thoughts on the gender of sport

Iranian race car women

Instead of this sort of thing we get Danica Patricks and Anna Kournikovas in American sports. Even though Anna was Russian, she was decidedly an American product of woman's tennis, a model playing tennis in other words. The European model of tennis put women like Seles, Graf, Navratilova at the forefront because they were actually good at it (though Seles' grunting was a controversial story for a while). Marketable commodities, I agree, carry some weight in the nebulous regions where sport and entertainment engage one another. But in the end, shouldn't someone have to be good at what they actually do and that the novelty effect of it being an attractive woman doing something well is merely a side effect cash cow for advertisers? There is, while not as well documented, a similar effect for male athletes who appeal broadly to women and their own advertising side revenues, so it isn't quite a sexist system, only one that more prominently benefits attractive women, and it's one I'd be prepared to accept so long as these were women who were also giants of their event and not women who merely had giant boobs or some such merely participating in a sport. I suspect also the Michelle Wei effect in golf was working out this way, but eventually people caught on that she wasn't that great and that golf isn't either a coed sport like racing or a scantily clad one like tennis where her gender and sex appeal was as marketable. We're learning, after a fashion. We haven't quite gotten there yet with soccer or basketball. But this is more because of the product. Americans don't like soccer except every 2-4 years, despite the fact that our women are really good at it and happen to usually be attractive there isn't a successful model for a woman's pro soccer league, and basketball is just a huge gap in athleticism to provide entertainment value. Women don't dunk enough to overcome any gap in actual game (and there are indeed women who are very talented at basketball, certainly better than say 99% of men who play).

As far as Iran, it's generally surprising what levels of freedoms they grant and what they don't to women. They let her compete (which is short of remarkable in many ways), but she had to wear a hijab while driving inside a race car... and then had to conceal herself in some way when she actually won an event. Different. Culture. In America they'd probably encourage her to drive half-naked if they could get around safety considerations and there would be plenty of photos of some exuberant celebration (a la Brandi Chastain).