In last year’s NCAA championship game between Louisiana State University and Iowa State University, one gesture made by LSU forward Angel Reese drew a flurry of media attention and criticism.
Celebrating a fourth-quarter lead and an assured victory, Reese threw up John Cena’s famous “You Can’t See Me” pose at Iowa star Caitlin Clark and ran around the court.
This move generated hate from all over the internet. Keith Olberman, a famous sports journalist who had his own show for several years, posted on media platform X, “what a f***ing idiot.” Founder of Barstool Sports Dave Portnoy called her a “classless piece of s***.” Hundreds of others weighed in on social media to comment on Reese’s lack of class, or disrespect.
Reese, along with many other supporters who fired back at these comments, said, “I don’t fit in a box that you all want me to be in. I’m too hood. I’m too ghetto. But when other people do it, you all say nothing.”
Sports journalist Holly Rowe also defended her on X, saying “Unapologetically confident young women should be celebrated … Get used to it.”
Reese was referring to the fact that Clark did the exact same gesture earlier in the tournament, with practically no push-back. Reese, who is black, pointed out the obvious double standard from her critics. But beyond the racist double standard, why is this simple little gesture of trash talk a problem at all? After all, no male athlete is ever critiqued for their trash talk unless it devolves into full-on violence.
In fact, in an article in Bleacher Report by Patrick Buscone, the NBA’s greatest trash-talkers were celebrated, like calling Allen Iverson “as confident a player as you could find in the NBA. He simply oozed confidence on and off the court. Thus, it is natural that he was unafraid to talk a lot of trash on the court.” He “oozed confidence” while she is a “classless piece of s***.” The disparate language is glaring.
Steph Curry’s iconic “ring me” moment at the Celtics arena in 2022 was lauded by fans as an iconic moment of greatness after a great play; the parallels between his celebration and Reese’s is striking, but the reaction couldn’t be more different.
Players like Kevin Garnett can get on all fours and bark at an opposing player and fans brush it off as funny trash talk, but when Reese puts her hand in front of her face she’s (according to former football player Danny Kanell on X) “doing WAY too much to taunt Clark”?
This double standard is almost comical. But many fans don’t even seem to notice their hypocrisy. This is because sexism in women’s sports is so commonplace that it often goes completely accepted by fans and even players.
According to a poll of 46 Paly athletes, the general consensus is that sexism is present in sports. 76% observe instances of sexism in sports media. One example of this is when women’s teams are covered differently compared to men.
When men’s teams have aggressive play, they’re seen as feared and intimidating and masculine, like the 1980s and 1990s Detroit Pistons, who were known as the “Bad Boys.” But when a women’s team is more aggressive, they get labeled as villains. In the words of an LA times writer, the LSU’s women’s team in 2023 were “America’s … dirty debutantes.” He has since apologized for this crass choice of words.
Another societal problem that leaks into sports is the objectification of women’s bodies.
In some sports, women are often viewed as accessories to the male athletes. One such example is MMA ring girls.
Starting in the 1960s, ring girls were hired to hold signs around boxing matches to “add an exciting addition” to boxing, according to Spartacus. Traditionally, ring girls were considered a part of the event’s atmosphere as they wore scandalous clothing and kept the audience engaged. MMA borrowed this concept later on.
As times have changed, questions have been brought up about whether ring girls were appropriate for today’s society. People argue that ring girls promoted negative stereotypes about women and their stature. Some media personalities have suggested that ring girls should be replaced with “ring people”, a mixture of people from all walks of life. Many argue that they are an outdated aspect of the sport that values a woman’s body over her skills or personality.
Another example is cheer. Initially, the sport (intended to organize and excite crowds as football games) was only for men, but as women joined, people began viewing the sport as an accessory to the men playing football. Paly junior and cheer captain Emma Yang notes that this preconceived notion persists today.
“We have competitions specifically for cheerleading and we have all star cheerleading, but I think that’s just a lot less well known than traditional sideline cheer,” Yang said. “Usually when I say I’m a cheerleader to people… they say, ‘Oh, you cheer for football games?’ [And I will respond,] ‘Yes. And I have my own competitions and we have our own division.’”
Another issue that arises for cheerleaders is the fact that, since it is a performance sport, often the cheerleaders’ looks are prioritized over their safety.
“It’s a sport that’s focused a lot on making it look pretty,” Yang said. “We’re a really high contact sport. If you’re just looking at what we’re doing, we should have some kind of protective wear on, it doesn’t have to be anything major. We don’t have to wear football helmets all the time, but there should be some kind of protective garment on but we don’t [wear that] and I think that’s to please people that are viewing us. You know, cheerleaders are supposed to be pretty, dancers are supposed to be pretty… I know the US has a history of sexualizing the sport a lot.”
In soccer, the former president of FIFA Sepp Blatter (who resigned in 2015 following criminal charges) reportedly said that the women players should “wear sexier uniforms to boost ratings.”
Women’s uniforms in many other sports beyond cheer have often prioritized visuals over functionality, in the past and today. Nina Faust, a sophomore who has wrestled and played field hockey at Paly, notes that the field hockey uniforms tend to prioritize style over substance.
“For field hockey, we had to wear skirts, not even skorts,” Faust said. “We had to wear skirts, so we had to bring our own shorts and put them underneath.”
The pressure placed on women to always look good leaks into athletics as well. According to ESPNW, “68 percent of female athletes said they felt pressured to be pretty” and around a third of female athletes felt worried about looking too muscular.
Men can be impacted by unfair body standards too. For example, men in cross country tend to be leaner, since their intense aerobic exercise doesn’t build muscle in the same way that other sports like football do. According to an anonymous source, this can lead to teasing of the boys for their bodies.
