Sport

Why Does the World Cup Hate Women?

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By Issy McConville

article 2666287 1EF8296200000578 619 634x388 Why Does the World Cup Hate Women?

The other night, I watched the football. My dad watched the football, my mum watched the football, 13 million other people watched the football. 13 million tears ran down 13 million faces as England’s World Cup hopes were kicked into the dust by the boot of Luis Suarez. Yes, love it or hate it, World Cup fever has truly set in. Giant England flags adorn houses across the country; ‘Fantasy Football Leagues’ have become the new ‘Doing My Work at the Office’; and every-man and his dog are flogging some kind of tenuously World Cup themed gear – Pot Noodle anyone? It’s exciting, it’s unifying, we all flock to the pub for matches of countries we couldn’t even point to on a map. To borrow from the lyrical immortality of The Farm, we are ‘all together now’ – one big football shaped earth united for four weeks in our love of the beautiful game.

But are we? While I was watching the England v. Uruguay match, I couldn’t help but notice that there were no female commentators during the ITV coverage. Again, during the BBC coverage of the England v. Italy game, there were no female commentators. Two major British channels, two matches with an enormous audience – and no women. I don’t think it’s too radical to suggest the line-up could have included a female voice – women watch football, women play football, women are just as qualified to talk about it. Undeniably there are some hugely respected female names in sports presenting – look at Gabby Logan, or Clare Balding – and yet female voices were excluded from the biggest sporting event in the world.

In reality, women fail to be supported at all levels of the game. The English team in the Women’s World Cup are currently at the top of their group in the qualifying stages, but this has hardly received coverage. Earlier this year, leaked emails from Premier League chief Richard Scudamore, in which he refers to women as ‘gash’, revealed sexism at the heart of the industry. As children we’re told that football is a boy’s game, and it is often not offered to girls at school. A friend of mine, Jess, is a qualified coach and plays women’s football. She’s a really good player, but says she’s always told ‘you’re good…for a girl’. Why must her gender determine her ability as a player? Why is female interest in football so often seen as an oddity, an exception to the norm? Last week my driving teacher told me that ‘about 90% of women who go to matches only go to look at the fit men’. I almost jumped out of the moving car on an A- road. Yes, I cannot deny that I have enjoyed the presence of Thierry Henry and his cardigans during BBC coverage. But this isn’t the reason I’m watching. In fact, if eyeing up the players was your aim, you’d be left highly unsatisfied, as for the majority of a match you can only see small blobs running around the pitch.

These attitudes are undermining women’s enjoyment of, and involvement in, football, and they need to change. We need to celebrate women’s football, and encourage girls to play it at school. And this needs to start from the very top. By including female panellists at major matches, television companies can really lead by example; taking a simple step towards recognising and valuing women as equals in the football industry. This is not a journey that can be completed in 90 minutes, but we can at least take a step towards the goal.

Cheering at What Cost?

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Guest Blog by Molly Nash

Football is one of our favorite national past times. Whether it’s Friday night under the lights, Sunday afternoon at a tailgate, or Monday evening curled up next to the fireplace, football defines autumn for many Americans. And you can’t have football without cheerleaders. While little boys grow up dreaming of playing in the NFL, young girls idolize the beautiful smiles, sculpted bodies, and feminine curls that outwardly define the women on the sidelines. Cheering in the NFL is the ultimate pipe dream for millions of girls involved in the sport. Whether you find cheerleading a credible aspiration or not (in reality, it is a pretty demanding combination of gymnastics and dance), you’ll be astonished to know that NFL cheerleaders are routinely paid below minimum wage, if compensated at all. While their male counterparts on the football field are racking up millions, cheerleaders are literally sidelined by the $1,000-2,500 they take home at the end of each season.

This has been the case for decades, but Lacy T, an Oakland Raiders’ cheerleader, is finally bringing change to the crisp autumn air with the lawsuit she filed against the team last January, citing a take home pay of less than minimum wage for the hours she worked. The $1,250 salary initially agreed upon in her contract in no way covered the hours she spent on the field, in practice, or at press events. Furthermore, she was required to maintain nearly perfect hair (dyed and styled with 1.5 inch diameter curls at a team mandated salon!), painted toes and nails, bronzed skin, make up, tights, and a body weight of no more than four pounds over 103 lbs, at all times and on her own dime. The team paid for none of this and her salary, which she received at the end of the season, hardly covered the beauty regime, much less the hours she worked.

cheerleaders Cheering at What Cost?

