Lisa Leslie: Still fighting for recognition

Hello all — long time reader, first time poster and a big fan of the community going here…

I’m a strong proponent of women’s (professional) sports for a number of reasons, but most importantly because I think mainstream representations of female athletes — that are not over-sexualitized, objectified, or stuck in some narrow gender box — has the potential to help shift the rigid gender norms that our society has come to abide by.

WNBA star Lisa Leslie recently retired and made some controversial comments about women, sports, and femininity at her final post-game press conference that have sparked some interesting discussions among WNBA fans and warrant discussion beyond the WNBA because they certainly have consequences for gender and sexuality norms across society.

Leslie’s cultural significance as a female athlete, a positive black female image in society, and a visible beneficiary of Title IX make her public statements about women’s sports and womanhood significant. And most of the comments during her press conference about the media’s treatment of women’s sports have been widely applauded. However, people have been focusing on one segment of her comments as particularly problematic.

Leslie: "Also another important message is how we represent ourselves as women. We need to look like women; it’s important how we carry ourselves, how we dress on and off the court. A lot of these things have to be addressed and continue to be addressed because we are the product, and it’s important.

People want to see a good product. They do. That’s just the bottom line. And you need to be marketable and I think that more women need to understand that here in our league."

The full audio of the press conference is here .

For people who have followed the WNBA for any extended period of time, these comments should not come as a surprise.

However, as Tara Polen of Sportspagemagazine.com put it, If I had been at the press conference, I might have asked Leslie, “So what does a woman look like?”

While the question has not necessarily been openly discussed by the league, the implicit answer has been quite clear.

As reported here on Feministing and elsewhere over time, the WNBA has openly tried to present itself and its players as heterosexual as possible thru increased makeup and fashion sessions during rookie orientation, promoting its players as mothers (when NBA players are almost never mentioned as fathers unless there is a threat to pay child support), and the players they choose to promote as stars who generally fit a heteronormative beauty standard.

Instead of engaging in dialogue about these issues, the league has essentially tried to avoid it in an effort to not alienate mainstream sports fans, despite the fact that the LGBT community is among it’s largest supporters and it is widely accepted that many of the players are either lesbian or bi.

As troubling as her statements were, it appears as though this is an opportunity for the longest standing current women’s professional sports league to actually have the dialogue that it has traditionally avoided. It would seem that given both the fan base and the sexuality of some of its players, the WNBA would be the ideal organization to embrace an expansive notion of gender and femininity rather than attempting to adhere to traditional norms.

And yet the league (nor ESPN, who is contracted to cover the WNBA) even published these statements online.

The bind, as Leslie alludes to, is that as a professional sports league, it will not continue to survive if it isn’t able to promote a profitable product. The fact is that in the homophobic/sexist society we live in, the league is correct in assuming that the 18-35 male demographic that they are looking to market the sport to would simply not find a league with an openly gendered agenda palatable. Some people even argue, pragmatically, that de-gendering women’s sports is actually the way to promote it — figure out a way to promote the game as you would the men’s game and go from there. The problem there is that women’s basketball is clearly different — but I would argue not inferior to — men’s basketball for a number of reasons.

Part of the solution to the dilemma of selling a product while promoting women’s sports (which I believe has cultural value) is to stop trying to convert the crowds of people who will dismiss women’s sports on absurdly sexist grounds. Instead, I suggest something that ESPN.com columnist Mechelle Voepel suggested back in December:

Instead the WNBA has to focus on the fans who don’t have an ingrained negative attitude toward women’s hoops. But even those fans can be hard to reach.

Because while they may not be hostile in any way to women’s basketball, a lot of them are indifferent and quite reasonably may not see it as a product that’s worth their time and money. 

They may be big sports fans, but just have not found any particular reason to get interested in women’s hoops. They probably feel they have satisfyingly entertaining options in men’s sports and that they just don’t have the time or desire to develop interest in something else. 

Reaching out to them is undoubtedly hard work, but the league should approach it with the confidence that some of them really can be reached. I especially believe more women who are not “traditional” sports fans can be brought into the fan base if they’re approached in the right way. 

There are still a large number of women in this country who came of age before Title IX and never had the opportunities to participate in sports that are available now.

But there are also a lot of women in their 30s and 40s now who DID participate in sports in high school and maybe even college. However, they’re juggling careers and children and maybe just don’t think they have time or desire to watch sports that don’t involve their own kids or isn’t something their husbands/boyfriends/girlfriends/partners/whatever are watching. 

It’s imperative for the league to reach out to both those groups of women and make them feel they are “part” of something by coming to a WNBA game. 

The WNBA is a niche business, but plenty of niche businesses do survive and thrive. Is it more difficult now than ever in this economy? Of course. But it means that the league has to not just work harder but also smarter.

There are plenty of people — some of them sports editors, others just random lunkheads who have nothing better to do with their time but post derisive comments online — who believe that women’s sports cannot survive because women simply don’t care. Socialization arguments aside, I don’t buy that.

The issue — as framed by Voepel in my opinion — is finding a way to reach the fans "who don’t have an ingrained negative attitude toward women’s hoops" and simultaneously are willing to support female athletes that may not fit the narrow traditional heteronormative beauty standard that is accepted as profitable.

I think that’s possible, but it’s troubling that these conversations keep getting swept under the rug, thus only reinforcing sexist cultural norms.

The entirety of Leslie’s statements (which are worth a listen ) may not strike you as a "call to arms, of sort, for feminist action in support of the WNBA and women’s sports" as Polen writes . Nevertheless, I do think Leslie’s statements illustrate a need for further open dialogue about the WNBA’s role in the broader struggle against rigid gender norms and a more expansive understanding of "womanhood".