Yeah, but the point is that (I think) female sportspeople are expected to be both skilled and attractive (and by that I mean phenomenally attractive). If they're not, they tend to be either ridiculed or ignored (think Monica Seles or Arantxa Sanchez-Vicario, neither of whom is by any means 'ugly', but because they had less than perfect looks were pigeonholed as the grunty one and the fat Argie). This carries on to female sport in general. A few years ago the GB team won the curling prize at the winter olympics. Now, I quite accept that winter sports are either about getting down a mountain really fast without dying, or about keeping Scandinavians and Canadians entertained in the middle of winter, but it does strike me as harsh that the curling team should be constantly referred to as "those women doing that hoovering thing (ha ha don't they look silly)" (please note the housework reference). Way to go, completely denigrating their achievement in one go.

Any coverage of female sport (with perhaps the exception of tennis - and even there the players are fetishised in a way the men are not) seems to be always about the fact the participants are women, in a way that coverage of male sport is not. But I've argued this point before; and the media is basically institutionally everything-outside-the-predetermined-norm-ist.

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Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.

Charlie Brooker once said that the press have a narrative, and anything that doesn't fit that they force into it or completely ignore.

So the narrative is all terrorists are muslim, so all non-muslim terrorists get quietly ignored or even shown as justified in some way.
Equally the narrative is all serious sport is done by men, so all female sport either (a) doesn't exist, or (b) is presented at 'look at them! aren't they cute!'

That's verse 1 on the Mailwatch hymnsheet.

The press know their readerships and pander to them.

Sport of all descriptions tends to look extremely easy on TV.
"Look at those girls tapping the ball across the net".
"How did that midfielder not see the unmarked attacker"
"That big bowler is just tossing down lollipops"
"He was clear in for a try if he fielded that simple pass".

I also find a tendency to relate the pace of the game to our own experiences at amateur level.

Anybody who has sat close to high calibre sport in action can tell you that it's not as simple as it looks.
Those girls "tapping the ball" are hitting it a lot harder than your tennis club professional.
The midfielder had several things to worry about (Officials liable to call the unmarked man offside, and a couple of 15 stone holding midfielders who might barge in with an ankle shattering high tackle.
The "simple pass" in rugby is often travelling faster than your mates at the rugby club can pass the ball.

I can speak to the cricket issue, having played on a small side which had a good run in the Scottish cup.
We drew one of the Greenock - one of the big teams - in the next round.
They fielded a decidedly second line team and still bowled us out for under 50.
Opening batsmen who would happily average 40 at our own level were barely seeing the ball as it whizzed past.
As a "quick" bowler, I naively assumed it was a hard bouncy track so determined to bowl as fast as possible when out turn came.
The opening batsman (46 years old, had played a season of first class cricket in his early 20s) had no problems with my fast stuff.
He could pick the length of a ball and take 2 strides if necessary to come out and sweetly hit it to the boundary.
I'm sure that if he was a smoker he'd have happily played one-handed while puffing his woodbine in the other hand.

My conclusion - is that TV makes it all look easy, we tend to think "I could do that if - I had their training time / facilities".
We then go one step closer and assume that the women's version of the game is even softer.

Anybody examining "timed" race events can tell you that it isn't so.


I don't know how we break the circle.
It's not just that most televised sport features men, but most viewers are men.
This is partly about the presentation, but there appears to also be an issue that lots of women are not interested.
Look at the TV schedules and you see a pretty clear division, Soaps and Romance for the girls, sport and action movies for the boys.
I fear we won't get for until we stop chasing target demographics.

Indeed. The best person any average person has ever played football with or against probably isn't good enough to make it as a crap league player.

The guys on the sidelines who claim in all honesty that they could do better, should be given a trial!

But if women don't seem interested in women's sport, should anyone try and force the issue

I support Macc Town and no matter what promotions the club does, very few people give a shit.

You can't force people to care.

Ah, Beckham! I bet you didn't know you could do a degree in David Beckham Studies, it hardly ever gets mentioned in the press!

For gender studies types, Beckham is interesting as either a trendsetter or an outlier, in terms of the whole metrosexual / gay icon schtick. What isn't new is that Beckham's off-field image is harnessed to sell consumer products to young men — think Kevin Keegan and Henry Cooper promoting aftershave, or even Johnny Haynes advertising Brylcreem. The content of those images has changed over time, but the function has not. The fashion and cosmetics sectors use Beckham and Ronaldo to reach young male consumers; to reach young women, they still prefer film stars and models rather than sportswomen.


I don't agree. Thanks to the celebrity footballer phenomenon, I recognise the likes of Peter Crouch and Ashley Cole, who are neither oil paintings nor world-famous players. The Mail follows WAGs but not HABs.

When discussing media coverage, I'd also make the distinction between individual and team sports. Women's tennis and athletics are recognised as legitimate, albeit lesser, elements of those sports. Golf is joining them. Team sports are much less well covered. They're still sidelined as either posh, girls-only sports such as netball, or 'unfeminine', inferior versions of male activities such as rugby and football. But these stereotypes are being undermined. Advertisers such as Nike have come to realise there's a market for girls who play team sports, especially in the US, where soccer players such as Mia Hamm and Hope Solo are marketed as role models for a different type of femininity, just as Beckham is supposed to represent an alternative, modern masculinity.

