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"Babes" & Boards: Opportunities in New Millennium Sport?

Article in Journal of Sport & Social Issues · August 2005

DOI: 10.1177/0193723505277909

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10.1177/0193723505277909
“BABES” &SPORT
JOURNAL OF BOARDS
& SOCIAL ISSUES / August 2005
FOCUS

“BABES” & BOARDS

Opportunities in New Millennium Sport?
Robert Rinehart

The proliferation of action or extreme sports in recent years leads to a reas-

sessment of fundamental, foundational questions regarding the nature of
sport. One such question is Does the much-vaunted alternative ethos of
action sports lead to a concomitant paradigm shift in fundamental attitudes
toward race, class, or gender differences within these new sport forms? In this
article, the focus is on advertising in slick, national skating magazines and
more particularly on the gendered nature of advertising and how it reflects
and promotes gender segmentation in markets. In examining such print
advertising, several metathemes emerge: There are images that (a) reify the
naturalized maleness of North American sport; (b) objectify girls and woman
as a naturalized position; (c) objectify girls and woman in sexualized man-
ners, so that they create misogynist views in their audiences; and (d) attempt
to set up the brand advertisers as outlaws, as oppositional to mainstream
sport culture.

Keywords: action sports; women; advertising

. . . formal equality—for whatever sex, race or class—can prove chimerical when

civic and political structures that permit such processes of equality already
work in favor of the dominant group, and demonstrate that in fact the discourses
of power assume relations of inequality at their very roots.
(Imelda Whelehan, Modern Feminist Thought:
From the Second Wave to ‘Post-Feminism’, 1995, p. 1)

The term babe, in the early stages of the 21st century, is decidedly not
politically correct. As used here, ironically, it is meant to highlight at least
two directions mainstream sport—and currently, as emergent sport forms,
alternative, action, or extreme sport—have taken in their articulation with
female practitioners. First, the term babes infers that women are objects
rather than subjects, objects of voyeuristic or scopophilic gazes (Brummett
& Duncan, 1990; Duncan & Hasbrook, 1988; Morse, 1983); and second, the
term implies female athletes as infantilized adults within a male-dominated
sport culture. In both cases, power is not within the women—who are either
objects of usually male gazes or who are dependent on others for their sense
of selfhood—but rather it is directed from a patriarchal hierarchy, where
there are controllers, masters, and actors imposing their wishes on, respec-

Journal of Sport & Social Issues, Volume 29, No. 3, August 2005, pp. 232-255
DOI: 10.1177/0193723505277909
© 2005 Sage Publications
 “BABES” & BOARDS 233

tively, the controlled, the subjects, and the acted on. Anyone who has ever
been subservient understands that this is not an enviable position (e.g.,
Scott, 1985; Scott & Tria Kerkvliet, 1986).
Thus, to be a babe, in either sense, is not an honorific: It is decidedly a
frustrating, energy-consuming, and humbling position in which to find one-
self. Furthermore, although the appropriation of babe, much like the use of
girl and girlie, may be meant by its users as empowering, there is still the
incessant reminder for women “of [their] status as honorary children. . . .
The dominant meanings of this term [girl] currently in circulation are only
superficially laudatory” (Whelehan, 2000, p. 37). Furthermore, Beal (1996)
points out that “females [play] a marginalized role in the subculture of
skateboarding” (p. 215). Beal discusses the use of terminologies such as
skate betties as “the name given to most females associated with skating.
Skate Betties are female groupies whose intentions are . . . to meet cute guys
and associate with an alternative crowd” (p. 215).
The term babes, then, as I use it, is meant ironically to provoke the
reader to interrogate its sensibilities (and the circulations of meanings) in
skating and alternative sport culture.
In this article, I intend to contrast and compare mainstream, domi-
nant, hegemonic sport with alternative, so-called extreme or action sports.
During this process, I examine the educational rationale for sport and dis-
cuss major ideologies of mainstream sport and why and how those might be
opposed by alternative sports. Furthermore, I suggest a case where the new,
postmodern sport forms—action and extreme sports—are an opportunity
for the creation of fundamental change in the way postindustrial societies
perceive sport.1 I suggest that this is an opportunity for a paradigm shift in
our thinking about what is sport, who might benefit from sport, and what
sport means to North American society and that, as it is currently delivered,
that opportunity is being lost.
Opportunity for change does not necessarily mean achievement of
change: Co-optation by multinational corporations, electronic and print
media groups, and sport administrators practically guarantees a status-
quo, conservative, and hegemonic response to any attempted incursion by
radical sports enthusiasts. Even if the so-called outsiders, dominated by
male White youth, were to suddenly become more gender-enlightened,
many societal structures might oppose their attempts at egalitarianism.
And the spaces for female participation, although greater in numbers and
perhaps even slightly better encouraged in extreme sports than in main-
stream sports (see Kay, 1998), are still fraught with patriarchal dominance.
Some of the manifestations of this dominance are underground and covert;
other examples of such hierarchies are obvious and overt. To better under-
stand this process of incorporation and co-optation of so-called radical sport,
I will discuss several disquieting examples of both covert and overt sexism
in alternative sport advertising.
The advertisements were gleaned from skating niche-market maga-
zines (that is, in-line skating and skateboarding). The images are from Box,
 234 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / August 2005

Slap, Big Brother, TransWorld SKATEboarding, and InLine: The Skate Mag-
azine, circa 1995 to 1997. Although these ads are certainly not the standard
fare for most advertising in these specific magazines during this slice of
time, ads like them can be easily found in many of the extant magazines.2
But before examining these advertisements, I will compare and con-
trast general attitudes and fundamental underpinnings of mainstream and
alternative sport forms. The ethos of dominant sports is presumably well
known, but an overview will help to underscore and contextualize signifi-
cant differences between dominant sports participants and the practitio-
ners of action sports.

