{"id":859,"date":"2013-12-22T20:49:25","date_gmt":"2013-12-22T19:49:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/?p=859"},"modified":"2013-12-22T23:17:35","modified_gmt":"2013-12-22T22:17:35","slug":"sponsoring-football-because-boobs-arent-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/idrottsforum.org\/forumbloggen\/sponsoring-football-because-boobs-arent-news\/","title":{"rendered":"Sponsoring football, because boobs aren\u2019t news"},"content":{"rendered":"

Around the middle of 2012, Lucy-Anne Holmes realised that although athletes such as Jessica Ennis were among the most high profile British performers at the Olympic Games, the largest and most high profile picture of women in The Sun<\/em> was it topless \u2018Page 3 Girl\u2019 \u2013 now a feature of the paper for over 43 years. This is all the more paradoxical, because for many men the reason for buying the paper is its sports news which is strong on football, and they claim to begin reading from the back page. <\/p>\n

Holmes, not to be confused with the Australian actor Lucy Holmes (for those who are Wikipedia searchers), set out to do something about this paradox; in a manner of more and more people in the internet age, she started an on-line campaign and found that she was onto something. No More Page 3<\/a> isn\u2019t the first campaign to target The Sun<\/em>\u2019s part in mainstreaming the objectification of women; among others, Claire Short, who became secretary of State for International Development in Tony Blair\u2019s government, tried something similar in 1980s \u2013 but at the height of Thatcherism it didn\u2019t take off as a campaign. <\/p>\n

Of course, times have changed. Liberal feminism, with its limited success in mainstreaming women\u2019s success, leads to feminist struggle being presented as thing of the past. This success is limited because women are still under-represented in positions of power and major political, social, economic and cultural institutions, are still fighting for equal pay and remain among the principal victims of structural adjustment programmes and economic austerity, and that doesn\u2019t begin to deal with issues of violence against women, reproductive rights and those other things that are more obviously \u2018women\u2019s issues\u2019. Even so, the mainstreaming of images and practices that objectify women (magazine covers at the local newsagents and the seeming ubiquity of lap-dancing clubs being but two of the signs of this mainstreaming) has seen the re-emergence in the last few years of campaign groups such as the campaigners Object: Women Not Sex Objects<\/a>, the on-line spaces at Feministing<\/a> and at the F-Word<\/a> and the consumerism focussed Pink Stinks<\/a>. We have seen similar campaign groups centred on women\u2019s equality emerging across the world \u2013 in Sudan<\/a>, it started as an issue about whether women should wear trousers while Afghanistan saw campaigns to protect and defend the parliamentarian Malalai Joya<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Amid all this, it is hard not to get the feeling that the high profile and success of some women athletes is part of the liberal argument that women are making progress so these dissenting feminists and their supporters should pack up and go home. This is all the more so because of the seeming absence of formal barriers \u2013 women now participate in all Olympic sports and at the London Olympics in 2012 women made up around 45% of participants and even represented retrograde patriarchal strongholds such as Saudi Arabia (no matter that women are arrested for driving cars, a US-based athlete of Saudi descent was in the team) leading to those hyperbolic claims that London 2012 surely were the \u2018women\u2019s games\u2019, while tennis\u2019s Grand Slam prize money is now equal. The absence of legislative barriers, however, does not mean that there are no barriers or that women\u2019s sport and physical activity participation is not constrained by all manner of social and cultural rules and conventions; neither does it mean that the practices of sexualisation and trivialisation that Jennifer Hargreaves, among others, identified as the norm in discussions of women\u2019s sport before the 1990s are no longer pervasive.<\/p>\n

Which brings us back to Lucy-Anne Holmes and her campaign, which really isn\u2019t only her campaign any more \u2013 it is now supported by groups as diverse as the National Assembly for Wales, the UK\u2019s Girl Guides and Girls\u2019 Brigades, the Royal Colleges of Nursing and of Midwives, a wide group of trade unions, the British Youth Council, Rape Crisis, the Breastfeeding Network and many others. Pressure from Student Unions has also seen the end of sales of The Sun<\/em> on many University campuses. In many ways, this is the campaign profile we might expect. Earlier in December the campaign took a turn that brings it back to its 2012 origins \u2013 No More Page 3 decided to see if it could sponsor Cheltenham Town Ladies Football Club. The partnership \u2013 the footballers and the campaigners \u2013 set out to crowdsource<\/a> the funds they needed \u2013 another option not available to Claire Short and others in the 1980s.<\/p>\n

Leaving aside the problem of the \u2018Ladies\u2019 label, this campaign seems to have hit a nerve and a large number of people responded positively to the idea of a football team bearing the No More Page 3 logo, to the extent that 11 days into the 30 day fundraising campaign they have already raised 4 times the target amount. It is a campaign that raises the profile not just of the problems of the Sun\u2019s Page 3 but wider issues of women\u2019s objectification; the fundraising site doesn\u2019t say how many donors there have been but the range of amounts when I last looked was \u00a32 to \u00a330 with most being \u00a35 or $10 \u2013 small amounts of crowd sourcing money suggesting wide support for the move. This is an innovative, from the ground, campaign of the kind we too often miss as sports scholars and analysts who, all too often, focus on policy, on national and international sites for developing analyses and arguments. It is the kind of thing we should be studying and involving ourselves in (and giving money to, just click on ’crowdsource’ above) \u2013 not only is it good politics, it provides meaningful support for women\u2019s sporting participation and helps poke the eye of a media conglomerate. It\u2019s just the thing for warming the heart at Christmas, and I suspect not what was intended when huge banners across London made Jessica Ennis the face of the 2012 Olympic Games. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Around the middle of 2012, Lucy-Anne Holmes realised that although athletes such as Jessica Ennis were among the most high profile British performers at the Olympic Games, the largest and most high profile picture of women in The Sun was it topless \u2018Page 3 Girl\u2019 \u2013 now a feature of the paper for over 43 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":11,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-859","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-okategoriserade"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t