I get Google News updates on hockey "as they happen". Yesterday, I received an article that had the title "The ten hottest players in the NHL". Now, you'll note that I didn't provide you with an URL. I'm not in the mood to drive business to the site (which appears to be a sidebar of Fox Spors. Oh, why am I not surprised?).
Why? There's a bunch of reasons for that. Right off the bat, it's the usual sniggery TigerBeat-ish bullshit that would get a bad grade in a grade 9 English class. It's bad writing. It's the entire attitude that this sort of phosphor-slop engenders that really cranks me.
Look, when an eight year old thinks that Pat Falloon is the cutest guy in the world and wants him to be her "boyfriend", that's kinda cute. An 18 year old "dirty" expressing the same (and in much more explicit fashion) is pretty grotty. And in a 40 year old woman whose life revolves around a fantasy life she's created, well, that's a nasty mixture of disgusting and sad. I'll talk more about that in a couple of days.
Then there's the notion that women can only be interested in sports from a notion of who in the league has the cutest butt.
That's insulting.
I have an MBA with a speciality in sports marketing management. Every giggling "fan-girl" article, every dirty, Annie, hockey-ho or bimbette that gets into the mindset of a sports franchise makes it that much harder for me, or any other woman with a legitimate interest in sports to be able to do business.
Any woman who wants to be taken seriously in sports, whether at a business level or just at a fan level, gets a little more marginalized, a little more shoved into a corner when this happens.
Am I being a hard-ass? You betcha! If this was the only "column" of it's type in a year, I'd call it bad judgement. When I see a collection of these, written over the course of the season, because some editor has decided that "this is what women want to read about regarding sports", it's like walking out to your backyard, to find it knee-deep in weeds.
And with weeds, you need to pull them out before they spread.
Posted by lsefton at September 14, 2003 03:04 PMWhile I completely agree that this kind of crap should have no place in sports journalism, I must confess to having pilfered and perused a copy of Playgirl--musta been early '80's because I know I wasn't 18 yet--when they had a feature about the NY Islanders. Bobby Nystrom and Clark Gillies in their skivvies made quite an impression on me, I'll tell you what!
Posted by: vicster at September 18, 2003 07:40 PM