Interestingly enough, this is pretty much the status quo for NFL cheerleaders. Teams throughout the league have maintained these practices by framing cheerleading as a sisterhood going back generations; women on the team, it seems, should be privileged just to be included. Cheerleaders are repeatedly reminded that they are dispensable and that thousands of girls will line up to take their place. In a strikingly cult-like manner, cheerleaders remain silent and loyal to the team. Needless to say, Lacy’s lawsuit rattled the Raiders and the entire industry. ESPN wrote a lengthy article about it, entitled ‘Just Cheer, Baby,’ and news media such as The Guardian and The LA Times have followed the case.

Still, the Raiders are doing everything in their power to combat the lawsuit and have shown no signs of remorse. This begs the question: How does such wage inequality still exists in our so-called ‘post feminist’ society. Oh, that’s right. We’re not there yet. Because if we were, it would not be acceptable for a whole industry of women to be paid below minimum wage. Especially when they bring in millions of dollars for the teams they cheer for.

What do we tell young girls who dream of cheering professionally? Did someone say to little Lacy, “Keep at it, and after years of practices, private coaches, competitions, and workouts, you’ll grow up to earn less than a hundredth of what the professional football players make?” Probably not. And while this crazy disparity in salary doesn’t exist in most careers, the young Lacys of the world need to know that women still only make 77 cents for each dollar earned by men. If they knew this, maybe more Lacys would file suit and maybe more of her ‘sisters’ would stand with her.

Because We Can: Covergirl’s Newest Ad

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By Kara Chyung

girlscan Because We Can: Covergirl’s Newest Ad

At PBG, we tend to talk more about the negative events happening in the world and with feminism; sexual assault, objectifying advertisements, and Photoshop are among the most common themes. This is understandable; since our goal is to promote the power of women, we try to address all of the negative portrayals of women that exist in our daily lives.

However, it seems that a lot has changed since I first joined PBG. Many more companies have adopted the mindset of the Dove Real Beauty Campaign, which was launched in 2004. With Dove’s Real Beauty Sketches and Aerie’s Real Beauty Campaign, I am seeing more media campaigns that seek to portray real, unedited women than I was even one year ago. While these campaigns aren’t necessarily flawless (e.g. what exactly is “real beauty” anyway?), they do demonstrate a lot of positive change in the amount of respect women receive from the media.

The latest in this new stream of ads is Covergirl’s “Girls Can” advertisement, featuring Ellen DeGeneres, Katy Perry, Sofia Vergara, Janelle Monae, Pink, Queen Latifah, and ice-hockey player Natalie Wiebe. The one-minute video begins with the words “Girls can’t.” Each of the women then lists something she’s been told that she couldn’t do because she was female (“girls can’t be funny,” “girls can’t rap,” “girls can’t be strong”), and then says how she decided to ignore what others said to achieve her goals.

Toward the beginning of the ad, Ellen says, “Girls can’t. Sometimes you hear it, but more often you feel it.” I think that this summarizes perfectly the struggle with confidence and self-esteem that most girls face. While you still hear blatantly sexist language, it is usually the little things that are the biggest discouragements, like a flawless photo of your favorite celebrity in a magazine or being the only girl on your quiz bowl team. But the message of the video is that we cannot allow these obstacles to control who we are and the decisions that we make. Even though it is absolutely true, “be yourself” is a such a cliché, and what those words actually mean can sometimes unclear. But I interpret it to mean that you can be whatever you choose to be, and that being a girl should certainly not going to stop you from doing so. The world is not always a friendly environment for women, and it only will be if we have the courage to change it.

Crying Double Standards

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Guest Post By Samantha Slotnick

A few hours before my last home hockey game, I stumbled across an article that was shared by a handful of my Facebook friends. The headline read: “Mocking the US Women’s Hockey Team for Crying Over Their Loss to Canada is Sexism, Pure and Simple.”

1 Crying Double Standards

Members of the US Olympic Women’s Ice Hockey Team crying after losing gold-medal game

Baffled by the title of the article, I clicked on the link to learn more. The author calls people out on their responses via twitter to the women’s team for crying. Some of the tweets she referenced included (please note that I use italics to draw attention to the shocking things people had the audacity to say): “The US women hockey team are such ungrateful assholes. The damn Swiss team is so happy with bronze & you’re crying cause you won silver;” “The women’s US hockey team crying after they lost is exactly why women shouldn’t play sports. Grow some ovaries. #GetOverIt;” “To the US women’s hockey team: ‘There’s no crying in hockey.’” I was enraged.

I followed the US Women’s Ice Hockey team’s journey in Sochi and watched the entire gold medal game versus Canada-all the way down to the devastating overtime loss. I watched the medal ceremony that immediately followed too, and quite honestly I did not even think twice about the girls crying over their loss. To me, that was normal. These 21 girls had not only trained four years to win gold in these Olympics, they had been training their entire hockey careers for this. You don’t just magically become an Olympian-it takes hard work, dedication, and a drive to succeed that is built upon year after year after year.

