I thought I had pretty much poured out my soul this week on the topic of female NBA fans. And then someone pointed me in the direction of the “Body Shots” contest the Memphis Grizzlies official site was running this week in advance of the NBA Dance Bracket. I’m really glad they did. Let me tell you what this “contest” is. It’s this:
WTF Memphis Grizzlies. Are you kidding me?
You have to guess which Grizz Girl is in the picture… from her breasts. So, right there, all those “But this is a great career opportunity for the dancers! They want to dance!” arguments I saw in the comments at True Hoop yesterday go flying out the window. This girl doesn’t even have legs or arms. What can this possibly have to do with her career as a dancer? The text from the page: “As our Grizz Girls prepare for the NBA Dance Team Bracket this week, they also have a little extra challenge for you. How well do you know them?”
How well do you know them? I laughed out loud at “How well do you know them?” How much time have you spent in front of your computer creepily studying their breasts, is more like it. Now, I have no idea whether this girl thought it was cool to be today’s faceless set of boobs for this contest. Let’s please leave that out of the analysis and any comments, because I would like to make it clear I will not be projecting my thoughts onto this girl. I don’t know her.
I am telling you right now, if I ever see something like this on Hornets.com, I will be on the phone to my ticket rep in under three seconds. Not optional. I will be sending at least five emails to five different people in the organization. And I will be asking to speak to your supervisor’s supervisor. Because I pay a significant chunk of my paycheck each month to watch basketball, not this.
But if I don’t live in New Orleans, if I live in Memphis? I’m not going to that Grizzlies game. My hypothetical future daughter? Is certainly not going. Because my daughter is not a disembodied set of breasts. My daughter has a mouth and a brain. My daughter is an athlete. My daughter is a fighter. And you know what? My son is not going either. Because I am not raising him to believe that this sort of thing is okay, that this sort of thing is what women are “for.” So that leaves my husband. I tell him if he wants to go with someone else, fine. The rest of us will be watching on TV. He chooses to stay. That’s four tickets. But say I go to lunch “Sex and the City” style with my girlfriends (I don’t, but say I do). Say I tell them about what I saw. My friend had kind of wanted to see the Mavs next week because she’s a Dirk fan, but now she’s not going, and because she’s a bit more militant than me, she’ll be damned if her husband goes. Six tickets. For a team that has butts-in-the-seats problems. Multiply that by anyone else who happened to be on Grizzlies.com and saw “Body Shots” when they were trying to buy tickets.
I have to apologize to Rudy Gay, because he already made an appearance in my other post as my “NBA Cutie” example. Now it turns out, since the Grizzlies just pissed me off, he’s not off the hook yet. We’re going to use poor Rudy here as an example of why the people who commented on my other post and said “guys looking at dance teams is the same as girls looking at the players” are way off base.
Rudy Gay has agency. He has power. He makes $3.3M and is about to sign an even more lucrative contract this summer. If he doesn’t want his ass on the Memphis Grizzlies website, he has people to back him up—his agent, the folks at Octagon, basically anyone in the organization he wants to go talk to. If he says he’d rather not be part of the “Guess Which Shirtless Grizz This Is” promotion, he doesn’t have to worry about not being asked back to the squad next year.
This is why commenters who compared NBA players running around in tank tops with their sweaty muscles to the dance team were missing the point. An object is something that is acted upon. You can’t objectify Rudy Gay in the same way this headless dancer is being objectified because he is an actor, not an acted-upon. A headless set of boobs is there for the viewer to project whatever the hell they want onto it. A headless set of boobs does not “do” anything. Rudy Gay, on the other hand, plays basketball. You can put his buttshot on the team website for the ladies to look at, sure, but at the end of the day, he’s not being paid $3 million dollars for that. He will always be seen more for his role as a person who acts, a person who does, an athlete, than for whatever promotion you stick him in. He has a big, important role in the organization. His face is important and therefore you don’t cut it out of pictures. You see the difference in the power structure here?
Think about how often you see a man in a print ad or commercial with his head cut off. Does the picture below look weird to you?
Is this something you see a lot? Think about it.
“But,” you say, “the majority of the people who go to games are still men! You want to take away the cheerleaders! You want to ruin all the fun! You want to completely change the game experience!” That’s not what I’m saying at all. I’ll ignore the dancers and accept that other people enjoy them, but faceless women on a professional basketball team’s website crosses a line for me. I hope I have sufficiently explained in this post what that line is. The Memphis Grizzlies do not hurt anyone’s fun by not putting disembodied breasts on their website as a contest. The pictures are still available. Anyone who knows how to right click “Save Image As” and has a photo editing program can happily cut the heads off all the dancers they like.