NORTH AMERICAN MAINSTREAM SPORT:

THE EDUCATIONAL MODEL
In North America, an ideological rationale justifies sport: Sport teaches
its participants values, skills, and lifelong lessons. However, also in North
America, indeed, in most of the postindustrial world—mainstream, domi-
nant sport is male. By mainstream,3 I mean sports that have been embraced
by spectators and participants alike—sports that are taught in the schools,
that run through a patriarchal culture to such an extent that both terminol-
ogy and attire deriving from those sports remain unremarkable to casual
observers, that “the hegemony of a class [male] is largely maintained by its
ability to execute its power over those living in the dominated classes in a
nonconflicting manner” (Robidoux, 2001, p. 22). The very maleness of sport,
of course, is paradoxical to this ideology of an educational, egalitarian model
for sport.
In North America, mainstream and dominant sports include football,
basketball, baseball, hockey, even soccer. Generally, those are the sports that
people consider dominant, mainstream, highly engaging—the so-called real
sports. They exist in contrast to more expressive sports like skating, diving,
and gymnastics (see Lowe, 1977).
But there are also forms of sport that typically privilege male-
dominant parameters of physical fitness. The maleness, the ability of a pre-
ponderance of males to defeat many females in these sports, although it may
be biologically driven, is also culturally constructed. What if, for example,
the fundamental goal of football was to exhibit grace, agility, and balance
rather than to overpower another player in seeking to score a touchdown? In
this case, the well-known NFL films’ sequences of a Lynn Swan or a Jerry
Rice catching a ball, sometimes put to music and slowed to demonstrate the
incredible dynamic balance and symmetry of the act of catching a football,
would not be marginalized but might be seen as key elements of successful
football.
The degree of equality of the sexes in sport is an interesting question.4
In the 1970s and 1980s, American psychosocial theoreticians analyzed why
it might be important for young girls as well as young boys to have positive
experiences in sport, games, and play situations: What were some of the pos-
sible outcomes of sport participation? Susan Greendorfer, for example,
 “BABES” & BOARDS 235

examined children’s socialization into (and through) sport (Greendorfer &

Ewing, 1981) and looked at positive and negative results of organized sport
(Greendorfer, 1987). In her review of the literature of the psychosocial corre-
lates of organized sport, Greendorfer (1987) cautioned that education, not
sport participation, probably gains participants greater upward mobility,
that moral development in athletes is more immature than in nonathletes
(Bredemeier & Shields, 1984), and that the influence of sport climate, par-
ents, coaches, and peers significantly affects either positively or negatively
the outcomes of the sport experience. Sport climate is key to the success or
failure of youth participation in sport: Process-oriented youth sport settings
are more effective in facilitating perseverance, joy of achievement, and life-
long participation than product, ends-oriented youth sport settings.
In this sense, then, sport is neither wonderful nor evil: It is neutral.
Those who implement sport—parents, coaches, peers—largely determine
one’s attitude toward sport. As Shakespeare wrote, “There is nothing either
good or bad, but thinking makes it so.” Clearly, Greendorfer’s research—and
many others’ since—on organized sport outcomes suggests that the orga-
nized sport experience may be positive or negative, gender-neutral or sexist,
relatively color-blind or blatantly racist: In short, the quality and result of
participation reflects many of the values and much of the ethos of the larger
society within which the youth sport takes place (Roberts & Sutton-Smith,
1962).
But if some of the ideologies for outcomes for organized sport—that
participation may allow young athletes the opportunities to learn persever-
ance, dedication, how to work together, persistence, how to overcome disap-
pointment—are good for boys, then, most thinking goes, they should be
equally good for girls. As John Gorman (1994) said,

We’ve lost sight of the educational basis of our sport in America. Sport—
and sport practices—originally began as an opportunity for youngsters—boy
youngsters—to learn values and affect. Now, rather than being process-
oriented, sport is primarily goal-directed. Winning is all that matters. And girls
have been excluded from the mix. (April 23, 1994, personal communication).

Of course, we see more and more examples of the possible negative

aspects wrought in male-oriented, organized sport—and the visible exam-
ples, from professional sports, abound: “Boomer Esiason walks off the job
after he loses his job as Cardinals quarterback . . . Robert Horry, former Suns
forward . . . mistakes the face of his then-coach, Danny Ainge, for a laundry
hamper” (Shappell, 1997, p. C1) and “Rage, racism, sex, alcohol, possible law-
suits and felony charges: We touched ’em all, baby” regarding the Detroit
Pistons-Indiana Pacers’ NBA brawl (McCallum, 2004, p. 44). Kevin Johnson
was quoted as saying “Athletes are people, and we reflect society. . . . Our big-
gest influences used to be the church, family and our peers. . . . Now it’s
music and television” (cited in Cohn, 1997, p. C12). Professional athletes,
thus, may serve as models for youth sport participants. So there is another
236 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / August 2005

aspect to the educational orientation of American sport: Modeling behaviors

may empower and impel (male) young people toward physical activity.
Interestingly, in light of this athletes-reflect-society thesis, typical
gender expectations remain pretty skewed: In this same 1997 Arizona
Republic special issue detailing today’s athlete, writer Jeff Metcalfe (1997)
tried to avoid mainstream controversy by indicating that “unsportsmanship
conduct from women still shocks us . . . [and this] double standard [is one]
only the most ardent feminist would buck” (1997, p. C13). Yet, at the same
time, many of the quotes in the piece nostalgically seek a return to higher,
(presumably naturalized and stereotypically feminine) standards: “Maybe,
just maybe, as women’s pro-team sports emerge, they can clear a path to the
civility that often is the road less traveled by the men” (1997, p. C13).
The simple fact that most North American (indeed, world) organized
sports are separated based on sex is intriguing. Why is it that boys and girls,
men and women, do sport separately? Is it just the way it is? Is it because of
essential biological differences, so that weight, height, body composition,
and strength, power, and speed components, which generally privilege
males, are inherent to superior functioning within most sports?
That cannot be: There are clearly sports in which females’ bodies and
body types gain the advantage: One example is long-distance swimming, an
ultramarathon event in cold water, where a higher percentage adipose tis-
sue provides less resistance in the water, greater resources for energy con-
sumption, and more insulation against the cold. Another example is where
implements might even the playing field, and visual acuity and steadiness
are key factors. In the Olympics, for example, some shooting events (trap
and skeet) are coed: Males and females compete alongside one another, with
females likely to gain the advantage over their male competition.
Physical and physiological measures of skilled sport and fitness—
before fitness became health-related—typically used to include agility, bal-
ance, coordination (grace), and cardiovascular and muscular endurance
(stamina). But most of the sports that are mainstream and dominant privi-
lege such fitness parameters as strength, speed, and power. These are
parameters where a majority of mature males have a decided advantage
over a majority of mature females, and when these criteria are the most
important factors in a given sport, most males have a similar advantage over
most females. This is just to say that sport is dominantly male, that it is
socially constructed, and that the hierarchies within dominant forms of
North American sport are skewed toward reproducing and thus reifying a
cultural myth of male physical superiority.
Of course, there are other (less notable) mainstream sports—sports
like figure skating, synchronized swimming, even golf—where fine motor
skills—grace and agility and balance—are key elements. But these sports
are not nearly as celebrated, not nearly so dominant, as football, baseball,
basketball, or hockey. They are relegated to second-class categories like
Olympic sport, minor sport, country club sport, or, at some apparently neo-
Marxist universities, the nonrevenue sports. The words are important,
 “BABES” & BOARDS 237

