"The pressure on sportswomen to increase levels of sponsorship and media coverage has seen many resort to taking their clothes off just to get some publicity."" Jan Borrie, the Canberra Times, 27 May 2000.
Case study one.
Sports such as tennis are beginning to confront to tensions associated with maintaining a production line of young, and in many cases underage, teenage girls for the professional ranks. Increasingly, the popular image of tennis is becoming reliant on the sex appeal of players under the age of 20.
In an effort to revive a flagging interest in women's tennis the focus has now shifted away from the on-court action to Venus Williams' backless dress, Martina Hingis's hair or Anna Kournikova's Lolita-like image. Indeed, Anna Kournikova is a prime example of the production of a new tennis star, merging the role of tennis pro and supermodel in a sport where more people now watch matches on television more than in the stands. Kournikova is a player of average ability, one who is yet to win a singles tournament and who has displayed variable form during her short career- including one woeful match in the 1998 Australian Open where she served no more than 32 double faults. Yet she is undeniably a global media star and match orgainisers are quite ready to change their scheduling to ensure that she is on court during peak television viewing time. The Russian teenager is the subject of a growing host of internet pages, which merge sex appeal with computer rankings and win-loss ratios. Kournikova is seen as exotic and alluring by the media and is represented as the supermodel of women's tennis.
These developments in women's tennis highlight the dilemma of co modifying the sexual qualities of women's sport and the tensions in attempting to lift the profile, generate spectator appeal and boost television and cooperate sponsorship, women's sport has to resort to sexing up' the game by stripping down'.
Changing the females uniform was for no reason other than to try and gain viewers through sexploitation. ... Sexploitation applies to forms of marketing, promotions or attempts to gain media coverage which focus attention to the sexual attributes of female athletes, especially the visibility of their bodies. ... To conclude, inequity and sexploitation occurs in beach volleyball. ...