How about this chap?

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I'm a nasty, violent lefty. You cunt.

Yes, if it worries you that girls aren't doing enough physical activity, and if you accept the WSFF report's findings that lack of role models is a cause.

Yes, if you object on principle to the double standard.

Yes, on the basis that lack of interest in English women's football, for instance, is not down to some essential biological or cultural difference, but was the result of an FA ban which lasted for 50 years.

Anyway, women are interested in women's sport. In terms of participation, women's football is the #3 team sport in the UK, behind men's football and men's cricket. The media, on the other hand, are not very interested in covering it, except in the gendered, sexualised way described by Andy earlier in this thread, where the focus is not on the games or the results, but on the woman-ness of the participants: their outfits, their bodies, their private lives, the obstacles they face as woman athletes. Many media narratives, ranging from Castor Semenya and a few steroid-enhanced East Germans to stories about make-up-wearing cyclists, focus on the very question of 'what is a woman?' Macclesfield Town do not have this problem.

Dominant ideologies often disguise themselves in the language of 'naturalness' or inevitability: thus, we can't force women to play sport; and we can't expect anyone to be interested in watching them when they do, because they're naturally smaller and slower and otherwise inferior. This is misleading. It overlooks the fact that mass competitive sports emerged in the industrial era as a vehicle for promoting and naturalising male superiority. Men were naturally bigger and stronger; size and strength were the key values of a virile empire, a productive industrial economy, and a disciplined, patriarchal family. It's also false. In the US, for instance, college sports are almost as popular as professional sports, even though the athletes are smaller and slower and less skilled. The boat race does not feature the best rowers in the world, but it gets a bigger audience than any other rowing event. What makes the difference is history — the very history denied to women's sports by paternalist ideology about the unsuitability of sports for ladies, and by outright discrimination such as the English FA's ban on women's football. Governing bodies must now make up for lost time by promoting women's sport equally.

Amy Williams seemed to get a good deal.

Except for the constant letching by Clarkson on Top Gear.

So maybe not.

Plus my memory sucks.

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Changin' avatars like there's no tomorrow

I think the IOC have missed a trick by not including indoor climbing, they are considering including it in 2020. The IFSC which is the governing body for indoor climbing always run male and female competitions along-side each other, a sort of 'different but equal' attitude. These championships attract large audiences and TV time when held in Europe and the far east but rarely cause a ripple in the UK.

What do you think, would you watch this?

Like most solo sports, it seems as though it would be more fun to do than to watch. It looks fairly technical, and I wonder how much the uninitiated spectator would see from down below. The music would drive me up the wall (not literally).

On the other hand, if this were an option in PE lessons, I think it would be very popular.

I agree it is more fun to do than watch

The World Championship comps attract such large audiences that camera men dangle from the ceiling to get up-close footage which is shown on large screens, so I imagine they could do the same for a TV audience.

Not many schools have indoor climbing walls but most cities have at least one so if youngsters wanted to try it after seeing it on TV they wouldn't have to go far. My 'local' walls in Sunderland and Newcastle are full of kiddies having climbing parties at the weekends and I have noticed a definite increase in the number of young girls at these walls. They tend to 'boulder' (low level climbing without ropes) which tends to be done as a group rather than a couple,so it's a bit more sociable with climbers of both genders helping and encouraging each other.

Spot on about the music too!

Some of da yoof bouldering in Fontainebleau:

I'm of precisely the same mindset.
It's a solo sport, so no interesting team dynamics, and it's something I've never done, so any technical niceties fly way over my head.
I miss out on a lot of sports that fall into this bracket (Skiing, skating, shooting, wrestling, dressage, modern pentathlon......).

It's the nature of UK broadcasting (Led by BBC and Sky) that minority sports get a sparse covering.
Channel 4 used to do a good job of covering obscure sports - and I would often watch them for novelty value (Kabaddi, Aussie Rules Football, etc).
My favourite "Hard to find" sport is road cycling. The daily hour on analogue TV has now been improved by ITV4 carrying the Tour De France live feed.
But I've wandered a bit off point.

What we appear to lack is a sport that's perceived as friendly to girls (You have to catch them before they leave school) not socially exclusive, doesn't force a specific body type to the fore, and doesn't rely on heaps of expensive equipment, livestock, or acres of space.
That rather rules out Tennis and Golf (Socially exclusive, and space inefficient), Gymnastics (No fat chicks), Horsey stuff, Hockey (The fields cost a bomb and as 2G Astro aren't suitable for other sports), Basketball (Only tall folks need apply)...

Volleyball may have potential, but is utterly grim to play with a team of beginners, and that's where I suspect most sports fail "We tried it a few times and it was rubbish".
That limits my suggestions to that frisbee version of American football (Apparently excellent for aerobic development), and small sided Football (7 a side on a half pitch).

Feel free to discuss.

As an aside, the coverage of the WAG culture seems to be a classic case of cake-having-and-eating - a chance to both envy such women for the cushiness of their lives, and to sneer at them for being so dreadfully common.

_________________
Ten seconds... the pain begins.

Fifteen seconds... you can't breathe.

Twenty seconds... you give up and turn off the Jeremy Vine show.