because they betray attitudes toward the various sports: Some are clearly
more important than others.
Similarly, the discourses surrounding women and men athletes are
differentially charged. In a study replicating a previous study (Duncan,
Messner, Williams, & Jensen, 1989), Duncan, Messner, and Aycock (1994)
discovered that sports commentators’ descriptions of male and female ath-
letes, although less overtly stereotypical than 5 years previous, still tended
to undercut the females’ athletic ability. They discussed four examples of
Foucaldian-type structuring absences in the commentators’ praise of men
and absence of praise of women in the 1993 NCAA Men’s and Women’s Bas-
ketball Final Four. The discussion of men’s errors, for example, “served to
create an impression that men’s errors were unavoidable, caused by factors
other than their incompetence,” although “the absence of such accounts in
the women’s games constructed an impression that women’s errors were
due to their own unmitigated incompetence” (p. 7).
When things are arranged hierarchically or differentially (with the
National Basketball Association [NBA] consistently gaining, for example,
more column inches on the sports page than the Women’s National Basket-
ball Association [WNBA] on any given weekend5), they tend to become natu-
ralized. We learn to take the order of things as natural or a given and leave
that order unexamined. We—women and men alike, socialized into the same
society—protest that men playing in the Final Four are more talented, so
more deserving of praise, or that the men’s game is more a real sport, so
deserving of more column inches in the newspaper. And this tautological
insistence tends to reinforce the stereotypes, to reify the naturalization.
When this kind of hierarchical imbalance occurs to women, particularly in
something that is not seen as a stereotypically women’s field, few male or
even female voices protest.
But watch when men’s sports are threatened: Even women like
Camille Paglia (1996), perhaps steeped in the patriarchal mythos, cry that
sports have become unfair: “Title IX,” she writes, “has become a license for
vandalism” of men’s programs, at least as enacted by “cowardly and self-
serving university administrators who are scapegoating men’s athletics
instead of fighting for principle against intrusive Washington bureaucrats”
(1996, p. 11A). Of course, she is missing the point that a policy of dividing
and conquering is the strategy for maintaining the status quo in sports
programming.
The point is that men’s and women’s sports—and boy’s and girl’s
sports at the public school level—are contested terrain. And in most cases,
the males have the resources, and the females have been granted second-
class status. Historically, females have been relegated to cheerleaders and
sideline encouragers; the men are the performers. Laurel Davis (1997) dis-
cusses a variety of readings of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue: She
suggests that a positive strategy “to subvert gender, racial, ethnic, and sex-
ual inequality” might begin with the “abolish[ment of] the gender ideals of
masculinity and femininity altogether” (p. 121).
 238 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / August 2005

Men, until very recently (and still in much more numbers), have had
opportunities to continue professionally in sport; for women participants,
educationally based sport was an end in and of itself. Such seemingly mean-
ingless issues as scheduling time for gym use for practices or for games
(prime times have historically been allotted to males, for the reason that
there is more interest in their games), locker room facilities, practice and
game uniforms, equipment, and access to better- or less-trained trainers: All
of these historically have been cited as Title IX infractions.
But for the most part, in mainstream sport, male attributes of physi-
cality have become privileged, so that they seem to be natural, seem to be
givens. Thus, North American sport can be said to be fundamentally male.
But, functionalists and right-wing backlash sports commentators might cry,
why the fuss?6 If males were to apply the law of reversibility (turn the sexes
around and see how it would feel to really be in that situation), how frustrat-
ing it might be, how many barriers there would be to participation, and
males will start to understand the issue better.
The answer, of course, is because sport, a pervasive facet of modern-
day, consumer society, is not naturally male. It has only been framed that
way. The ideological positives that are supposed to accrue from an edu-
cational model of sport participation (and sometimes even do) such as self-
confidence, eye-hand coordination, grace under pressure, affiliation with
others, cooperation, putting competition in perspective should accrue to
everyone, not just to males and not just to elite, privileged males in privi-
leged sports like football, basketball, and baseball. So a constellation of
stratifications—layers of privilege sitting one on top of the other—exist in
contemporary sport: class, race, age, ableness of body, sexual orientation,
ethnicity, sport choice, gender.
In North America, at least, the social construction of sports that privi-
lege male dominance, then, has become naturalized, unquestioned, and ulti-
mately accepted. It is a model based on an ideology that generally believes
that sport is a positive force in socializing and educating mostly male youth,
and it serves to reinforce the impression of male dominance both within and
outside of sport venues.

EXTREME SPORT: PARADIGM SHIFT OR MIRROR?

Hopefully, this very brief introduction to facets central to the model of
mainstream sport in North America is relatively familiar to most. I re-
counted it to serve as a framing device, to introduce the relatively new phe-
nomenon7 known as extreme (now termed action) sport. Some proponents of
alternative sports—in this case, extreme sports—claim that theirs is a dif-
ferent model, a paradigmatic shift, one in which mature females and mature
males might see equal opportunities for participation, exposure, monies,
respect, and individual and group growth within and through sports. Others
see the product of extreme sports as different from the product of main-
stream sports but suggest that, like most everything in culture, extreme
sports influence and are influenced by the larger culture: Thus, despite their
 “BABES” & BOARDS 239

