Friday, April 07, 2006

Two Out Of 162

While taking an old lady to a medical appointment, I was reading The Sporting News in the waiting room. I used to get TSN when I was a pre-teen, when it was on newsprint. I even found a through-the-mail fantasy league in the back. I refused to trade Greenwell for Mattingly. I finished last. But that's beside the point.

I decided to tally the number of females pictured in the magazine, and compare that to the total number of men. I included everything--photos, ads, headshots of writers. Obviously I didn't count people in the background of pictures, like fans. Only the person or people focused on in the shot.

Here are the results:

Total pictures--162 (perfect for what was their baseball preview issue)
Males--160
Females--2
Total number of female athletes pictured--0

Terrible job, male-dominated society, or as I call it, "MaDoSoc."

Surely there are some females who are sporting, or were sporting in the past week, right?

I guess I should be happy that there were no females in the ads, considering how they're usually portrayed. Then again, how about putting females in advertisements without objectifying them?

In case you're curious, the two females were: A headshot of their female hockey reporter, and a shot of a basketball player's wife.

Comments:
As you said, women are often objectified in print and video advertising. An attractive and almost impossible-to-attain female face or form is shorthand for "buy this and you will get or be her."

From time to time, however, you will see similar representations of men. The Calvin Klein Obsession ads and a long-gone Coke commercial spring to mind. The hetero men I knew weren't too keen on those. "Real men don't look like that."

And I replied, "Well, now you know what it's like for us."
 

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