Findings from

Since I was unable to share my findings from the Awareness Assignment with the class last week, I wanted to sum up what I found here on our blog. For this assignment I did a media critique looking at two websites of the NBC Olympics and Sports Illustrated comparing portrayals of female athletes along with the amount of coverage they received. On the Sports Illustrated site, there was very little coverage on women’s teams. If there were any articles, they were placed on the side with no attention drawing towards them. If one were to scroll down the page, one would automatically see the advertisements and brief articles about their new swimsuit issue. The model on the cover was not even an athlete and it brought up concepts learned in class. This sex appeal demonstrated the idea of how a woman should look and was in correlation with the film, Pumping Iron II, and the skirt theory. As we saw in the film, these female athletes still had to maintain a feminine image by not building too much muscle and the judges made sure that this was implemented. The same thing goes with the skirt theory that if a woman can play a sport in her skirt, then it was allowed. These two examples indicate how a woman should look and use sex appeal to draw attention to their sport while there is no focus on her athletic ability. On the Olympics site, there was equal representation of female and male athletes, but most of the female athletes that were represented were white women. I thought that this was interesting because the Olympics are known to show diversity and bring this world as one. Overall, I thought that what I found was intriguing and was surprised to see that what I was looking at related to a lot of the yopics that we discussed in class.

Denise Nunez
KIN 338I T/Th 9:30-10:45