“All the boys in [cross country] are discriminated against and labeled as gay,” they said.
But while this does impact men, it is far more common to see women sexualized, both in general and in the sports realm.
The sexualization of women is evident in the professional world as well. Nike’s kit for the US team in the 2024 Paris Olympics was received with a wave of criticism. The men’s outfits had a tight tank top and shorts that covered the thighs. The womens’? Essentially a bathing suit. Former runner Lauren Fleshman made the crucial point in an instagram post. “If this outfit was truly beneficial to physical performance, men would wear it.”
It’s not the only Nike outfit that women have to choose from for the Olympic games, but many athletes still expressed their disappointment that it was even an option.
And when these women are forced to wear inappropriate and impractical outfits, the men around them assume they’re dressing for them and trying to be as sexy as possible. When Tara Davis won the women’s long jump event in 2022 at the Millrose Games in January 2022, she went viral on tiktok.
But instead of getting congratulations for her hard work and incredible performance, she was instead the victim of a thirst trap which showed her landing in slow motion. Men in the comments repeated ideas like, “she knows what she’s doing,” with the disgusting attitude that in this moment — when Davis was focusing all her energy on culminating all her hard work in the perfect jump — her biggest worry was looking “sexy” for the people watching her.
And of course, this harassment can continue into assault, such as with the serial abuser Larry Nassar, who exploited dozens of young gymnasts for 18 years, and hundreds of other examples of coaches and trainers exploiting the women in their care.
This is not an issue isolated to the outside world; Paly athletes are at risk just like all other women. According to a survey of Paly athletes, two in every five athletes have experienced instances of sexism in their sport.
Last year, an incident occurred on the Paly swim and dive team where a member of the team took an inappropriate photo taken of a female swimmer and circulated it. An anonymous member of the girls team (not the one who was the subject of the photo) notes how it impacted the team.
“It honestly shook us,” she said. “We had been really close with the boys team and felt like a cohesive unit. And even though most of the boys weren’t involved and didn’t even see the picture, just the fact that one of our peers would do that was really tough.”
She notes that since the swim uniform is more revealing, it is important to create a positive culture.
“We’re walking around in our suits and trusting that we have a good culture where people don’t take advantage of each other,” she said. “When someone violates that culture it kind of ruins that trust and sets a damper on the season.”
Fortunately, the incident was dealt with and rules were put in place to avoid that situation in the future.
“[The administration] did deal with it, and I think there are some new policies, which I appreciate personally,” she said.
Another scenario occurred at Paly last year which involved the football team and the cheer team. Football players shared inappropriate comments about the cheerleaders, both in text group chats and in person to some of them. Junior cheer captain Emma Yang mentions that their comments often regarded the girls’ bodies.
“We’ve had players directly come up to our cheerleaders telling them different things regarding what they’re eating [or] how much they should be eating,” she said.
The cheer team filed a Title IX claim against certain boys who had made the comments. The situation was dealt with, but the trust between the two teams was damaged. Yang worked this year to try to extend a hand and rebuild the relationship, but it was a challenge.
“This year we really tried to repair that relationship we had with them,” Yang said. “There was a pretty big wall of shot up between the two sports. … We had created a group chat with the football captains and we were thinking of different activities we could do with both teams together.”
These events didn’t pan out this year for logistical reasons, but hopefully the relationship can be repaired following the violation of trust by the boys on the team.
As can be seen in these examples, sexism and harassment are not just present in the real world, but also exist in our own community. That’s not to mention all the examples of little moments of harassment that women choose to tolerate instead of report.
In many cases, the people who perpetrate these examples of harassment don’t mean to be harmful at all. Sometimes they think they’re not being inappropriate, or they get carried away in peer pressure. So, to avoid accidentally being disrespectful, everyone should be conscious of the way that they talk, especially avoiding any comments that discuss someone else’s body that they didn’t invite.
Another, more systemic issue that comes along with sports is distribution of resources like equipment and facilities. In professional sports and Paly sports, women have found themselves with lower quality equipment and inconvenient time slots for gyms and fields.
In a Euronews article by Mario Bowden, it is reflected that boys were always prioritized for more favorable time slots.
“When you’re a female footballer today when you’re playing in the D1, you can regularly find yourself in situations where you find yourself with the last time slot left free by the boys training, i.e. the 8pm/10pm time slot,” French soccer player Melissa Plaza said.
Faust, who switched from wrestling to field hockey during her sophomore year, notes that the women on the wrestling team are also not prioritized.
“Wrestling in general is a very male dominated sport,” she said. “The sexism that I saw in the sport was … stuff that you wouldn’t really call sexism until you reflected on it more. For example … there were three captains on the entire team. There’s two males and one female. They’re all seniors. But in the practice room, our female captain wouldn’t act like a captain for the whole team … she wouldn’t lead warm ups or anything, unless the boys weren’t there.”
Along with the boys leading the practices without the female captain, the girls also had to wrestle with the boys JV team.
“[Our captain] also had a wrestle with us on the JV team,” Faust said. “Imagine having a girls varsity team having to play with the JV team.”
This unfair distribution of equipment and facilities is also present in our Paly community. During the basketball seasons, girls teams were often forced to play their games in the small gym due to the boys taking up the big gym. Having few stands, the small gym made it more difficult for fans to watch the girls basketball games.
In conclusion, sexism has remained a prominent issue in the world of sports. While progress has been made to improve the matter, the presence of body objectification and double standards is still significant in women’s sports. In reality, sexism is often a trait based on subconscious rather than intention. It is important for us as individuals to reflect on our intuitive stance on sexism and how we can improve it. Our world is continually changing, and the sexism towards women in sports needs to be an issue more scrutinized in the public eye, because with awareness, we can eliminate the issue.
