Women’s Tennis suffers from stereotypes
Women’s tennis has a problem, which it has had since the very beginning. The women who play the game are proper athletes, who want to be taken seriously when they play the sport they love. But this is where the problem creeps in. Everyone knows s*x sells and tennis players who are good looking or s**y get a lot of attention from the media. So much so that it sometimes overshadows their game. Men’s tennis does not have this problem, a lot of good looking men play tennis but they are never judged on their looks or on the outfits they wear, people only talk about their game. It is high time women’s tennis reached this same level.
The interesting part of women’s tennis is that there are a lot of good looking women playing the game today. From Maria Sharapova, Caroline Wozniacki, Kim Clijsters, Maria Kirilenko, Daniela Hantuchova and many more, there seems to be a lot of hot tennis stars around at the moment. There are two sides to the issue of taking women’s tennis seriously as a sport and not as a sleaze fest.
On the one hand there are those who think that women’s sport should be taken seriously no matter what the contestants look like. They should be judged and measured on their game play and not on the length of their skirts. This side feels that a lot of time is spent discussing women tennis players’ clothing, their hair, the way they look, their outfits or even the grunts they make every time they hit the ball and less time is spent talking about tennis.
Women’s tennis is a sport that seems to accentuate sexiness on the court. The outfits women wear have always been tight fitting short skirts and dresses and that is the norm in the sport. Other women’s sports have the athlete’s wearing revealing outfits as well but there is a combination of factors that make women’s tennis a s**y proposition to watch. Women’s tennis has an abnormally high number of good looking women in it and secondly a lot of female tennis players make grunting noises every time they hit the ball which can be mistaken for resembling a completely different sort of noise. Combine these factors with the tight revealing clothing and it starts to become clear that women’s tennis has a problem. The other issue for the sport is that, so many of its superstars, such as Sharapova, Kirilenko and the Williams sisters all appear in men’s magazines wearing close to nothing. They themselves are not doing their sport any favours by appearing half naked for men to ogle at. This is another dilemma that the sport faces.
The women who appear in magazines and photo spreads, know that s*x sells. If they can show a little bit of skin they can make some serious money and they might be able to get some endorsement deals out of it. The proponents of showing skin say that women should be able to do what they feel like and if they are comfortable in their bodies and they want to show them off they have the right to. On the other hand some people say that by showing off their bodies and grunting with each hit, female tennis players are exploiting themselves and not allowing themselves to be taken seriously. A reason for trying to make more money for themselves, is the fact that traditionally, women’s sports have less money in them than men’s sports. Even though this is slowly changing but in some cases it will take some time. The WTA tour pays out $80 million on the men’s tour while paying out only $57 million for the women’s tour. It is this kind of discrepancy that makes some women dress a bit sexier in order to secure some big deals in the process.
One tennis player who knows all about s*x selling is Anna Kournikova. The beautiful Russian did not win a single tournament during the whole time she was playing but still rakes in over $12 million a year in endorsements.
It looks like women’s tennis will always have to live with the dual image that it currently has. One of being a serious and highly competitive women’s sport and the other is the fact that the players will always be seen as s*x symbols. It might change in the future but it does not look likely.
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