Tag Archives: stereotypes

WNBA Basketball Needs Its Own Press Corps

We support a ceasefire in Palestine.

Angel Reese facing the camera; Caitlin Clark facing Reese and holding the ball

Laurie and Debbie say:

If you are not a sports fan, or a WNBA fan, here’s the groundwork:

The WNBA audience is currently growing astonishingly fast. This popularity is in part due to Caitlin Clark, a white player from Iowa currently playing for the Indiana Fever. Clark has set many records and has a huge fan base; she also does a great deal to promote the sport. Though Clark gets much more of the credit, Angel Reese is another key reason for the sport’s increasing viewership and excitement. Reese, a Black woman, plays for the Chicago Sky; she has also set many records and draws large crowds.

Jemele Hill is a reliably incisive and thoughtful Black sports reporter, currently running her own film and production company. In “The One Downside of Gender Equality in Sports,” she has Things to Say about the quality of reporting on Clark, Reese, the reputed feud between the two of them, and women’s basketball in general.  (Warning: the article may be behind the Atlantic’s paywall.) Aside from reading Hill’s article, I also heard her on the podcast A Word … with Jason Johnson, which I strongly recommend.

The arrival of a dynamite WNBA rookie class, headlined by the sensational Caitlin Clark and Angel Reese, has prompted an explosion of coverage of women’s basketball. But—and perhaps I should have anticipated this—the surge in popularity has come at a cost. Ill-informed male sports analysts are suddenly chiming in about the league and its players, offering narratives untethered to facts and occasionally making me long for the days when the WNBA largely flew under the radar. …

A persistent theme has emerged that WNBA players, particularly the veterans, are jealous of Clark and resent the attention she has been getting, when they should be groveling at her feet. A few weeks ago, for example, the Hall of Fame former player and beloved commentator Charles Barkley accused WNBA players of being “petty” and declared, “Y’all should be thanking that girl for getting y’all ass private charters, all the money and visibility she’s bringing to the WNBA.”

Hill acknowledges the real rivalry between Clark and Reese, and goes into a recent incident which reveals some of the truth here. But …

In men’s sports, of course, tough defense, physical play, trash talk, and personal rivalries are celebrated, applauded, and marketed. NBA history is filled with stories of personal grudges, including some that featured plenty of dirty play and have lasted well past athletes’ playing days. (See: Michael Jordan and Isiah Thomas.) These stories are embraced and told with affection. In fact, one of the criticisms that some fans have of today’s NBA is that the players have gotten too friendly and the game itself too soft. When it comes to hard-nosed play against Clark, however, male pundits seem unable to see women as fierce competitors. They just see mean girls.

The commentary Hill critiques isn’t just about the supposed personal issues between the two players. One thing she said on the podcast is that the male reporters conflate competitiveness with jealousy. No one reaches the top of professional sports without being competitive, but you can be competitive without being either jealous or (one of the favorite words used about Reese and other Clark competitors) petty. Both jealousy and pettiness are stereotypically associated with women athletes — and with Black women.  These are, of course, as untrue and unfair as most stereotypes, and that (surprise!) doesn’t stop male reporters of any race from uplifting them as if they were facts.

And then there’s the not-quite-stated assumption that women’s sports are basically about theater, not excellence.

After Clark’s team lost its first several games of the season, for example, some male analysts suggested that the league should be rigged to allow Clark to succeed, for the benefit of the sport’s popularity.

“The WNBA is playing this all wrong,” the NBA journeyman Jeff Teague said on his podcast, Club 520. The league, he said, should mimic professional wrestling, pulling its punches against Clark. “It’s supposed to be like WWE. Y’all are supposed to play hard against her but let her kill.”

The Fox Sports radio host Colin Cowherd made a similar argument on the air a few weeks ago. The WNBA had erred, in his view, by making Clark play against strong competition to begin the season. “So they finally have this moment,” Cowherd said. “Don’t put Caitlin Clark up in the first four games against New York twice and Connecticut twice, the best defensive teams.”

Read the article to see Hill take that one apart.

Let’s close with Hill’s closing, in response to a male commentator being PO’ed because people expected him to know his facts.

Perhaps longtime women’s-sports fans should stop holding male pundits to even the most basic standards of knowledgeability. I mean, we wouldn’t want to appear ungrateful that men are finally paying attention. That would just be petty.

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Debbie occasionally posts on Mastodon.

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#strongis(not)thenewskinny

Debbie says:

Holley Mangold during the snatch in the 2012 Olympic Trials for Women's Weightlifting at the Greater Columbus Convention Center in Columbus, March 4, 2012. (Dispatch photo by Kyle Robertson)

Over the past few years, I’ve seen several good essays on the simplistic concept of “strong women,” “strong women characters,” “kick-ass heroines,” and so forth. But I haven’t been watching the growth of the #strongisthenewskinny tag, which has 573,000 likes on Facebook and 22,000 tweets. Fortunately, Anne Thériault at The Daily Dot has been paying attention.

Oscar-nominee Carey Mulligan recently spoke out about the double-edged sword of “strong” women. In an interview with Elle UK about her role in the upcoming movie Suffragette, Mulligan said: “The idea that women are inherently weak—and we’ve identified the few strong ones to tell stories about—is mad.” And she’s right—the idea that strength is a trait men have by default and something women can only sometimes aspire to is both pervasive and damaging. But the issue with the way “strong” is applied to women also goes much deeper than that. …

In a Google search of most popular photos associated with the [#strongisthenewskinny] meme, nearly every single woman is skinny, white, blonde, and beautiful. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with being skinny or beautiful, but it seems ridiculous to posit that strong is the new skinny when strong actually seems to be the same old skinny after all. Is there really such a vast difference between telling women to aspire to one idealized body type and telling them to aspire to a slightly different one?

I opened this post with a photo of Holley Mangold, who was on the U.S. women’s weightlifting team in the 2012 Olympics. Somehow, although she’s one of the physically strongest women in the world, she’s not a #strongisthenewskinny icon. Neither is Alicia Garza, strong enough to be a co-founder of #blacklivesmatter.  Neither is Aung San Suu Kyi, who won the Nobel Peace Prize fighting for democracy in Burma, and has been strong enough to survive nearly 15 years of house arrest from 1995 to 2010.  Neither is Anita Sarkeesian, who survived being a prime target of Gamergate. I couldn’t tell you how much Garza, Suu Kyi, and Sarkeesian can bench press, but I can tell you how much I’d want any or all of them in my corner if I was in trouble.

Thériault goes on from talking about the limitations of “strong” as a body image trope to discuss the question of “strong female characters” and she pulls from a number of excellent sources. Don’t just read her essay, click the links.

In the end, however, she and I agree that — even if “strong” is interpreted broadly and not viewed as worthy of note when applied to women — it’s insufficient.

we don’t need updated standards for how women look or act—we need to scrap those standards altogether. We need characters and memes that reflect the diversity of women’s lives. There is nothing wrong with being strong—…strength is an admirable character trait—but we deserve images, characters, and ideals that are deeper than just one version of what “strong” is. We deserve women that seem real.

For me, that would be women who are strong in some ways and not so strong in others, who partake of all kinds of human qualities: some stereotyped, some surprising. Come to think of it, that’s what I want in depictions of men, also, though the preconceived notions are different. And while I’m asking, I want thousands more examples of characters outside the gender binary.

Maybe the tag we need is #realisthenewgoal .