oppositional roots, they daily serve as a mirror of society. Thus, in this view,
as a whole, extreme sports will suffer from similar problems as mainstream
sport has. I think which way it goes will largely be determined by who con-
trols extreme sport. Agency of the actors within action sports is key. How-
ever, during the initial contestations for power and agency within these
alternative sports, it is interesting to note how extreme sports are present-
ing themselves.
Although ESPN and other media sources first promoted the term
extreme and now have proliferated the term action sports, many of the par-
ticipants used to cringe when someone called their activity sport, much less
extreme sport. Over time, though, that opposition to sports rhetoric has been
undercut, so that extreme and action have to some extent become natural-
ized. With the more commodified extreme sports—like snowboarding and
skateboarding—there appears to be less and less participant opposition to
the term sport than before (e.g., Kleinman, 2003). In other words, aligning
themselves with sport in addition to lifestyle has opened up a whole new
market for business venturers and entrepreneurs. Interestingly, ESPN had
promoted a whole range of physical activity programming for their various
cable enterprises so that lumberjack and other work-related contests, sports
aerobics, world’s strongest man contests, and cheerleading competitions are
now an early-morning staple for ESPN (e.g., Rinehart, 2003). The tie-in, for
ESPN to maximize its sport-eager audiences, is always to bring such compe-
titions back to (a) physical skills and (b) a competitive format.
Despite this recent trend toward incorporating mainstream sport and
sport audience values into the X-Games, some of the values attached to the
first incarnations of extreme sport were decidedly in contrast—in opposi-
tion—to mainstream sport values: Arlo Eisenberg, who really has grown up
with in-line skating (Rollerblading), even today prefers to term his activity a
lifestyle as opposed to a sport. In the early days, competition per se was
eschewed within many of the activities, with a large preference for big tricks
over the concept of defeating someone else. Skateboarders bonded together
(often against in-liners for space at skating parks, or railing against them
in skating magazines), and other subcultures—like windsurfing and
snowboarding—within the extreme phenomenon similarly are tightly knit
and exclusive kinds of groups (see Beal, 1995; Borden, 2001; Humphreys,
2003; Wheaton, 2003).
And, very much like mainstream sport before it was mainstream, the
values of extreme sport began to be incorporated and usurped by main-
stream values. ESPN and other media corporations introduced the Extreme
Games (now the X-Games) in 1995. Slick niche magazines extolling sports
(ranging from board sports like snowboarding, skateboarding, surfing,
windsurfing, and wakeboarding to biking and climbing) cropped up and cap-
tured hard-core and occasional enthusiasts’ imagination and began to
change the values and ethos of the activities.
Where do girls and women fit in with these extreme sports? Typically,
as in mainstream sport, female’s extreme participation rates and
240 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / August 2005

Figure 1: Roces Advertisement, 1997.

opportunities vary sport by sport. Attitudes toward women likewise vary:

But, unlike organized sport, where governmental legislation like Title IX (at
least in the United States) has somewhat guaranteed sport possibilities, in
action sport, for the most part moderated by private concerns,8 there are no
gender equity laws. Extreme sport is not educationally based; thus, it is not
dependent on the public school setting, where government surveillance
regimes can impose a degree of egalitarianism for women.
Joanne Kay (1998) has made a compelling argument that opportuni-
ties and access for women may be greater in extreme sports because the
sports are mostly individual, because they are relatively new (and thus more
liable to self-definition), and because the fundamental source of comparison
between participants is a willingness to risk, rather than, for example, brute
strength. If women are willing to be high risk-takers, says Kay, they will be
more readily accepted by the subculture.
A few companies aligned with skating have attempted to reflect this
attitude: The Roces ad (see Figure 1), for example, shows a woman staring
straight into the camera, with a skater freely swinging down a tree-lined
lane next to her. Because of her juxtaposition with the long shot of the skater,
she is presumably an athlete, not a model, although she is exceedingly
reflective of current standards of beauty. In fact, she may be the skater her-
self. The copy reads: “You’re sick of the overtime. You’re sick of the glass ceil-
ing. You’re sick of the prodding and pinching. Your prince? You. Your trusty
steed—the LAX. Anatomically correct cuff and liner that’s designed specifi-
cally for you” (Roces, 1997, pp. 6-7).
This ambivalent message is, on the surface, quite liberating for female
skaters. But, is not the company suggesting that the woman remain depend-
ent, but rather than be dependent on a man or a relationship to a coworker
or a relationship with another human being, she should become dependent
 “BABES” & BOARDS 241

on this multinational corporations’ product, dependent on her status as a

consumer. The apparent liberation, the apparent self-reliance for this
woman skater, appears to be a bit of a misnomer: After all, isn’t the model
(and, by extension, the female consumer) merely substituting one needy
relationship for another but this time with a company and its product? Nev-
ertheless, for many and without further reflection, this ad represents a
move—however mixed the message—toward female empowerment.
Roces and Kay present one argument: the argument that extreme
sport may provide a fertile ground for societal change, for more egalitarian
acceptance of women within what Coakley (2004) terms the power and per-
formance model of North American sport, which is dominant within specta-
torial sport. This possibility for change, for boarding sports, as exemplars of
pleasure and participation sports (Coakley, 2004), to facilitate change with-
in the dominant power and performance spectatorial sports, is one argu-
ment, and I hope female empowerment and inclusion is the way extreme
sport opportunities fall out.
But I wish to propose a less positive possibility—perhaps only as a
warning—that extreme sports, despite their differentness from mainstream
sports, will most likely follow the model of mainstream sports. I believe we
are seeing evidence right now of encroachment by media that reinforces
mainstream values (such as male dominance in sport; women as passive,
adoring observers of men; women as dependent on men; females intended as
sexual objects for the gaze of mostly males).
The media, after all, are intent on selling themselves: A negative story
often creates more interest than a positive story. And creation of interest—
Dennis Rodman’s antics, Canadian snowboarder Ross Rebagliati’s loss then
regaining of the gold medal for maybe violating the International Olympic
Committee ’s (IOC’s) drug policy (for marijuana use) at the Nagano Games—
is what brings in audience and potential consumers of products that sustain
media. Thus, media, by definition, will rarely take a marginal position or
stance. They exist to self-perpetuate, and education or enlightenment of
their publics with marginalized positionings do not provide a direct rela-
tionship with self-perpetuation. Proffering female participation in sport—
which is culturally defined as male—is still a marginal stance. Great strides
have been made—there were two professional women’s basketball leagues
(before that, there were others that failed financially), and there is increased
opportunity for educationally based participation in sport for women—but,
women athletes are still marginalized and relativized with regard to their
male counterparts.
What sells and passes for women’s sport, even in the 2000s, are scant-
ily clad women playing beach volleyball, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit
issue, and women whose capabilities are somehow undercut and dependent
on males. Davis (1997) writes that

Coverage of female athletes often differs from coverage of male athletes. When
the popular media cover women in sport, they often focus on the athlete’s
 242 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / August 2005

appearance. . . . Unlike the coverage of male athletes, coverage of female ath-

letes often portrays them as emotional. . . . And, unlike the photographs of male
athletes, photographs of female athletes often feature inactive glamorous poses
or show the athletes in settings unrelated to athletics. . . . Photographers often
picture male athletes in ways that signify dominance or superiority, while pic-
turing women athletes in ways that signify submissiveness or inferiority.
(pp. 141-142)

