Positives and negatives of the Olympics.

Casey, I would agree with your last sentiment. IF women's football does take off and big money becomes involved, it will go the way of the men's game - cheating, diving, feigning injury, conning the ref etc etc. At the moment it seems remarkable free of cynicism.

For those wanting increased coverage - beware what you wish for.

I don't attend football games at all (men's or women's). But when DD1 gets to 6 in a couple of years I'll be taking her to watch women's rugby. If she's interested in football then I'd be happy to take her to women's league games (far happier than to take her to men's games, TBH).

Casey, agreed, but it's a bit chicken-and-egg. My own Premiership football club can attract over 40,000 men and women to home games. The women's team had 105 attendees for their last game, and this is in the highest league in the sport. I think the highest attendance for a league match this season has been just over 5,000 (Chelsea vs Arsenal).

The FA are trying in the UK;

www.fawsl.com/index.html

BUT it needs a groundswell of support as well. I would genuinely love to know how many people actually attend women's league games. Do any of your daughters attend? Liverpool charge four pounds fifty for adults, and it's free to under 16's. It needs commitment as well as coverage.

NameGames, no I don't agree. The BBC show women's football, as I showed above.

From this website;

www.beach-volleyball.co.uk/about.htm

it seems British Volleyball UK Ltd have TV contracts outside of the Olympics with ITV, Channel 4 and Eurosport, as well as international TV companies. It seems that a lot of there content is also streamed live over the Interweb, which would tie in with the profile of the sport, appealing to the 'surfer dude' crowd and younger people generally.

But there's a cause-and-effect, trickle-down effect with that, ncg. If women's sports were given more attention / sports coverage in general was marketed more at women then they would become more popular. But sport (the doing it and the watching it) is marketed very heavily at men and the coverage leans very heavily on men's events.

There's nothing that makes women as a gender inherently unsporty. Give girls growing up more opportunities and more coverage of women's sport at a high level and they're more likely to play and to actively support women's events.

For a while after the last women's Rugby World Cup you'd see Maggie Alphonsi appearing on regular rugby programmes as a pundit/commentator and I thought that was tremendously positive because she was articulate and insightful and a darn sight better than Stuart Barnes . But after a couple of months, when the women's rugby "gimmick" was over, she was quietly dropped from the punditry roster.

A lot of this isn't about sport at all of course -- the principle that if women want to watch sport they'll watch men, while men won't watch women, so why bother with women's sport at all, isn't a million miles away from "boys won't read books with a female lead character, while girls will read books with male leads" or "you need a bankable male star to open a movie, and characters other than the love interest/mother should be male by default, because women will go to the cinema anyway".

By the way, who still does not have access to BBC3 and the red button? I thought everywhere in the UK was now covered by digital? Genuine question as I don't know.

namechange so you are agreeing with Treats?

My post was in response to 'the Olympics is the only time you get to see women's team sports on the television.'

Hand on heart, how many people follow women's football closely outside of the Olympics? The only time I have ever watched it live is when my daughter played for her school team.

I am getting very bored of hearing about beach bloody volleyball.

I was joking about why they only show the beach volleyball, sorry I'm not that great at sarcasm.

"Some good stuff here from the BBC"

really? would that be the normal level of coverage for the men's world cup? where only the final is shown live on BBC3, and everything else is available through red button?

www.bbc.co.uk/sport/0/football/19000201

www.bbc.co.uk/pressoffice/pressreleases/stories/2011/05_may/20/england.shtml

Some good stuff here from the BBC, and not based on the Olympics.

Lurking - my point was that the Olympics is the only time you get to see women's team sports on the television. They never even cover the beach volleyball at any other time.

To be fair Treats, they never fail to cover the women's beach volleyball!

cough

On Facebook last night at least 10% of my 'friends' statusses were along the lines of 'watching the men's shot putt, oh no wait a minute it's the women's' followed by replies of lols, likes, me toos etc.

There's one that just occurred to me when watching the women's hockey last night. It's so rare to see women on telly or in popular culture having a good time together, doing something fun that has nothing to do with men. It's great to see the hockey and football teams, the rowers, the gymnasts and the swimmers all having fun with other women.

It made me think about popular depictions of women spending time with other women and I realised that you just don't see it very often. It's almost like an extension of the Bechdel Test. Cultural representations of women in groups is always something cringey like a 'night out with the girls' - with the presumption that they're on the pull - or Sex and the City, with its massive emphasis on men and appearance, or - worse - those bloody awful adverts where women sit around in coffee bars discussing constipation . It's always either embarrassing or undignified or trivial. It's as though popular culture cant' think of a good reason why women would want to get together purely for its own sake - we'd only want to do it because it made us more attractive to men.

It's completely taken for granted, on the other hand, that men will spend time together and that it's important that they should do so. Mostly through their shared experience of either playing or watching sport - whether or on the golf course or watching the footie in the pub. This is sacrosanct 'guy time' and every man's right.

Someone gave the stats upthread for coverage of women's sport and I think it's interesting that you really only see athletics or tennis - individual sports. I think women - and young women in particular - are really missing out through not seeing positive representations of women working as a team and enjoying each others' company that we would get from seeing women's team sports on the television. And we also miss out from not having the bonding opportunities that playing and watching sport together can give to men.

Sorry - long post - but I was thinking a lot about this overnight.....

Negative: Photos circulating on Facebook of a weightlifter, mocking her for having underarm hair.

Eh? That's just so rubbish! Many "names" are a bit forced but Amigas would seem to do the job ok whilst still being naff.

Negative: billing the Team GB women boxers as The Three Ami gos GIRLS

Aaaaaaaarrrrgh! This one has me really worked up. I think it's because "Amiga" is a perfectly acceptable pre-existing word. Calling them "The Three Amigas" would be... tolerable, at least. It would still be a bit WTF (the fact that there are three of them doesn't really justify the label, after all) but, yeah, OK, no worse than the stupid "Magnificent Seven" thing they have for the men. But someone has actually gone out of his/her way to butcher the reference completely just so that they can be referred to as girls. And then they've put a stupid ident together and dubbed annoying music over the top so that you can't possibly miss the sheer crassness of it.

(...and breathe...)

Sorry:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oksana_Chusovitina

I'm behind all of you, watching on the catch-up, and just watched the vault finals. I was absolutely blown away by the woman who came fifth. Just her wikipedia page makes amazing reading:

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oksana_Chusovitina]]

She is 37, has a son, and has coped with both growing up in the Soviet Union and later training on antiquated equipment. She's also seen her son recover from cancer.

I just thought, what an amazing woman, and it seems to me its an important feminist issue that she has a child, not because I imagine everyone wants to be a gymnast for most of their adult life (!), but because it's so good to show that even at this elite physical level, it's possible for her to do that. It's very unusual for gymnasts to come back after having babies.

I saw some children pretending to be Usain Bolt yesterday, doing his bow-and-arrow celebration thing. One was a girl.

I suppose he could have also said '"the female mixed race" but personally I saw it as a breakthrough that Jess's sex is not now considered unusual enough to even mention.....

Not a feminist point but I equally valid I think. A writer in the Torygraph today was saying (in a not very politically correct way, but making an important point in a tongue in cheek way) about Saturday's 3 gold medal athletes that it shows that Britain allows the possibility for anyone to do well and cited as them as an example as "the mixed race, the refugee and the ginger kid".

Cristina Odone in the Telegraph today. Headline is to do with "girls" and first line was about how she questioned pink and purple for the colours initially but it was ok now as the "girls" were doing so well. Boris article at least talked about women and females (but still called the showing of emotion feminisation).

Both articles did have positive angles too, to be fair