448001 IRS

Article

International Review for the

Overexposed: Capturing Sociology of Sport

48(6) 643­–657
© The Author(s) 2012
a secret side of sports Reprints and permissions:
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photography DOI: 10.1177/1012690212448001
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Patrice A Keats
Simon Fraser University, Canada

William R Keats-Osborn
University of British Columbia, Canada

Abstract
Accredited photographers have been observed taking sexualized, voyeuristic images of athletes
that are later distributed on pornography websites and among collectors of pornographic
images. As with other emergent forms of digital voyeurism, such as upskirting, these images
are taken in public places in such a way that they capture compromising moments without any
awareness on the part of the victim, and expand the temporal and geographical scope of the
intrusion. Such a prurient use of photographs can be devastating and humiliating for the athletes.
An examination of the ambiguity of an image’s meaning, especially in the eyes of the law, is used
to demonstrate the inadequacy of legal approaches to policing these kinds of voyeurism. In
addition, an exploration of the culture of sports journalism, where the priority of self-promotion
and competition often underscores the lack of attention given to the rampant sexism that
frequently pervades the profession, is used to illustrate the apparent factors that precipitate and
maintain the practice of sports voyeurism. Recommendations for potential interventions and
further research are provided.

Keywords
journalism culture, photography, pornography, sports photography, visual culture

Introduction
In January 2008 The Orange County Register learned that a number of photographs of
water polo players from several southern California high schools had been posted to gay
pornography websites. The photographs generally depicted the unsuspecting athletes

Corresponding author:
Patrice A Keats, Faculty of Education (Counselling Psychology Program), Simon Fraser University, 8888
University Drive, Burnaby, BC V5A 1S6, Canada.
Email: [email protected]

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644 International Review for the Sociology of Sport 48(6)

standing in swim trunks on the deck of the pool, and they were found on a number of
websites juxtaposed with other photographs of nude and semi-nude males, some engaging
in explicit sex acts (Reid and Albano, 2008a). Many of the photographs in question were
credited to an individual named Scott Stanford, who was found to be the alias of a police
dispatcher working for the University of California Irvine (UCI), Scott Cornelius. The
Register reported that Joan Gould, a media operations official for the 2007 Junior Water
Polo Championships in Los Alamitos, had earlier granted Mr Cornelius credentials to
photograph the tournament based on a recommendation from another photographer,
Allen Rockwell, who operated a website called allensnaps.com. Paid subscribers received
from this website a certain number of non-nude images of young male aquatic athletes
on a daily basis. Although the website posited the images as being artistic, it acknowl-
edged the potential duality of the images in a disclaimer: “this web site does not contain
any nudity or sexual material. If you are looking for that sort of material, you are asked
to look elsewhere” (Reid and Albano, 2008a).
Some of the athletes involved in the story were reportedly traumatized by the experi-
ence, and The Register reported that, “In some cases, boys have sought counseling after
learning their photos were on the Web sites” (Reid and Albano, 2008a). One athlete,
whose photograph had been the focus of “lewd comments” on a web forum, reported to
The Register that he felt his “life wasn’t respected as it should [have been]” (Reid and
Albano, 2008a).
Following the Register story, the director of an online safety organization,
WiredSafety, acknowledged to ABC News that “we have a huge problem with both gay
and heterosexual predators attending sporting events and taking pictures of athletes and
cheerleaders” (Goldman, 2008). This does appear to be the case, as basic web searches
easily turn up collections of sports-related voyeuristic images, both of male and female
athletes; the photo-sharing website Flickr, for example, hosts groups and photosets with
titles like “Sexy Sport Positions,” “Massive Baseball Bulges,” “Sports Erotica,” and
“Volleyball Asses.” Many images are either cropped to a narrow field of view to emphasize
the athletes’ genitals or buttocks, or they are taken with a fast shutter speed at a strategic
time when the athletes’ legs are spread apart or when they are bent over. Athletes
are selected preferentially for their tight or otherwise revealing clothing; swimmers,
gymnasts, and volleyball players appear to be among the most common.
The links between photographers like Mr Cornelius and the world of professional
sports journalism, we suggest, are more robust than the Register story indicates. In
personal correspondence with three photojournalists, two of whom were specifically
accredited to take photographs at the 2010 Olympic Games, it was revealed that many
professional photographers are aware of the phenomenon of sports voyeurism within
the journalism community, but they are reluctant to discuss it openly out of concern for
the impact that doing so might have on their careers, particularly in the context of a
culture of journalism that champions competition, reputation, and self-promotion
(Banagan, 2011; Oates and Pauly, 2007). Upon this foundation, we speculate that the
possibility of preventive action on the part of individual journalists diminishes, while at
the same time the interpretive ambiguity of these images, as demonstrated by Allen
Rockwell’s website, weakens the external community’s agency in taking preventive
action. In the following paper, we intend to describe the nature and scope of this