There are exceptions. As Kay (1998) rightly says: “It is easier for
women to overcome gendered assumptions about risk-taking than gendered
assumptions about physical strength” (quoted from presentation). So,
extreme athletes may find that their risk-taking capacity allows them eas-
ier access into positions of power, assuming that the terms of gendered par-
ticipation (in Coakley’s power and performance model) are disallowed.
But the heightening acceptance of female and male risk-taking as
overcoming the dominant societal message of “What is sport?” is simply not
there in a public trained to focus on biological difference as a metamessage.
If dominant sport is conceived as male, it appears sadly inevitable that any
forms of oppositional sport that are co-opted by commercial interests will
follow a similar path. The change will occur and has already occurred: More
women and girls are involved actively in sport. But some of the same barri-
ers, coded in covert messages to youth, are cropping up in the media.
In most cases, the media, corporate sponsors, and sport administrators
have begun to take over a variety of extreme sports. There are now national
and international bodies and federations that control the direction and, to
some extent, the image for the sports: Among them are the International
Triathlon Union; the International Ski Federation, which the IOC turned to
when they decided to include snowboarding; and the International Snow-
board Federation, which was established by snowboarders themselves. The
directions extreme and action sports take will be determined in the next 10
years by power struggles between and among organizers, entrepreneurs,
corporate sponsors, a few athletes (for credibility and establishment of
authenticity), and mostly by the media.

IMAGES OF POSTMODERN SPORT:

REPLICATIONS OR OPPORTUNITIES?
The media have created many often conflicting and indeterminate
messages. After all, they seek to insinuate themselves into each and every
citizen’s psyche, to the extent that they may be heard and their messages
read and reread by a relatively heterogeneous populace. Because of this and
because of a free enterprise system that celebrates the ideology of individual
freedom (and creativity), many images are drummed into audiences daily
(e.g., Fiske, 1987, 1989). In print media, advertising photographs tell stories:
That is, at a single glance, the reader has learned to expect a compact, cre-
ative, sometimes provocative stance that will attempt to coerce her or him
sympathetically to the view of the photographer and, by extension, to the
product being marketed. No advertising image is naïve. Some are more or
 “BABES” & BOARDS 243

less effective, but their intent is singularly clear: Bring in new audience,
create more consumers (generally, of product or lifestyle).
The following advertising images and words are meant to illustrate
the outer ranges of possibilities in circulation circa 1996 within the skate-
boarding and in-line skating subcultures. Some of these images may be
offensive and disturbing; they are certainly visually arresting, as effective
advertising usually is. They are not presented for prurient purposes but
rather to demonstrate the range of images and texts that exist in two
extreme sports. Additionally, I believe one of their purposes is to offend: To
run counter to dominant culture, of course, one typically confronts that cul-
ture and that culture’s prized symbols. A discussion of the offensive nature
of the images is appropriate. The major difference here is that the resis-
tance, if one could call it that, has been generated by advertising executives
and marketing teams, not necessarily by the skaters themselves. And the
companies, like many companies in business, seek to create identification
between consumer and product or image or both. Thus, the ads sometimes
attempt to reflect an outlaw image, or a bad-boy kind of clubbishness, which
easily align with the ethos of the power and performance mainstream North
American sports.
The ads certainly are not altogether typical—other images and signs
from other magazines appear to be somewhat gender-neutral. But these
images far outnumber the type of ambivalent images such as seen in the
Roces ad. There are also ads that might be deemed X-rated. I agree with Kay
(1998) that there is progress; there may be greater spaces in extreme sport
than in mainstream sport for women and girls to become active. But there is
another side that undercuts some of the progressive ideas and images, and
that is the side I will now discuss.
If the Sports Illustrated swimsuit issue reinforces stereotypes of
females as subservient to males (as objects, not subjects; as adoring, depend-
ent, infantilized creatures [see Daddario, 1992; Davis, 1997]), then the fol-
lowing images go a step further: Designed for a normatively adolescent
audience, the subthemes of these images illustrate several metathemes. I
have ordered them this way: There are images that (a) play on gender stereo-
types and the maleness of sport itself, (b) push toward the objectification of
girls and women as a naturalized stance, (c) pander to a sexual-object view of
women that is both misogynist and matriphobic, and (d) attempt to set up
the advertisers as members of a resistant, oppositional, or outlaw subcul-
ture.9 Many of the advertisements, of course, illustrate more than one
metatheme.
Some of the more prominent aspects of these images and texts follow.
This is done in broad strokes, as the images themselves bear pondering by
each reader; the discussion is a beginning foray into the overt and covert
effects of some of this advertising. As well, I do discuss what I am positioned
to take as a relatively dominant reading of the messages: Fiske (1987, 1989,
1996) has demonstrated that there are not only dominant readings of media
messages but also a variety of resistant and oppositional readings.10 Yet I
244 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / August 2005

Figure 2: Giant Skateboard Advertisement, 1996.

agree with Whelehan (2000) when she states that “a definable thread runs
through the language of culture, politics and the mass media that is quite
simply antifeminist and antiequality” (p. 3). I believe the images herein
reflect that thread that runs through youth skating culture.
Dominant readings of the first three images reinforce the male do-
main of sport, the constructed and naturalized maleness of sport and activ-
ity. The first, “The Class of ‘96” (see Figure 2) shows 18 children in a variety
of poses: fishing, wearing boxing gloves, flying toy airplanes, patriotically
saluting the American flag, holding skis, shooting marbles, dressed in a
1940’s leather football helmet, looking into a microscope—in short, for the
most part doing things, not sitting passively but nostalgically reconstructed
actively, in sepia tones indicating some sort of better past. But, every single
one of these images is of a boy, doing stereotypically active boy things. In
1996, there are no active girls? Males are seen stereotypically, as doers;
females are absented altogether.
 “BABES” & BOARDS 245

