sunday, July 19, 2009

Planning ahead

As the presentation is almost done! I now need to get the length and structure on my paper. Preparing for the presentation has helped me figuring out what I want to focus on the most and what my point of view is. I still don't have a solution for the problem though.
The sources I found help me look at the amount of time women and men are represented and also the quality of the representation. Not only have women only 6% of the time on air on big sport channels in the US, the way they are represented is degrading and more focused on their appearance than on their performance.
I am also looking at the way women are represented in Magazines where they are also not valued through their performance, but the readers are shown a down to earth, heterosexual "normal" woman when an athlete is covered. Men, on the other hand, are more often pictured with their result board next to them, saying how fast they are or how many people they tackled or home runs they've made and the report is more often about their actual sport, not about their homey private life as good husbands which is the case of the women.
Furthermore I am looking on a article where they looked at college kids attitudes toward sports. If their attitudes had traditional gender views of sports eventhough they've grown up during the title IX era and they had. So I want to talk about if it is the audience who shape the media or the media shapes the audience.
So I have some different thoughts going on but it all has the same base in women's coverage in sports and I think I can have a good thread running through my essay if I connect them in the right way.

Getting back to the question how I should solve it...
Possible solutions I can think of:
To force equal coverage time between women and men upon sport channels and magazines. But does that conflict with freedom of speech?

A respected award for journalists who makes fare and interesting coverage on women athletes like the Pulitzer prize. Both individually and whole newspaper or TV channel too make it more desirable to cover it. With better coverage the numbers watching will go up too.

Michel Messner, a pioneer in these studies who has been writing and researching hte subject for a long time, suggest in one his articles that what is really takes is a new way of feminism to fight the issue and from people to not accept this kind of coverage. I agree but how would you argue for that and have a possible plan to make that happen?

5 comments:

  1. I don't think you could ever require coverage of women's sports. I like the idea of awards or some sort of recognition for excellent coverage of women in sports.

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  2. maybe look into why do these female athletes play into misconceptions by allowing poses in such non athletic stances? playboy is something a few athletes have done, maybe they should reconsider?

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  3. also do you think it would be possible to have womens network like lifetime, style, oxygen (mostly women) do features on women in sports media to highlight and give them their own time?

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  4. You know, I actually heard on ESPN the other day (when some big tennis match...Wimbleton...I think was on, sorry if I butchered the spelling)that the female players who were asked to play on the front and center courts were determined on the bases of appearance (i.e. Maria Sharipova and Anna Kornikova types). I just thoughts that was totally nuts how blatently the sponsers of that tournament insulted those women and all other female athletes by doing something like that. I even heard them say that Serena Williams was not deemed acceptable center court material and was upset about it- since when is Serena not hot? What has this world come to? :/

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  5. Amanda Beard (a US olympic swimmer) posed for Playboy sometime after the Olympics and I think she got a lot of crap for it because it made her seem "less of an athlete." So that might be interesting to include-when women pose showing their muscles its "masculine" and when they pose nude exposing their "femininity" its sluty. They get crap for it either way. Seems very unfair!!!

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