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Keats and Keats-Osborn 645

problem, to investigate how the culture of journalism might contribute to the systematic
acceptance of this activity, and to suggest how this phenomenon can be approached as
a research problem, taking into account journalists’ reluctance to talk about it.

The problem of digital voyeurism

Sports voyeurism of the type described above is merely one of a variety of new forms
of digital voyeurism that have arisen along with advances in technology. The develop-
ment of small, powerful digital imaging devices, along with the rise of the internet and
its attendant possibilities for sharing and widely distributing images with little effort,
has radically changed the context in which voyeurism takes place. Whereas voyeurism
has been traditionally concerned with direct witnessing of private acts, the development
of digital imaging and communication technology has allowed for an expansion of its
invasiveness and scope. With a camera, a photographer can “freeze” movements and
“zoom in” on certain narrow fields of view, allowing them to see more than they would
as casual observers using the naked eye (Zeronda, 2010: 1136). Digital cameras have
decreased in size and increased in ubiquity, so invasive images can easily be captured
in public without detection (Bell et al., 2006: 306). The images can then be copied and
stored in various locations for repeat viewing. Internet technology allows for the effort-
less reproduction and distribution of the images, rendering the victims of voyeurism
powerless over the communication of their own image; what should be private can
swiftly become public on a global scale.
Manifestations of these technological advances are probably best known in the
cases of the most rampant emergent forms of digital voyeurism, “upskirt” and
“downblouse” photography (Bell et al., 2006; Zeronda, 2010), which serve as good
reference points for considering athletic voyeurism. Upskirting and downblousing
involve taking photographs, usually of women’s underwear or cleavage, with the use
of strategically placed, clandestine recording devices, such as camera phones.
Certain law enforcement agencies have also recorded an uptick in the clandestine
photography of individuals at beaches, pools, and other locations where people are
likely to be partially clothed or otherwise exposed, sometimes leading to the sugges-
tion of legislative restrictions on photography in certain areas (Whyte, 2009).
These images, athletic images included, propagate through the internet much like
any other pornographic image. They are generally available on both free and pay
websites, and there is often a free interchange of images from one type of site to the
other; many websites charge for user-generated content, and they use free content as
a way of increasing demand for their pay content (D’Orlando, 2011: 54). Pornographic
photographs often become commodities that are collected and shared on forums and
social networking sites, and through peer-to-peer applications, such as BitTorrent
(D’Orlando, 2011; Quayle and Taylor, 2002). A photograph that is divorced from any
information that would identify the subject or the photographer can still propagate
widely through the web and, on this basis, it is reasonable to assume that the number
of cases where victims actually come to learn that their image has appeared on por-
nography websites or in collections of pornographic photographs is only a fraction of
the total number of cases occurring without the athletes’ knowledge.

