The Swimsuit Issue
April 9th, 2008 by Diana
You know this had to come up eventually. Reading through Victoria K. Gosling’s article, “Girls Allowed?,” in which her female football fans in the UK see “true fans” as constructed by the “footballing establishment” as male, I couldn’t help thinking of a feminist book I once skimmed through, Laurel R. Davis’ The Swimsuit Issue and Sport: Hegemonic Masculinity in Sports Illustrated. Gosling discusses the ways in which live sports venues can be coded as male spaces, making them feel unsafe or uncomfortable to female fans attending live games, and she touches on television and print media’s construction of “sports” as men’s sports, giving little to no attention to women’s teams. However, in addition to individual male fans of sports sometimes using their fan communities as implicit male-only spaces in which they can express antipathy towards women, it seems clear from the example of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue that sources of information for sports fans encourage and appeal to this tendency within sports fandom (most likely as a strategy to make money).
I’m not sure if Sports Illustrated is really the dominant publication that Davis seemed to think it was in 1997 (the year her book was published). However, it does seem interesting to me to note that the swimsuit issue is pretty much the issue of Sports Illustrated for any given year. A publication that is in name dedicated to sports coverage is devoted in significant part to soft-core porn distribution. One of the headings on SportsIllustrated.com, for example, among “On Campus,” “Fannation,” “SI Vault,” etc. is “Swimsuit,” and the second hit on Google under the search “Sports Illustrated” is a link to their swimsuit page for 2007.
So, right. Consumers of sports news and consumers of soft-core porn come together to form the readership of Sports Illustrated. This makes more money for the magazine. I could imagine, however, that the people who initially subscribed to SI for the sports might start to like the swimsuits, and the people who started off just to look at the swimsuits may have started reading articles about the sports, too. Masculine heterosexuality (in the implied male gaze of the photographs in the swimsuit issue) thus gets mixed up with sports in that if you’re a heterosexual male who likes soft porn, a publication like this encourages you to also be a sports fan. Not to belabor the point (too late!), sports fans are also encouraged to be straight men who like soft porn.
I remember coming across a swimsuit issue of Sports Illustrated as a child in a doctor’s waiting room. Being the sketchy kid that I was, I liked the pretty pictures, and decided that SI was the magazine for me. For years, I picked up SI in doctor’s offices looking for another swimsuit issue, and getting disappointed. At some point, I got to be the “kind of girl” who doesn’t like sports, so I started picking up Cosmo instead. At the time, I didn’t like fashion any more than I liked sports, but I just assumed it must be “the magazine for me.” Eventually, I started to like fashion, makeup, boys, telling embarrassing stories about myself, etc.
Sports Illustrated is a sports fan’s magazine, ostensibly, but, like any other magazine, it is also a product that is based on a construction of identity. Not only do you construct your own identity based on what magazine you pick up, but you also announce to the rest of the lobby what kind of person you are based on what magazine they see you with. In the same way that women’s fashion magazines associate femininity with heterosexuality and a fan-like relationship to fashion, celebrities, sex with men, etc., could it be that men’s sports magazines associate masculinity with heterosexuality and a fan relationship to sports?
In other words, Gosling writes that sports fan communities are hostile to women and celebrates the entrance of women into those communities, but I’m trying to ask: could membership in sports fandom be more accessible to men because they are in some way coercively associated with sports? Just as I felt an increasing interest in fashion, etc. as somewhat pushed onto me with my identification as a feminine woman?
Do men have to like sports to be a “real man?” Are sports not only a location for a confirmation of civic pride, entertainment, and community, but also a confirmation of masculinity (that is then coded as heterosexual)? Is there an implicit threat to heterosexuality in the male contemplation of male athletic bodies that SI seeks to eliminate with its ostentatious association with het soft porn?
If liking sports is supposed to be a symbol of any male fan’s association with dominant heterosexual masculinity, does he lose those points if he wrestles in the backyard with other men? Especially if he feels “ecstatic pain” at the hands of other men? Maybe I’m going too far reading bdsm-like qualities into McBride and Bird’s backyard wrestlers. What about female sports fans? Do they experience a sense of masculinity through their association with certain teams, their spectatorship, etc?
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I thought the point of “estatic pain” at the hands of another wretsler was interesting in relation to the beginning of the class when we saw the Star Trek episode “Amok Time”. Someone made the point that Spock basically orgasms by fighting Kirk. But I’m not convinced that the joy of physical violece diminishes the hetero-masculinity of male athlete. I obviously not a man, but I do play a sport the involves alot of semi-inapropriate touching-rugby. And as far as I can tell, no one questions the masculinity of self-identified straight ruggers. I think perhaps since violence is associated with masculinity, as long as the sport involves pain, they keep their hetero-masculinity points.
Why are you more willing to “buy” Spock’s orgasm as opposed to the rugby player? The only sport I ever played seriously was tennis, so I know nothing of contact sports, but it seems 100% arbitrary as to why this concept wouldn’t apply to male rugby players. Moreover, violence is linked to lots of other things other than masculinity, namely SEXUALITY (paging Dr. Freud.) I’m just wondering what about sports exceeds this observation.
As a more general response, I tend to answer yes to most of Diana’s questions. However, one issue that seems to complicate the magazine theory would be Men’s lifestyle magazines, like GQ or Esquire. These magazines offer both softcore images of women and men (probably more of the latter considering how much space is reserved for ads.) Placed within the context of articles and objects that represent “the good life,” it seems all these near naked men pose some serious problems to the clean cut model of identification.
My point was that I’ve never met anyone who, after watching a rugby match, had the same reaction as our class did watching the fight scene in Amok Time. And I think that probably just comes from the coding of sports, particularly contact sports, as a hetero-masculine activity. But I could be wrong.
I like your last point about women who “experience a sense of masculinity” through liking sports. How often do you hear that women who understands sports are just trying to be “one of the guys”? (Or that they themselves self-identify that way.) That indicates that Gosling is right when she says that there is no constructed space for female sports fans.