Using only male models for this ad, of course, is a specific trope: the
assumptions are that only males will read the magazine, only males are
skaters, only males are interested in skating products—or, in this case, only
males can aspire to be professionally sponsored as professional skaters by a
variety of corporate sponsors. At the beginning of a sport such as skating,
which emphasizes risk (Kay, 1998), it would appear that opportunities for
professionalization are not egalitarian.
The second, an ad for Pleasure Tools (1995; see Figure 3; Babes-
Boards, 2004) is really a cartoon, apparently intended as a caricature. The
amply endowed, sexualized, and prominently displayed redheaded woman
straddles a wrench; the ad itself is for in-line wheels, variously named Lip
Service, Po’ Boy, and Joy Ride, with caricatures of scantily clad women remi-
niscent of the art work on World War II bombers etched into the sides of the
wheels. This both serves to objectify the model as available plaything and
reaffirm male dominance within and through sport-related items with a
seamlessly nostalgic cultural trope: Wasn’t it a more sensible and controlled
world when females knew their place as flesh-tools for male use?
The third advertisement firmly establishes the connection between
male-dominance and sport as a theme. To some degree, it is self-explanatory:
“We’ve Got the Competition by the Balls” (see Figure 4; Babes-Boards, 2004)
is ostensibly a straightforward ad for street hockey balls. Sexualizing skate-
board and in-line skating equipment for the sake of selling more product is
one thing, but this ad clearly ties in to a male-dominant, female-submissive
model that, unchallenged, assumes and thereby reinforces the naturalized
maleness of these new sport forms.
Because the sports themselves are not any longer primarily consid-
ered lifestyle choices, as Rollerblader Arlo Eisenberg and others have claim-
ed, but now have morphed into sports—and seek to be dominant sports,
which are assumed as dominantly by and for males, thus male—aligning
them with a dominantly male ethos and using a play on the very word
balls, apparently seems an appropriate tack for (mostly male) marketing
departments.
The next group of images primarily demonstrates an objectification of
females as a naturalized stance: Models are juxtaposed with text that nor-
mally would be seen as offensive because the models are not real people but
rather objects, things, or trophies to be paraded and consumed by males. In
these advertisements, the male gaze is a form of symbolic consumption, and
in these, the strategies, rhetoric, and practice of consumption of objectified
female (or the uncomfortable aversion from it, denoting untouchable sta-
tus11) only serves to distance young boys and men from genuine relation-
ships with girls and women.
Though the previous grouping—the distancing promoted by exclu-
sionary practices that assume a male domain for sport—clearly promotes
the objectification of females, the next group of advertisements have as their
metatheme the overt objectification of girls or women within sporting ven-
ues as a naturalized and taken-for-granted stance. Of course, this
246 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / August 2005

metatheme ties in with the previous theme: that of the assumed maleness of
sport. If sport is assumed to be male, then male privilege is assumed to
extend to seeing females as personal objects that may be manipulated at will
and that, when thus objectified, serve at the whim of the more powerful sub-
ject, the male. Within sport settings, this worldview results in unevenness of
resource allocations, lessened expectations by and for girls and women and
an attitude that questioning will only result in a powerful, swift, and puni-
tive backlash. However, there is also an alignment within these ads with the
third metatheme of pandering to a sexualized objectification of females sup-
plied for the (dominantly) male gaze. Thus, the objectification of females (the
second metatheme) slides into the sexual objectification of females (the
third metatheme) within and through sport advertising.
The first image of this group is titled “Label Whore Clothing Co.”
(1996; see Figure 5; Babes-Boards, 2004). In this ad, the model is dressed in
pink, her upper body open to the camera gaze, her lower torso cast away from
the viewer. Her skin tones and outlined body are visible—and her eyes look
elsewhere, so the timid male gazer may consume without guilt. She is
objectified, placed into a context in which her own gaze is seen as sugges-
tively submissive. Moreover, the placement of the tight-fitting dress stretch-
ed across the model’s buttocks is also meant suggestively, to incite sex-
ual appreciation for the sexualized body of the female offered for male
consumption.
It must be pointed out that “Label Whore” was a relatively nonpejor-
ative term within youth culture at the time of this ad: Among a variety of
vernacular meanings, to be a whore was to be deeply involved in something,
and the connotation was not necessarily even covertly sexual (e.g., “You are
a skating whore!”), but of course the double meaning is always operatively
embedded within the name of the company. The name itself also, inciden-
tally, aligns insider consumers with outsiders, a strategy that advertisers
use as well (see the fourth metatheme within this discussion).
The next ad is for Skin Protective Devices (1996; see Figure 6). Boldly
announcing “Some skin is worth saving,” the model is suggestively gazing
back this time, dressed in bra and short shorts.
Is this an ad for women or girl skaters to identify with the model, as in
“My skin is worth saving! I should wear Skin pads”? Likely not. The bold
gaze of the model back at the spectator suggests this is for a male audience,
yet the text confuses the issue. Nevertheless, the objectification of woman is
naturalized, and the sexualization of the model, it is assumed, only serves to
reify the stance that women like being sexual objects. Of course, problematic
within that stance is that women wish to have a certain amount of control
over the issue of who is sexualizing them. If they are active participants,
with a chosen other, and the sexual objectification is mutual, then that is
quite a different option than becoming the object of multiple voyeuristic
(male) gazes as devices for sexual arousal (e.g., Duncan & Hasbrook, 1988;
Messner, 2002; Nelson, 1994). So, objectification, in this ad, elides into
sexual objectification.
 “BABES” & BOARDS 247

Figure 6: Skin Advertisement, 1996.

In this metatheme category, the first advertisement places two women,

dressed in clear space helmets, fragile White and metallic clothes, boots, and
strappings in a pose suggestive of handmaidens, leaning next to a relatively
248 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / August 2005

disinterested male. The male is consuming what appears to be a beer,

labeled “Cosmic,” with hundreds of Colt 45 cans stacked behind. Obscurely,
but also suggestively, the words Deep Space 69 are written above this pose
for Cosmic Apparel (1996; Figure 7; Babes-Boards, 2004). In this ad, woman
is portrayed as sexualized alien and other, man as serious and deserving;
woman as servant, man as served; woman as object, man as subject.
The next ad is one of the most overt demonstrations of a pandering to a
sexual-object view of women: The black and white, low-tech photo of the
reclining, naked woman who is the object of the male gaze is printed in
grainy shades of gray (see Figure 8; Babes-Boards, 2004). Clearly, the audi-
ence for this is the voyeuristic adolescent male: The staging of such a photo-
graph is reminiscent of surreptitious pornography, shot quickly and from a
distance, as the audience imagines sexual acts. The model’s face is recogniz-
able; her body, however, is printed over with product names for pads, bear-
ings, skates, wheels, and methods of payment—except for key sexualized
zones, which are, again, available for the male gaze. This is ostensibly an ad
for a distributorship (Inline Inc., 1996), but again, the adolescent male gaze
is drawn to it primarily because of the nudity and the availability of mature
women as potential sexual objects.
Sexual objectification is the next category; although clearly there is
overlap between these categories, the images and text in the next three ads
demonstrate a clear sense of self-reflexiveness on the part of the advertisers:
In an attempt to justify ads they presumably normally wouldn’t show, the
copy next to these ads undercuts the images. As an aside, many of these com-
panies advertise in other skating magazines, and their ads are toned down
quite a bit. So there is a conflation of the sexual-object view of women
(metatheme number 3) with the attempt to set up the advertisers, the brand,
as oppositional and representative of outlaw subculture.
The first image consists of two ads. The skateboard magazine Big
Brother juxtaposed two seemingly disparate advertisements on the same
page: The Tasty (n.d.) ad with a teenaged girl in braces clinging to a pink-
hearted skateboard, standing shyly and averting her gaze in front of a wall
with pink and purple hearts, is next to a Thieves (n.d.) ad for clothing (see
Figure 9) that shows a grown young woman, topless and supine, gazing
directly, suggestively, at the camera.
Above the logo for Thieves is written “Pornography sells image, Qual-
ity sells clothes.” The jarring juxtaposition of a seminude woman next to a
young innocent is arresting to the eye, but it also poses a troubling possibil-
ity (in this magazine) of the infantilization of female skateboarders and the
overt sexualization of underage females for male consumption.
“Hardline—Reach-Fa-Ya-Tool” (1995) is an ad that blatantly sexual-
izes woman for a male skater’s benefit (see Figure 10; Babes-Boards, 2004).
In this ad, a woman is reaching into the front of a laughing male’s pants, her
hand buried up to the wrist, with the words “Reach-Fa-Ya-Tool” written
above. They are seemingly having a very good time, and the female model is
smiling too. Presumably, the slightly erotic nature of the ad will promote an
 “BABES” & BOARDS 249