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Ambiguity of images
Sontag (1977) compares photography to modern poetry, noting that both are concerned
with “wrenching things from their context (to see them in a fresh way), bringing things
together elliptically, according to the imperious but often arbitrary demands of subjec-
tivity” (p.96). Thus, as a confounding factor in considering these types of voyeurism,
the availability of all manner of images on the internet means that photographs do not
have to be taken deliberately for prurient purposes in order for them to be used that
way. Images taken innocuously, including, for example, images posted to Facebook or
other social networking sites, commonly find their way into collections of voyeuristic
or pornographic images hosted on the internet (e.g., Popkin, 2012; Srivastava, 2011).
The interpretive ambiguity of images, which can drastically change how an image is
read depending on its context (Barrett, 1985), makes the issue of sports voyeurism
much more complex. In the water polo case, for example, parents confirmed that some
of the photographs in question were originally posted by the athletes’ family members
to websites like Flickr, with the intent of sharing them with friends and family (Reid
and Albano, 2008b).
The fact that the same photograph can be a family snapshot in one context and a
pornographic image in another illustrates the difficulty of defining pornography pre-
cisely; whether something qualifies as such is often highly contingent on historical,
social, or cultural contexts (Rea, 2001). In general, the difficulty in saying definitively
whether or not something is pornographic has to do with a tension between definitions
“that hold that the defining feature of pornography is that it is intended to produce
sexual arousal or in fact has the effect of producing sexual arousal” (Rea, 2001: 132).
There is little ambiguity in the case of many photographs that are taken specifically for
pornographic publications; it is the photographs with the potential for effecting sexual
arousal in certain people that are much harder to identify as such. In the context of
sports photography, it is possible to imagine even the most straightforwardly documen-
tary of images being capable of arousing sexual feelings in a viewer, and the point at
which that fact becomes wholly or partially the responsibility of the photographer is far
from clear.
Legal definitions of obscenity tend to disregard the potential effect of an image on a
viewer in favor of testing the image against a hypothetical community standard. In the
United States, the standard legal determination of obscenity is based on the Miller test,
which queries, among other things, whether an image would be perceived as appealing
to the prurient interest by reference to contemporary community standards (Berkowitz,
2009: 204). In the context of the internet and attendant developments in imaging and
file sharing technology, the Miller test is something of a red herring that diverts legal
discourse away from the salient contextual issues that arise with these types of images.
Although the community standard concept attempts to introduce some contextual basis
for defining pornography, the fact that it relies on the hypothetical average person
applying the hypothetical community standard – both virtual constructions of the law
– means that its capacity to respond to the actual conditions of the use and distribution
of pornographic images is often tenuous; it renders the legal definition of obscenity, in
other words, responsive only to qualities that are considered inherent to a given image.

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Examples such as the water polo case, where family photographs ended up adjacent
to obviously pornographic images, demonstrate that the law is unprepared to deal with
an image whose pornographic status is constructed by the complex technological,
social, or psychological factors that form the basis of its creation and distribution. Strict
interpretations of child pornography and obscenity laws have demonstrated this ambi-
guity in a variety of legal cases surrounding visual art and photography, including cases
involving the work of Robert Mapplethorpe, Jock Sturges, and Bill Henson (Simpson,
2011; Stanley, 1991). Particularly illuminating is the case of Cynthia Stewart, who was
charged with producing child pornography because of photographs she had taken of her
eight-year-old daughter in the shower. The case was later chronicled by a neighbor,
Lynn Powell (2010), who describes her experience of watching one photograph of the
child, ostensibly a record of the pleasure a mother would take “in the miracle of her own
child,” distort into a “sexual invitation” to someone “trained to look for the sordid
beneath the guise of innocence” (Strother, 2010). A photograph of an athlete that
appears in a collection of pornographic images on an internet forum may not be obscene
under the law, but its existence in that context is still underscored by the kinds of social
and emotional harms that the law purportedly aims to prevent.

