Masculinity In Sports

Words: 626
Pages: 3

All athletes try to be the best at their own sport. And a sport is a physical activity that pushes one’s body to the absolute max to achieve a goal, so athletes use their body as their tools to success. On another note, all celebrities or famous people are exposed to the media. Their fans crave gossip or any secret, cool, new information about them. So putting the two together is having a famous, very successful athlete that is often very exposed by media outlets. Both news outlets and their own social media pages manifest their crafts, which happen to be very reliant on their own bodies. So of course, both femininity and masculinity thus must be expressed to a very high degree.
Take these two professional swimmers for example. Both Ryan
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Very frequently they note his upper body and abdominal strength. He is also very competitive in nature. And like how Feder described, “athletes must strive for strength, speed and competitiveness, all those qualities which our society codes as masculine.” And this masculinity is what makes men attractive to woman. Since Lochte must know this, his pictures mainly consists of him swimming, weather it is before, during or after a race. There are also many photos that deal with his sponsors, where of course he is flexing in his swim suit. But the greatest bit of sexism lies in the comments and his fans. The comments are mainly of girls falling head over heels for his physical appearance. It important to note that although he is competitive toward Michael Phelps he has not won nearly as many medals as Phelps has, yet Lochte tends to still get more publicity, especially in the swimming world. This means sports still is not completely about the activity itself. This relates back to the gay baseball players we talked about in class. It’s not who, or how good the player is. It his appearance to the crowd. Since sport is basically entertainment, so professionals must be good in the media, not just at their own