Episode 16: Who's watching?
it was a good week for discourse on professional women's sports and notions of audience
After spending a month surveying so many of the problematic ways the LPGA has marketed its athletes over the last 40+ years, it was entertaining (and even heartening!) to see some smart conversations about marketing women’s sports pop up in two different places over the past week. Let’s take a quick trip through (1) the NBA All-Star Weekend and (2) the Sue Bird-iverse, and I’ll share some of the delightful things I read/saw/heard this week.
NBA All Star Weekend
Stephen Curry and Sabrina Ionescu faced off in a 3-point challenge during the NBA’s All Star Weekend. It was the first time that players from the NBA and WNBA squared up during the annual festivities, and it elicited some insightful commentary (from Frankie de la Cretaz) and some less-than-brilliant bumbling from Kenny Smith, which eventually devolved into an awkward conversation with Reggie Miller about playing with dolls. You can watch Steph vs Sabrina here and then follow it up with Frankie’s piece about what the 3-point challenge has to tell us about how women’s professional sports get marketed.
While Frankie is writing about basketball here, this sentiment certainly applies to professional golf:
Until women’s sports stops believing that they need men to watch them in order to succeed, they will always be stuck as second-class and trying to prove themselves. They used to try to draw in (straight) male viewers by sexualizing their athletes and highlighting their femininity. Then women were celebrated for being the “female version of [insert great male athlete here].” Now that “women’s empowerment” is all the rage, the hope is that viewers of men’s sports will be converted to fans of the women’s game by proving that women can compete alongside—AND BEAT—their favorite male athletes. That women are not worthy of men’s respect and viewership unless they can be better than a male athlete, or prove they are just as good. In basketball, men often use the fact that (they believe) women don’t dunk, that the three-point line is closer, as reasons they aren’t interested in watching.
But here’s the thing: women’s sports don’t have to look like men’s to make them entertaining or worthy. Athletes who play women’s sports shouldn’t have to keep trying to prove that they can hang with or beat the best men in the world in order to make a case for being respected. Because they can’t win, even if they do win that specific competition.
Want some more smart writing about marketing women’s sports? Check out:
Lindsay Gibbs’s thorough, hopeful essay from October about the problem of male fragility:
Or you can go back in time for Frankie de la Cretaz’s 2019 New York Times piece celebrating the moment when the WNBA realized that viewers are actually really into players’ androgynous style. This is where I learned that the WNBA (like the LPGA) also used to staff beauty experts to help make the players look more conventionally attractive:
As recently as 2016, the W.N.B.A. had fashion, hair and makeup classes for its rookie players. In 2008, nearly a third of the league’s two-day rookie orientation was dedicated to makeup and fashion tips. An outside beauty consultant, a makeup artist named Faith Edwards, was brought in.
Sue Bird
On Valentine’s Day, my boss, W. Kamau Bell, made sure I knew that Sue Bird and Megan Rapinoe were guests on Pablo Torre Finds Out, a podcast hosted by (you guessed it) Pablo Torre. He also made sure I knew that Pablo Torre is a sports commentator dude whose work and way of being in the world would probably not fill me with rage. Gotta appreciate having people in your life who know your media tastes and will curate recs for you!
The episode is smart and funny, and it highlights the ways that pressures around gender, sexuality, and marketing have evolved over the course of Megan and Sue’s careers. Early on in the conversation, Megan and Sue get into their very different experiences with being famously gay athletes. Around the 8:30 mark, Sue starts talking about the pressure she experienced to stay closeted early in her career. Even though she was more or less out to people in life, she wasn’t out publicly until her late 30s because she felt compelled to be as “marketable” as possible. Sue recalls being told that “ the only way [she] was going to have success from a marketing standpoint is to really sell this, like, straight girl next door.” Because Sue had “the look,” she was pushed to capitalize on that. While things now feel much better and freer for younger players in the W, we’re not seeing the same growth in the NBA. She says, “ I think … there's way more space for players to be themselves at such a younger age, like I see it with, you know, my … old teammates now and like younger players and just having those conversations way earlier and way more space, but it still very much exists, and then obviously in men’s sports. I mean there's there's no gay players so I mean .. that is still, like, a deeply crazy statistic.” Listen to the whole thing and be delighted by how much things have changed and how much these two have done to help effect such change.
Also, have you seen Sue’s Places? Lisa and I are four episodes into the inaugural season of Sue’s Places, a docuseries in which Sue Bird takes us around the country to learn everything we need to know about college basketball. It’s fun and it will not hurt your brain or your soul. It’s like United Shades of America and Taste the Nation now have a sporty cousin. I love that it’s a non-fiction show hosted by a lesbian, but her gayness isn’t the main event. She gets to be an expert on basketball who happens to be a lesbian. And she gets to look like herself. (What a refreshing contrast to the looks she was wrangled into during her first years in the WNBA.) Also, as someone who has worked on a similarly-structured show, I’m amused by the ways their team solves the problems that inevitably arise when you’re trying to tell these stories in an active way on a tight budget with people who aren’t actors.
I will leave you with a fun fact. One of the production companies behind Sue’s Places is Peyton Manning’s Omaha Productions. Omaha Productions’ director of current series is a producer named Kelly Rafferty. And she is not me! Hopefully we will meet one day and get to make something together. In the meantime, I like that because of her, my name shows up in the credits of Netflix’s Quarterback (another Omaha Productions project) and my uncle texted me to congratulate me on that.
Come back next week for a story about trauma, recovery, and the time I narrowly avoided going on a blame-rampage at my brand new gym.
Thank you for sharing! Also! My newsletter today is inspired by that Sue Bird/Megan Rapinoe episode of Pablo Torre’s podcast so we are definitely on the same wavelength.