It was not until I sat in the locker room before the last game of my college career that I realized what hockey truly meant to me and that it was almost over. Our coach, with whom I and the other seniors have a very close bond, gave a heartfelt speech about four “little girls” who began playing the game of hockey, and shared cute little tidbits our parents sent in advance. This was when it really hit me. I thought of the relationships I built with my teammates and family, and about how important hockey has been in my life as a necessary escape from reality from time to time. Something about realizing that this game-a game that played such a prominent role in shaping who I am today and the relationships I cherish-was coming to an end, brought me to tears.

There is in fact crying in hockey. We see it every year in June with the winning team of NHL players hoisting the Stanley Cup over their heads as the losing team exits the ice as fast as possible fighting back the tears in their eyes.

2 Crying Double Standards

Henrik Lundqvist crying after losing Eastern Conference Finals-Keeps NY Rangers Out of Stanley Cup contention

3 Crying Double Standards

Ray Borque crying after winning the Stanley Cup for the first and only time in his 22-year career

Why is it okay for grown adult males to cry when losing in a professional competition, but it is not okay for a team of females representing their country, with an average age of 23, to cry when losing the gold medal to their long-time rival? As a female hockey player, I am not naive to the fact that I carry some bias in my argument. This issue hits close to home. As a human being though, I cannot help but wrestle with this double standard. The American culture socializes us to believe that men don’t cry; women do. But in the case of sports, why is it okay for men to cry but women cannot?

This is just one of the many contradictions female athletes face. We are expected to be strong and intimidating on the playing field, but sweet and feminine off the court- “dolled up” with makeup or sexualized in the Sports Illustrated swim suit edition. As a society we tell girls it’s not only okay to cry, but expected of them, yet attack females for crying after losing in a sport? Where is the logic? So, now I ask the really tough question: how do we work on socializing generations young and old to understand that expressing our emotions is not only okay, but actually psychologically healthy for all human beings alike?

“Ain’t I a Woman?”

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christiana1 Aint I a Woman?

By Christiana Paradis

Meet Fallon Fox: the only transgender professional MMA fighter. Standing at five feet six inches, and 37 years old, Fox has many obstacles in front of her, especially as an MMA fighter. Though 2013 has presented society and the media with several athletes who have come out as LGBT - including professional basketball player, Jason Collins - it is difficult to compare these to Fox. Most athletes were welcomed into the LGBT community and after a couple weeks of headlines all of the buzz died down.

Fox has fought her way to the top because it is what she loves to do; however fans of the sport do not always reciprocate. Internet trolls frequently comment how “manly” Fox looks on promotional pictures and it is not uncommon for Fox to hear comments like “Kick her in the nuts” during matches. Furthermore, commentators were playing songs such as “Dude Looks Like a Lady” before Fox would enter the ring - but this isn’t bullying… bullying is just for kids, right?

Fox fights every day for herself, for her health, but also for respect. She states:

“MMA is the most dangerous sport there is for a transgender, with all the body contact, I know that, but it just turned out that I was good at it, you know? You pursue what you’re good at…. I realize that it’s kind of amazing that I hit girls. You’re brought up not to hit girls, that it’s the worst sin, and that’s what I do. But you know, gender is the last thing I think about when I’m fighting. It’s the one situation where I don’t think of gender at all.”

If gender is the last thing Fox is thinking about before she goes into a ring, then why is it the audience’s first? People are paying to watch women get in a cage and fight and that is what Fox does. She delivers what is asked of her, so why do commentators and audiences think they have the right to define her? As GQ states in their article, “Fallon Fox: The Toughest Woman in Sports” Fox is up against multiple oppressions specifically “When you are a transgender athlete, a lesbian transgender athlete, a lesbian transgender athlete who fights women in a cage, a lesbian transgender athlete who fights women in a cage and fathered a daughter, a lesbian transgender athlete who fights women in a cage and fathered a daughter and served as a man in the Navy.”

While I commend GQ for running a story that portrayed Fox honestly and favourably, I have an issue.

  • Why GQ?
  • Why a magazine that markets itself to men?
  • Maybe because it’s an article about MMA, which typically is marketed towards men… but then why wasn’t this article included in the “Women” section that GQ purposely excludes all female related articles to?
  • Also… if all of the other articles about females that GQ writes looks like this:

christiana2 Aint I a Woman?

…then what are they subliminally saying about Fox? They’ve portrayed and treated Fox as they feature men and not as they portray women in their magazine. Thus, despite writing an honest piece about Fox’s struggles as a transgender female in MMA they’re still featuring her as a man in their magazine.

Thankfully, Fox is too determined and focused to be bothered with such petty nuances, “I just try not to think about all of the obstacles all at once. I tell myself, you know how to win. Sometimes you get beat up, but you’ve always won.”