So now here I am living in my hypothetical Memphis neighborhood with my hypothetical two kids, and I love basketball. And I wish I could support the game experience, especially since the team isn’t doing so hot attendance-wise. But if I don’t know when “Don’t forget to go on Grizzlies.com and guess the boobs!” is going to pop up on the jumbotron, my daughter cannot be in that building. And I cannot justify shelling out the $200+ out of our family budget to an organization that has thoroughly disgusted me. But, you say, if I loved basketball that much, I would just go and ignore it and tell my kids to ignore it. Well, yeah, but now we’re back to what I said on Hardwood Paroxysm: I love basketball but you’re making it hard for me. And if you’re wondering whether something like this really affects a family who’s waffling on the line of whether or not to renew their season tickets, you’re damn right it does.
Because I want my daughter to have more in common with Rudy Gay than with the headless boob girl. And I refuse to apologize for that.
Opinionated
I’m not disagreeing with anything you said here. Just to put that out front.
But “Is this something you see a lot? Think about it.” made me think of a few examples instantly, most notable TV commercials. The Gatorade ads with the differently colored sweat, for example, don’t show a whole lot of faces, or have them obscured by lighting. Nike and Reebok have had a few along these lines as well.
Again, not disagreeing. Just saying that there are examples out there if you look around a bit.
Clearly that’s Kasie.
This is even better than I expected when I sent you the link yesterday. I used to work for the Grizzlies, so I can’t wait to forward this to some people.
@ Otto
I did waver on including that. I know a lot of ads with athletes in them do use body parts. But I do think it’s disproportionate when you think about how many ads that have NOTHING to do with fitness or hygiene have female body parts in them. Go Daddy is a great example.
@ticktock6 : Oh, agreed, but there’s a reason for that. Sex sells. Yes, it might upset some part of the market, but if it brings in more sales than it drives away, then it’s worth it.
And, on the whole, the number of women that get actually upset by this sort of thing is surprisingly small. So it doesn’t really hurt them enough to matter. Men don’t have a majority on being shallow, you know.
Not saying it’s right. Just that it is what it is. I doubt there’s enough sentiment that agrees with you (on the existence of the dancers in general) to make it unprofitable, although I suspect that this rather exceedingly blatant stupidity will get stopped rather fast.
@Collin : After a quick browse through the roster, I’d guess that it’s probably Susana.
You want your daughter to be Gay?
This is one of the reasons I hate commercial glamour as an artistic form. It reduces the person to a platform for the product they are selling. Unless the person who is being used as the platform is famous, who they are as people is not only irrelevant, its a distraction from the product. And any form of genuine emotion is frowned upon. In this case its “bewbs sell the Grizzlies”.
I’ll give you an example: Hooters. I have one right around the corner from me and I watch a lot of games there. I know the girls and they are mostly pretty cool. But I cant stand their advertising. There is one girl there that I would give a limb to capture her smile, it is that awesome. The pics of her shoots show no personality (and she has one) and no emotion (which she can definitely show). Im even familiar with the photographer who shot it and I have it on good authority that he does that gig because it pays him enough to let him indulge his other photography which is amazing stuff.
I shoot nudes. I don’t apologize for that. But every shot I take (or keep, rather) has to evoke an emotion. If it doesn’t, its worthless to me. Disembodied body parts cant give emotion because only people can have emotions. And emotion is generated in the face. No face = no emotion (except lust, which is the greater point here).
So I agree with you TT6. This is just ugly.
And my best guess is Jessica because of the hair and belly ring. I feel like a freaking CSI trying to figure it out and they usually only look at corpses.
Wow. Just wow. I don’t know why I’m surprised by stuff like this anymore but to think a group of people sat around a room and came up with “I know! Let’s post Guess The Boobs!” and it was approved! Wow.
This (excellent) piece just shoots a million holes in the “The NBA is just supporting those hardworking dancers!” commenters from the other posts. If the Dance Bracket was meant to be supportive of dancers wouldn’t it be– I dunno—be a DANCE competition?
The link to the body shots is gone. Score: Mindless sexism -0, Ticktock6 – 1
Actually it was already gone off the front page when I checked this morning. I believe the contest was over, not that it’s a function of me getting all annoyed about it.
… Oh. Well, I guess the link redirects now. WOW. Power of the internet!
[...] addition: Tolscer just added another great blog on the “Body Shot” contest the Memphis Grizzlies are currently running pertaining to [...]
