By Ann • 17 years ago

Strong enough for a girly-girl

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Just in case any manly-men out there were feeling threatened by racecar driver Danica Patrick’s Rookie of the Year status and admirable fourth-place finish at the Indy 500… Not to worry! Deep down, she’s a girly-girl.
That’s right. Patrick is the spokeswoman for Secret deodorant, which is apparently now strong enough for a woman who allows herself to be packaged and sold as a nonthreatening feminine ideal who happens to drive real fast. Proctor and Gamble must have offered her an amazing amount of money, because prior to inking her deal to represent Secret, Patrick made a point of not endorsing beauty products, choosing instead to lend her name to ads for antifreeze, windshield wipers and washer fluid.
Today she’s an advertiser’s dream: A properly feminine sports heroine.

Other sports marketers agree, ticking off Patrick’s attributes as if she herself were the product. She can be sexy, of course. But she also can project wholesomeness, an extension of the high school cheerleader she once was. She’s 24, but her petite size and playful nature help her relate to children (see “Danica Divides Decimals” in Scholastic Math magazine).

Secret has made the “product” interactive by creating an advergame — a recent marketing trend that brilliantly combines advertisements and video games, two media that are particularly good at objectifying women. Today it launched “Danica’s Secret 500 Challenge,” in which Patrick will “show the boys who’s boss.”
I’m torn. I don’t think women should have to adopt stereotypically masculine attributes in order to be taken seriously as athletes, and I think it’s great that Patrick is proud of her more traditionally feminine qualities. But those qualities seem to have been exaggerated by marketers to the point where she’s a caricature, almost a dippy cheerleader who’s just hanging out in the garage with the boys. Thoughts?

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