Legal weakness
In general, criminal law has failed to keep up with advances in technology (Bell et al.,
2006). Upskirting, for example, has occupied a “gray cloud” of legality since it first
emerged into the mainstream (Reid and Albano, 2008a), generally because the law holds
that people are not entitled to an expectation of privacy when they are in public places
(Bell et al., 2006; Zeronda, 2010). Attempts to legislate against upskirting, such as the
Virginia law passed against placing a camera between a person’s legs to record “intimate
parts or undergarments covering those intimate parts” (Bell et al., 2006: 304), generally
fail to take into account the scope of possibilities offered to a voyeur by modern technol-
ogy. In addition, the possibility of legislating against the use of otherwise innocuous
photographs as pornography, as in the case of images posted to Flickr or Facebook, tends
to conflict quite directly with the protection of free speech. In the English case Graham
vs. Kerr, in which a swimming instructor was accused of taking a photograph of a nude
boy at a swimming pool, the accused was acquitted on the grounds that the photograph
itself was not inherently indecent; “even though the defendant had said he derived sexual
gratification from taking and looking at such photographs, the secret motive of a defend-
ant was irrelevant to the question of its indecency” (Edwards, 2000: 4).
In this context, the photographer implicated in the water polo case denied any wrong-
doing, stating that he was falsely accused of being a sexual predator for “merely taking
pictures of athletes at water polo events” (Reid and Albano, 2008a). After a year of paid
administrative leave while the university investigated the matter, Mr Cornelius was
returned to his police dispatch position after the investigation was completed, according
to a UCI spokesperson, “to the satisfaction of both parties.” In addition, the Orange
County District Attorney’s office conducted an investigation that concluded Mr Cornelius
“did not commit any crimes” (Albano, 2009).

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648 International Review for the Sociology of Sport 48(6)

Victims’ experiences
Whether taking a particular image is illegal, then, has little bearing on the potential
for harm that the prurient use of that image can inflict on the victim. Like an upskirt
photograph, a voyeuristic photograph of an athlete draws attention to parts of the
body that the athlete would not likely have consented to have on display. Outrage,
shame, and humiliation are likely outcomes (Zeronda, 2010: 1133).
Although athletes whose images have been used as pornography have not commonly
described the experience to the public, victims of other forms of voyeurism have been
available more frequently to comment on the experience. In an article published in The
Guardian (Saner, 2009), the actor Emma Watson recounts experiencing an “open season”
on taking pictures up her skirt on the night of her 18th birthday: “one photographer lay
down on the floor to get a shot up my skirt. … I woke up the next day and felt completely
violated by it all.” But it can be more distressing for someone whose photograph is taken
without their knowledge. Lucy Parkinson, who was interviewed by The Guardian in the
same article, was a victim of a surreptitious video voyeur: “I hadn’t even noticed it happen-
ing,” she recalled, “and that’s the most unsettling part – in a city, you just don’t notice
physical proximity to strangers. It could have happened a dozen other times too, for all I
know.” Similarly, an 18-year-old student whose Facebook photographs had been posted on
a pornography website acknowledged that “being on a child porn website just makes me
look bad as a person” (Popkin, 2012). With sports photography, telephoto lenses and light-
ning-fast shutter speeds give photographers a virtual proximity to the athletes that puts the
victims at a similar disadvantage. Despite knowingly competing in events that are open to
the public, athletes have no knowledge or control over when images of their bodies are
taken, what position they are in at the time photographs are being taken, who in the audi-
ence is taking their picture, or what happens to the images that are not published in main-
stream publications. Like any individual in a public place, in the context of emergent forms
of digital voyeurism, their control over their image is severely curtailed by the possibilities
afforded reprobates by modern technology, both as producers and consumers of media.

Sports voyeurism and the culture of sports journalism

As noted, we suggest that the preponderance of voyeuristic images of athletes on the
internet can likely be attributed, in part, to factors within the sports journalism commu-
nity that contribute to a more systematic problem than just a handful of socially transgres-
sive individuals acting in isolation to realize new technology’s voyeuristic potential. In
conjunction with what we learned from the photojournalists we spoke to, it appears that
the culture of sports journalism creates a fertile environment for this type of activity to
take place, and that to some degree, sports journalists and photographers are complicit
both in creating a market for sexualized images of athletes and in satisfying that market.