@otto
“The Gatorade ads with the differently colored sweat, for example, don’t show a whole lot of faces, or have them obscured by lighting. Nike and Reebok have had a few along these lines as well.”
I’ve noticed these things as well, and what I think it comes down to, in a large part, is the fact that women aren’t the only group that tends to be sexualized (or objectified, or dehumanized) in the larger social (white) gaze–it’s also true for men of color, and it has been since before the NBA (or the United States) even existed.
But even admitting that, it is kind of jarring to see just parts of a male body represented in a picture, in isolation from an entire body. While it happens far less often to men than to women, this sort of fetishization of the body is just flat out harmful.
Great observation about those commercials.
@ticktock
I, for one, really hope that your words get taken more and more seriously throughout the league. You’re exactly right about this.
@ enstar
FABULOUS point about men of color. It did pop into my head when I was writing this, but I decided it was its own whole can of worms and left it alone. That cover– was it Vogue?– of LeBron James and whoever the famous white model (I know, what kind of a girl am I? lol) was, I forget, comes to mind. Where he’s all brute muscle and she’s all helpless. I was really skeeved out by that.
[...] the cheerleader’s face and used her chest as a visual clue. Awesome. Sarah vents her anger here at Hornets Hype. (Oh, and, by the way, Sarah… congratulations for ruling TrueHoop this [...]
Saying sex sells is a bullshit cop-out. Sure, I’m all about selling, buying, marketing, or even bartering sex. No problem. But that’s not what “dance squads” are. They’re selling women. Listen, the name “cheerleader” is really more appropriate. No matter how talented they are (and many of them are very good dancers) they’re still just eye candy to the main attraction, the men who throw around the orange ball. The implicit message to girls/women is you are inferior.
What cheerleaders, as currently constituted stand for, is that, sure, you can walk around and look pretty, or even dance around some in ways that prior generations might have blushed at, but you can’t do what men can. I say bullshit. Anyone ever watch the shooting stars at ASG? Every year a woman carries the winning team.
Maybe your daughter would rather dance than play ball. That’s cool. Then she should be able to do what she wants. But is it what she wants or what she’s supposed to want? Here’s the thing, if the “dance squads” were co-ed, I’d have no problem with it. Sell sex, gyrate on each other, have “special shows” in the back, whatever, because then you’re being honest and selling sex. Not just women. As it is now, it’s the worst kind of misogyny: the kind that gets a shrug and a question of what’s the big deal. Easy to fix blatant prejudice, not so much sexist apathy.
I know that’s not really the point that ticktock6 is making, but I’ll say it.
[...] The Dali: If you thought Sarah Tolcser was mad about the NBA marginalizing its female fans before, wait until you see her reaction to the Memphis Grizzlies’ new “Body Shots” contest. [Hornets Hype] [...]
They’re not all that cute
@otto writes, “And, on the whole, the number of women that get actually upset by this sort of thing is surprisingly small. So it doesn’t really hurt them enough to matter. Men don’t have a majority on being shallow, you know.” Here’s the thing tho, any act of discrimination (or sexism, or racism or any other “ism” you can think of) matters regardless of the size of the portion of the population it “hurts.” Whether it is one person or many people, the wrongness of something such as this cannot and should not be ignored. I’d also wager that more women are offended by stuff such as this than anyone knows BUT many remain silent because they fear (or know) their opinions will be regarded as the rantings of a “feminist” or worse… an ANGRY feminist. Lord knows, once you’ve got that title, no one, and I mean no one, will take you seriously. So better to just shut up and know your role (insert sarcasm here).
@ticktock6: the picture you’re thinking of of Lebron is from Vogue and is actually an homage to a WWI recruitment poster which, in turn, is an homage to King Kong. See here: http://rbasite.org/blog1/media/1/20080402-lebron_vogue.jpg.
Lastly, the Gatorade ads. These ads don’t marginalize the way this Grizzlies “guess which dancer’s tatas THESE are” contest does. The Gatorade ads may show body parts, but if you notice the focus isn’t on the bodies–they’re not even in color, only the sweat is. Furthermore, the ad features men, women, and people of color in WORKOUT GEAR. The concept is that you work hard, you sweat. You sweat, you dehydrate. You dehydrate, you need to drink Gatorade. The images of the women in this ad are clad in gear suitable to what they are doing. Yes, so are the Grizzlies dancers. HOWEVER, the women in the Gatorade ad are not posed pornographically with their shirts tucked up into bras, boobs busting out over the top of sports bras, or bejeweled pierced navels hanging out. The pose of the dancer above is reminiscent of a porn pose–go ahead and google porn for yourself and you’ll see.
