Thursday, November 05, 2009
Images that "sell" to young female athletes
Researchers at Bowling Green State University, the University of Memphis and the University of Iowa presented results of a study during the annual NASSS conference today suggesting that adolescent girls involved in sports are generally attracted to images of sportswomen that are athletically oriented -- not those that emphasize traditional femininity. The study, led by Vikki Krane(BGSU) and Sally Ross (Memphis), has implications for the marketing of women's collegiate sports toward the girls these programs may someday try to recruit: active, sports-focused images may be the most effective in attracting girls to sports events and athletic participation. The marketing materials (posters, programs, guides) often used for women's collegiate programs now often downplay these types of images in favor of more traditionally "feminine" photos of athletes.
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Texas A&M has a women's basketball team photo on its website that's being debated around the Internet. I'm a lesbian and like to look at attractive women, but this isn't my idea of how college student-athletes should be depicted.
http://viewer.zmags.com/publication/44402326#/44402326/1
The paramount question that arose regarding the study demonstrating that athletic women attract young girls attention was, when, and how does this change? At what physical, societal, and media shaped age do girls begin to cross over towards attraction to the "feminine" look? Can we address when and why the modeling of the feminine"Barbie" ideal becomes the preferred female shape and identity over an athletic, or say, intellectual girl-becoming- woman ideal? And why are women, themselves, so afraid when older, to be identified w/an athletic physique?
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