The failure or success of female
sports leagues in the United States rests primarily with female sports fans, Frank Deford said in a piece for National Public Radio titled “Ladies, Want Women's
Sports To Get More Attention? Pony Up.”
Unfortunately, Deford missed the
point entirely. Women’s sports should not appeal to uniquely to females because
women are playing. Women’s sports should appeal to all sports fans because
elite athletes are competing. Men do not feel mandated to watch LeBron James
because he is a man. Men and women watch LeBron James because he is the best
men’s basketball player in the world.
Note that I said James is the best men’s
basketball player. This distinction is critical to understanding the problems
facing women’s sports leagues. There is a tendency in mainstream media to deem
male athletes or male sports as the unquestioned best or standard. For example,
Deford mentions a new women’s soccer league is forming. Just saying women’s
soccer league delegitimizes the athletes in that league because there is a
qualifier to their prowess—their gender. Why can’t Major League Soccer be
called Men’s Major League Soccer? By having their sports leagues gender marked,
women athletes are already placed at a disadvantage because there is a latent
implication that their leagues are inferior to men.
The second issue I have with Deford
comes from the written summary of his piece. An excerpt states: “Still, I think
the sisterhood has to look more into the mirror. In the post-Title IX era, as
girls have flooded into athletics, there has been no comparable explosion by
female spectators. It's all very comforting to blame media men for a lack of
coverage, but if more women buy tickets to watch female athletes play, then
more coverage will follow.
“This may be only anecdotal, but I
have noticed that in small-town newspapers and on community websites, female
high school and college sports seem to get a commensurate amount of attention
with their male jocks. The imbalance of coverage is so much more at the top,
where commerce matters.”
This argument is misguided. Women
make up about 40 percent of fans in major North American sports leagues, according
to 2009 research by Scarborough Sports Marketing published in Sports Business Daily.
Male sports leagues need female fans to help fuel their billion-dollar industries.
By extension, female sports leagues need male fans for their leagues to thrive.
And since the “sisterhood” of sports
fans is markedly smaller than the “brotherhood”, it would be most appropriate
to question why male fans are exempt from Deford’s critique of the struggles of
women’s sports leagues.
-- Steve Bien-Aimé