Bias in coverage of sports news

In general, the profession of sports journalism is dominated by white men (Claringbould
et al., 2004; Elling and Luijt, 2009), which is a factor that researchers have linked to
biased media representations in favor of men (Hardin et al., 2006). Although routine

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coverage of women’s sports in newspapers and television programs was virtually non-
existent until fairly recently, in part due to women’s lower involvement in sports prior to
such legislative advancements as Title IX in the United States (Shugart, 2003), most
research has shown that routine coverage of women’s sports has not expanded in propor-
tion to the increase in women’s involvement in sport (e.g., Bishop, 2003). Bruce et al.
(2010) wrote a thorough review of the relevant literature, for example, and indicated that
on average, approximately 10 percent of television and newspaper sports coverage is
devoted to women’s events.
Even in cases where coverage of female athletes tends to be more prevalent, such as
during the Olympic games, there is still a tendency for news outlets to focus dispropor-
tionately on women in “gender-appropriate” sports, such as figure skating or gymnastics,
or those, in other words, “which depict females in aesthetically pleasing motions and
poses, emphasizing the erotic physicality rather than the strength of the female body”
(Daddario, 1992: 51). Numerous studies examining the imbalance of coverage between
genders, both in quantity and quality, in events such as the Olympic Games (e.g., Bissell
and Duke, 2007; Bruce et al., 2010; Daddario, 1994; Duncan, 1990; Jones et al., 1999;
Markula, 2009a) have reported underrepresentation of female athletes and the use of
strategies of marginalization that maintain stereotypical ideals of femininity.
Most common among these strategies is the tendency for media outlets to focus more
energetically on the female athletes’ aesthetic appearance than on their athletic achieve-
ments, or else to focus on their aesthetic appearance to a degree that would not be seen
in comparable coverage of men’s events. King (2007) notes that “female athletes’ sport-
ing achievements are often trivialized through stereotypical, and often sexualized views,
and that journalists continue to associate sportswomen more with appearance than per-
formance” (p.188). Similarly, Eastman and Billings’ (2000) analysis of newspaper, tele-
vision, and magazine sports coverage in the United States indicated “a lingering tendency
to use women athletes for their glamour or sex appeal without serious treatment of their
activities” (p.204). With regard specifically to written accounts, Lee (1992) indicates,
based on newspaper coverage of the 1984 and 1988 summer Olympic games, that women
tended to be described more often than men in ways that juxtaposed their strengths with
their weaknesses, or in ways that attended disproportionately to information unrelated to
their performance, such as descriptions of the shape of their body. While a good part of
this strategy involves objectification of the athletes – a minimization of their depiction as
athletes actually engaged in sport – it can also involve sexualization of the performance
itself, affirmation of the athlete’s heterosexuality through increased attention paid to her
relationships with men, or the use of asexuality as a foil in cases where the athlete upsets
traditional notions of femininity (Shugart, 2003).
Several specific studies are worth mentioning in this context for illustration. Duncan’s
(1990) analysis of magazine photographs pertaining to the 1984 and 1988 Olympic
Games indicated that images that highlighted the breasts and buttocks of the athletes had
a greater tendency to be selected for publication, and that many images depicted the
athletes in poses “that bear a striking resemblance to those of women in soft-core por-
nography” (p.29). More recently, Bissell and Duke (2007) undertook a study of American
television coverage of the US women’s volleyball team games during the 2004 Olympics,
and observed that a preponderance of camera shots were focused on the breasts or but-
tocks of the athletes. Approximately a fifth to a third of the camera shots analyzed were