Figure 9: Thieves and Tasty Advertisements, no date.

alignment of values that demonstrates the servile nature of woman as help-

mate, even in public sexuality, although also demonstrating the outside the
norms status of skaters who align with the company Hardline.
A slightly different reading of this ad might be more ambiguous: The
one part of the ad that undercuts the woman as object, man as subject, and
lends an uncertainty to this reading is the scar on the elbow of the woman. Is
she a skater? Does she participate in skating? Unfortunately, the ad does not
privilege her by name, as it does the “Skater Paul Beeman.” So once again,
the sexuality of the situation is for the benefit of the male model and, by
extension, for the male audience. Her gaze implies woman’s desire; his sug-
gests man’s understood acceptance of her desire. The ad serves to simulta-
neously reinforce the maleness of sport and the sexual subservience of
woman as object.
Finally, the last image is overtly sexist, and it is meant to be shocking.
The copy, however, above and below the nearly naked model and the sugges-
tive, phonetic company name, celebrates two things: the self-reflexive,
postmodernist nature of the sales pitch and the desperately oppositional
nature of this company (see Figure 11; Babes-Boards, 2004). (Forget that the
company, the magazine, and most companies and magazines determining
this skating subculture are easily run by mostly White males in their 40s.)
Here’s the copy that is ironic regarding sales:

It has come to our attention that to be “hardcore” or “cutting edge” in this new
highly competitive “street wear” industry, we should consider using nude or
 250 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / August 2005

half nude Strippers/Porn Stars. Well, we couldn’t get either so, we got Julie, a
Penthouse Pet of the Year, and now we feel extremely confident about our sales
going up due to it. (Fuct, 1997, p. 25)

And here is the copy that indicates that this company really is striving
to be oppositional (protesting perhaps too much):

Sinking To All New Lows

For all your sexual, perverted, sexist, racist, purist, anarchist, separatist, blas-
phemous, nihilist needs. (Fuct, 1997, p. 25)

The images overtly and covertly undercut the value of female partici-
pation, which creates an atmosphere detrimental to women’s full participa-
tion and acceptance into the sports.
Donna Dennis-Vano (1995), writing about women’s participation in
ESPN’s first Extreme Games in 1995, pointed out that

the women of aggressive skating . . . could blossom and receive long overdue rec-
ognition. As a group we are very underexposed, and it’s tough to inspire other
women to partake in a sport when all they see are male skaters. . . . [Unfortu-
nately,] we still didn’t get the prize money we were promised, nor the primetime
coverage. . . . If we had worn skimpy clothes, something a little sexier, maybe
along the lines of what women volleyball players wear, would we have been tele-
vised? Probably. (p. 29)

The issue, undercut by an incessant parade of mediated messages

quite to the contrary, is fair access, respect, and fair treatment for female
athletes.

UNSUPERVISED PLAY: DISCOVERY OR LORD OF THE FLIES?

There are many advantages to children playing without adult supervi-
sion: Some might learn independence, problem-solving, and some may feel
greater empowerment and control of their environment (e.g., Rinehart &
Grenfell, 2002). This element of the play culture is positive and persuasive:
In this scenario, children should be left alone to work things out, to grow
strong, independent of adult interference. And certainly, in sport, we’ve seen
lots of problems with adult supervision in age-group programs: A win-at-all-
costs philosophy, an overemphasis on results rather than on skill develop-
ment, a disregard for the health of one’s body, and so on.
In extreme sport, children and adolescents have been cast into a situa-
tion where adult supervision is largely absent. There are peers and adults, of
course, socializing them about extreme sports: Fellow practitioners are the
peers; corporate, media, and administrative executives serve as the primary
adult models. And they dictate the flavor of many of the skaters’ experiences.
Many young extremists and action sport aficionados are, to some degree,
unprepared for this freedom, although they are neither criminal (as some
city councils might have it, criminalizing skating in downtown areas, for
 “BABES” & BOARDS 251

example) nor delinquents: They are kids practicing something they love.
Somewhat surprisingly, they devote, without adults pushing them, count-
less hours perfecting tricks—just for the satisfaction of accomplishment and
the thrill of the rush.
But they also are prone to the media: The images within this article
have become naturalized givens, reflections of an oppositional subculture
that is adult influenced. Larry Flynt, by the way, was the publisher of
Thrasher, one of the skateboarding magazines shown in this article. The
images don’t necessarily offend (nudity, after all, should perhaps be less
offensive than say, murder), but the subtle messages that relegate females to
second-class citizen status, which help to create lifelong negative attitudes
toward a whole class of human beings, should be offensive to most.
In William Golding’s (1997) Lord of the Flies, a group of boys find
themselves stranded on an island with no adults anywhere. As anyone who
has read the novel knows, the vision Golding paints is not a positive one: The
gaggle of boys breaks up into two groups, one that represents civilization,
the other representing, perhaps, the “spark of wildness . . . [and] the forces of
anarchy” (Golding cited in Epstein, 1997, p. 206). In this seemingly Eden-
like environment, the boys, who are influenced by normative British society,
transcend into darkness, greed, power struggles, and ultimately murder.
Golding’s own critique of the book characterizes the story’s

moral [being] that the shape of a society must depend on the ethical nature of
the individual and not on any political system however apparently logical or
respectable . . . where adult life appears, dignified and capable, [it is] in reality
enmeshed in the same evil as the symbolic life of the children on the island.
(Golding cited in Epstein, 1997, p. 204)

Similarly, in some of extreme sport culture, like skateboarding and

aggressive in-line skating,12 adolescents and preadolescents have been cast
on their own. These usually young boys are influenced mostly by each other.
But they are also influenced, similarly to tobacco-marketers’ approach, by
marketing that skews reality, which piques the interest, and whose aim is to
produce lifelong consumers of the product. The adult influence, in skating, is
not coming from parents, coaches, or other responsible adults but rather in
the guise of identification with an outlaw culture, from multinational corpo-
rations and large conglomerate media firms. And the impression made on
young kids is dramatic, attitude-altering, and a mirror of what’s gone on
before—and what, unless change and interventions occur, will continue to
occur in action sports.

