The Babe Next Door: Media Coverage of the ’99ers

Fastest. Strong. Beat. Win. Dominate.

These are the words sports journalists use most often to describe male athletes. Each term is clearly related to athletic performance and competition, which makes sense. But the words most often associated with female athletes are rather different. According to a 2016 study, those terms are aged, pregnant, married, compete, participate, and strive. The first three have no bearing on sports, and participate could just as easily describe attending a staff meeting.

Granted, any of these terms are better than prostitute, the Brazilian media’s preferred way of describing female footballers in the 1940s. But they are problematic and indicative of a larger issue around how journalists cover women’s sports: they minimize girls and women as elite athletes and full-fledged, multifaceted human beings. 

Journalists do this in two ways. The first is by focusing their coverage on issues unrelated to the game—husbands, families, and personal appearance. This has the effect of downplaying athletic achievement and making players seem like less of a threat to social norms, unlike stories that emphasize their strength and athleticism. 

The 1999 Women’s World Cup was a case in point. Late-night host David Letterman famously referred to the US team as “Babe City,” and, as Caitlin Murray points out in The National Team: The Inside Story of the Women Who Changed Soccer, “The player’s looks became a topic all its own.” She goes on to provide a sample of headlines from the time, including:[2]

•       “US Women’s Team Looking Good: Sex Appeal Part of the Story” (Boston Herald) 
•       “Uncover Story: Soccer Has Sex Appeal” (Chicago Sun-Times)
•       “Get Real: Sex Appeal Does Count” (Washington Times) 
•       “Talented, Athletic, Sexy—That’s US Soccer Team” (Memphis Commercial Appeal) 
•       “Talented and Sexy: US Team Has It All” (Orlando Sentinel) 
•       “Success of the ’99 Women’s World Cup is . . . Looking Good” (Los Angeles Times) 
•       “The Babe Factor in Soccer Team’s Success” (Scripps News) 

Aside from babes, the phrase most often used to describe them was girls next door. The media portrayed them as attractive but approachable, athletic but not intimidating, talented but modest. It was a fine line to walk. 

“To their fans and their corporate sponsors, and to so many members of the media, the ponytailed Americans presented a safe-sexy picture of bouncy femininity,” Jere Longman maintains in Girls of Summer: The U.S. Women’s Soccer Team and How It Changed the World. “The ponytail was even incorporated into the official Women’s World Cup logo. It was an unthreatening symbol that may have felt restrictive to players on the team not to conform to such a portrayal, a sign that organizers still felt it necessary to sheath women’s sports in the image condom of heterosexuality.”[3] 

Indeed, that was the subtext. Behind the emphasis on the ponytail and everything it symbolized lay the implicit message that players were “just like us!” if “us” happens to be straight, mostly white, and suburban. How many members of the team did not fit this “image condom” remains a mystery; it was not a safe time for women athletes, especially those on a quest to fill stadiums and appeal to millions of fans, to come out of the closet. 

Which brings us to the second issue. Journalists and fans typically hold female athletes to higher standards of behavior on and off the field than they do male athletes and punish them more severely for the same actions. When Dr. Jessica Vredenburg and Dr. Marilyn Giroux studied the impact of behavior on sponsorship deals, they found that while the sports world is littered with “loveable bad boys,” no female equivalent exists. 

Their research indicated that bad boy behavior was often associated with positive sentiments, like fearlessness and intrigue, but even the slightest hint of temper or extra aggressive play in women attracts condemnation—and jeopardizes their financial support structure. “Sponsors drop women a lot quicker and for smaller transgressions,” says Giroux, a senior lecturer at the University of Auckland School of Business, “especially in their personal lives.”[4]

Those transgressions may be as simple as stereotype violations, she notes. “We expect men to throw tantrums or be aggressive, but when you see more dominance or aggressiveness in women, or when they talk louder, people will penalize them a lot more than they will men.”

Women are already chronically underrepresented in endorsement deals, on average earning one-fifth of what men competing in the same sport bring in. When male athletes act up—and some of the biggest stars in male football over the past sixty years certainly have, whether by snorting cocaine, hanging out with known mafia members, assaulting teammates, attacking fans, sleeping with their teammates’ wives, or repeatedly biting other players—it doesn’t necessarily impact their popularity with fans or sponsors and might even enhance it.

One reason is differing audience expectations based on gender, according to Vredenburg, a senior lecturer at the Auckland University of Technology. Fans go to men’s sports to enjoy the show, but they attend women’s games expecting female athletes to inspire the next generation. “The audience focus tends to be more on the girls who are coming up and wanting to be sportswomen,” she explains. “In that view, women are expected to help others. When they do make a mistake, it’s inconsistent with traditional norms.” 

That may explain the response when the Canadian women’s national hockey team took to the ice to drink beer and smoke cigars after their gold medal win at the 2010 Winter Olympics. Media reaction was swift and merciless. 

“People reacted like, ‘Oh my God, what are these women doing?’” says Giroux. “We see this kind of behavior all the time in the NBA and after the Super Bowl. They were just celebrating the same way men celebrate.”

If the media are part of the problem, they can also be part of the solution. Vredenburg points to “Change the Angle,” a collaborative campaign to raise awareness about how the media portrays women’s sports. Research has shown that women are ten times more likely than men to be objectified in sports coverage, with cameras zooming in on areas most likely to titillate

“What’s the representation? The journalists and the camera people are creating the content and curating the story,” Vredenburg notes. “If you have a mostly male newsroom covering a sport, the story may be very different from the more balanced coverage that occurs when more females are among the reporting staff. The marketing campaign, the camera, and the reporters all go hand in hand to support the way the story is told.”