@tinapickles: great points. Especially the Gatorade breakdown. One question, though, doesn’t King Kong have racist undertones?
As a female Grizzlie fan, I thought I would add a short comment. I have no idea what any of the dancers names are, they are never given out at games like the players names are and I never felt the need to investigate them. Also, the squad started out co-ed in the beginning and had some very intersting routines with the male dancers included, more interesting than now. I agree contest is sexist and unnecessary.
@tinapickles I believe that you misunderstood my comments by my incorrect use of prepositions. Not your fault, I was unclear. I’ll rephrase:
And, on the whole, the number of women that get actually upset by this sort of thing is surprisingly small. So doing this sort of thing doesn’t really hurt the Grizzlies (or insert whatever group is running the advertisement in question) enough to matter to their bottom line.
That was what I meant to say. That even if some percentage of viewers is upset by this sort of sexualization in advertising, most people simply don’t care and don’t get upset by it. It’s quite likely that a larger percentage are in favor of it than are against it. So it’s not about to change, realistically speaking.
@ Otto
You walk a very dangerous line when you say things like that. The majority of people thought the civil rights movement was unnecessary. I have to vehemently disagree with you here. Our society, at the current moment, is very “down” on intellectualism and critical thinking. That doesn’t make unquestioningly accepting the things around you okay. Say YOU don’t care about a topic. Fine. But don’t say no one cares about it or no one SHOULD care about it, just because you don’t.
@ Otto not sure if you’re saying “you” don’t care or the “Grizzlies” don’t care. Hopefully, the latter. But either way, I think its more about how the Grizzlies try to portray sex, i.e., the objectification of women in ways they wouldn’t/couldn’t/won’t with men. It has to do with power relations, agency, and cultural hegemony. Maybe you’re right. Maybe the Grizzlies make money and don’t care. Maybe people like me are in the minority. But I still think its important that people like ticktock6 at least bring up these issues so that people can discuss these issues, rather than just make assumptions about how things should (i.e. “always have been) be.
@mW: in a “modern” reading of King Kong, it could be perceived as racist–you do have a “native” being appropriated by the dominate “white male” who is punished for not falling into line (and for falling in love (and I would argue not even in a sexual way, but rather “in love” in the sense that she is the only one that shows Kong kindness) with a white woman, who is apparently the only one that can understand the “big dumb ape” (literally and figuratively). However, you could also read it the other way too–if looked at a certain way it shows the evils of colonization (physical and literal) of the other as the other is not able to assimilate and as such is destroyed by the dominate culture and in this sense, it could be seen as a cautionary tale decrying the evils and destructive nature of colonization (Kong is removed from everything he knows, forced to preform for white society, and then is betrayed when he does not live up to their expectations). Either way, its a movie representative to the period in which it was made (the 1933 version, not the 2005. It also occurs to me I said WWI, when I meant WWII).
@otto: change starts with one person. Change occurs when one person (or more who are like-minded) raise a stink over something that is perceived culturally acceptable and normative because the majority is indifferent in regards to what the see and consume. Just because the majority is “okay” with what they’re seeing and consuming, doesn’t mean its right or okay. And it certainly doesn’t mean that people like TickTock6 shouldn’t point out the erroneous nature of the complacency of the majority.
For the three people who commented solely to say you didn’t care about this, the reason I didn’t let your comments through moderation was not because “ooooh I’m censoring you!” but because they contributed nothing. If you don’t care, why not go comment on a post you care about? Don’t waste other people’s time. I am pretty sure I’ve delineated both in the post and the comments why I care and why people should care.
It drives me crazy that we’re conditioned NOT to care. The phrase that pisses me off the most (in general) is, “Why are you making such a big deal about this?” BECAUSE IT IS A BIG DEAL, you condescending f*ck! Please, ticktock, mW…. continue making such a big deal about these things.
Oh, and if I lived in Memphis, neither I nor anyone that came out of me would be attending a game while that “challenge” lasted.
Not to be all LET ME TAKE OVER THE COMMENTS, but another reason why this post is important is because even if people don’t care now, perhaps the next time they see a similar dance team promotion, they’ll stop and think. Even if it’s just to say, “Oh, ticktock6 will have something to say about this” at least the idea that this is offensive to someone will enter their consciousness and eventually, the idea that this is just offensive period.
Our society needed a civil war to figure out that non-Caucasians are human. We needed 9-11 to figure out we shouldn’t keep offending other religions. What about us girls? Do we need to pick up some Bazookas to stop being just sets of boobs?
Amazing, great post. I really respect what the presence you’ve been making in the blogospehere this week.