NOTES
1. See Rinehart (2004) for a more in-depth analysis of why these sports might be con-
sidered postmodern.
2. While presenting a variation of this article at the University of the Pacific in 2001, I
was challenged by an audience member as to his dismay that I was unfairly charac-
terizing skating magazines, skaters, and the subculture of skating itself by using
252 JOURNAL OF SPORT & SOCIAL ISSUES / August 2005

old data. Certainly, the forms of patriarchal hegemony evolve into new and more
subtle forms over time and because of societal challenges; however, a quick check of
current magazine ads in skating magazines will confirm many of the points I make
within this article. One of the major reasons I took on the alternative scene as a focus
of my research interests is because of its emergent nature: Much of the given nature
of mainstream sports is not present when something new is emerging, and it makes
a more obvious case when biases are out in the open at the beginning of new cultural
forms. So, too, with extreme sports, as they have morphed from extreme to X to
action based on, to a large degree, public acceptance—dominant and mainstream
public acceptance.
3. This practical definition of mainstream in terms of sport hopefully does not run
counter to Raymond Williams’s (1977) way of defining the dominant: He contrasts it
with, in fact creates interdependencies between, the dominant and the residual and
the emergent. Williams also points out that none of these three categories is static.
In the same way, the dominant, residual, and emergent in sport structures are con-
tinually reestablishing themselves and the degree to which they hold sway of sport
culture.
4. The question itself, of course, is begged by the notion of differences that Whelehan
(2000) points out as deriving from “Germaine Greer’s The Female Eunuch (1970). In
The Whole Woman (1999), Greer laments the all-too-hasty transition from calls to
liberation to the language of equality” (p. 13). The sense of control of one’s own life, as
opposed to asking for permission to join something, makes all the difference in the
world.
5. In a sociology of sport class exercise, students compare column inches for gendered
sport and the totals of coverage for males range (in 2004) from 7 to 9 times more than
for females.
6. See Kusz (2003) for a good discussion of the coalescence of action sports, White privi-
lege, and popular culture incitement to a reinstantiation of White-male-as-victim.
7. Indeed, in sport-time, extreme as a term that denotes most of the activities ESPN
has embraced within their Extreme or X-Games is quite short. The first Extreme
Games was broadcast in summer of 1995. It is interesting to note how quickly soci-
etal acceptance of extreme sports has occurred, whereas, as a comparison, there is
still a great deal of resistance to gender equity after the 1972 introduction of the
Title IX Amendment. I would propose that much of the ethos in existence within so-
called extreme sport has been deliberately aligned to mainstream values (and thus
easily accepted), whereas the fight for gender equity is a genuinely transformation-
al, oppositional, and seditiously insurgent social act. But still, Title IX does not
reach into local governments.
8. Of course, local governments (townships, cities, and counties in the United States)
have debated the wisdom of incorporation in their own ways: Skating on public thor-
oughfares has been deemed by most to be antithetical to community values, so local
governments have seen fit to build skate parks, usually run by the local recreation
and park districts, under the aegis of the local government. By building such parks,
of course, the hope is to control and marginalize the activities. Building such parks
and providing sponsorship of them also works to incorporate oppositional behaviors
of youth into licit and sanctioned activities.
9. In the postmodern sportscape, irony and parody complicate understandings of some
of the ad campaigns. For example, Arlo Eisenberg of Senate clothing “thought it
would be funny to print ‘Destroy All Girls’ on the laundry tags sewed into Senate
clothes. . . . [said Eisenberg] ‘It was just a joke . . . [but] the people in our market get
turned on by controversy. It makes them want the product twice as bad” (Cooper,
1997, p. 17). The point I am trying to make here is that the primary object of the ad
campaigns—the demographic of 12- to 34-year-old males (quite a range of ages!)—
may not be aware of the ironic or parodic elements and may in fact learn misogynist
attitudes from powerful ad campaigns such as these.
 “BABES” & BOARDS 253

10. If one interrogates the notion of dominant readings vis-à-vis standpoint epistemol-
ogy, one realizes that the concept of dominant readings is fundamentally based on a
scientific, statistical model, where numbers of roughly agreeing individuals, taken
collectively, establish dominance. However, dominance has come to mean power and
control and is not always based on numerical superiority; the case of South African
apartheid rule demonstrates a numerical disadvantage, yet a hegemonic, dominant
case for White elitism. One’s standpoint epistemology, however, tends to problem-
atize such theorizing: An n of one still has the ability (and perhaps responsibility) to
put forth her viewpoint, to make his voice heard. Thus, coming from a position of
individually laden standpoint, and assuming dominant readings, is perhaps always
a fallacious argument. Thus, I have participant- and scholar-checked these images
with others (from lectures, from a variety of readings to various groups) to get their
readings of the key issues involved in the advertisements. However, having said
that, the critiques of the ads insist on multiple readings of them, so the dominant
portion of the reading is undercut already.
11. This untouchable status parallels the Madonna-whore dialectic where a female is
seen as dramatically revered or wholly consumable.
12. Adventure racing is one of perhaps many exceptions where there is “a different kind
of sexism . . . obviously because it is not adolescent culture, where women are
seen as ‘mandatory’ equipment in obligatory mixed teams” (Kay, 1999, personal
communication).

AUTHOR
Robert (“Bob”) Rinehart is an associate professor at Washington
State University in the Sport Management Program. He has taught at Cali-
fornia State University—San Bernardino and Idaho State University, and
his primary research interests are in qualitative research methods and
action sport. He is author of Players All: Performances in Contemporary
Sport and coeditor (with Synthia Sydnor) of To The Extreme: Alternative
Sport, Inside and Out.

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