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coded as chest shots, and just under a fifth were coded as buttock shots. In fact, they
observed that there appeared to be a directorial influence on the types of shots selected
– “Misty May often slapped [Kerri] Walsh’s buttock as a form of celebration or support,
and the camera operators became quickly trained to capture this motion with a tight shot
of Team USA’s buttocks” (p.41).
There is also evidence that the sexualization of athletes by the news media is not just
relegated to North America. Wu (2009), for example, notes that the quantitative imbal-
ance between genders is similarly exhibited by the Chinese media, which, from a quali-
tative perspective, also has a tendency to focus on the bodies of female athletes rather
than their sporting performances; based on a review of the Chinese literature on the
subject, she concludes that “the trivialisation and sexualisation of female athletes in
media coverage, which are found commonly in the West, are also overt and blatant in
China” (p.74). Her analysis of Chinese newspapers during the 2004 summer games in
Athens noted, as an example, the frequency with which a particular female diver, Guo
Jingjing, was referred to as a “goddess,” including one article in which the athlete’s
“sexy swimming suit” was described as making her appear “beautiful and attractive”
(p.76). Sexualized representations of foreign (Western) female athletes were also noted
by Koh (2009) in Korean newspaper coverage during the same summer games, and
similar observations have been made in Finland (Markula, 2009b) and the Netherlands
(Elling and Luijt, 2009).

Cultural and institutional factors

In most news media organizations, journalists and photographers are grouped into
areas of specialization, and people working within each area tend to have specific val-
ues, attitudes, behaviors, social nuances, and ways of being that identify them as unique
groups of professionals (Keats and Buchanan, 2009). Specifically, Oates and Pauly
(2007) see sports photographers and journalists as stereotypically egotistical, socially
ignorant, overly aggressive, and highly competitive. In addition, when compared to
other areas of news reporting, women working in sports journalism report a greater
degree of marginalization and discrimination (Eastman and Billings, 2000). This point
is clearly illustrated in Hardin et al.’s (2006) study on textbooks for sports journalism
courses, which generally endorse a male bias and promote “gender stereotypes of
sports, sports writing, and sports writers” (p.441), hence maintaining patterns of gen-
der discrimination in all areas related to sports. Eastman and Billings (2000) describe
“sportscasts that seem to speak a private male-only language and operate rather as
private clubs for men” (p.192). They report male newscasters’ tendencies to address
sports issues they are most familiar with (men and men’s sports) and to direct their
reporting to daily sports consumers (men), which manifests in mostly favorable
descriptions of male athletes and men’s sports. This positioning is problematic, espe-
cially if the sports audience sees “sports reporting as a form of cultural representation”
(Oates and Pauly, 2007: 333); in effect, stereotypical group identities based on gender,
societal values skewed in favor of men, and denigration of female athletes and their
sporting events are sustained.

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As an illustration, Messner et al. (2003) conducted a 10-year study of visual and

verbal aspects of sports news, and found a disturbing preponderance of segments where
women athletes were shown and described in sexually objectified ways (e.g., a female
athlete described as a “sexy villainess,” or photographs of a high-level female tennis
player with jokes about what a man had to do to “date” her). These authors describe the
prevalence of journalists’ assumptions about “who their audiences are and what they
want to see,” and the unregulated delivery of “visual moments of sexual voyeurism
peppered with locker-room humor” (p.49).
Other studies have illustrated that the idea of providing what the audience wants to
see, often presented as a justification for the sexualized representations of female
athletes, is one of a number of cultural and institutional factors that influence the nature
of the news media’s coverage. Theberge and Cronk (1986) note, on the basis of ethno-
graphic fieldwork conducted at a US newspaper, that “The exclusion [of women from
news coverage] is woven into newsworkers’ beliefs about the contents of the news and
their own methods of uncovering the news. … Their reliance upon bureaucratic news
sources and the standardization of the production process mean that newsworkers rou-
tinely define sports news as news about men’s sports” (p.195). Based on research by
Knoppers and Elling (2004), it appears that certain sports journalists downplay their
own agency by attributing the biased coverage to institutional factors over which they
have no control, such as the commercial imperative to provide content that the audi-
ence wants to see, or external factors such as the athletes’ own decisions. “You can say
that pictures of women focus on their short skirts but who puts those skirts on?” one
male journalist asks. “Not my male colleagues … But the women athletes do that. They
think that the more skin they show, the more attention they will receive … They get the
attention they want” (p.64). Another male sports journalist appeals to the commercial
imperative: “Of course these shots occur because beautiful women sell. We try not to
do that but I cannot deny that it happens” (p.64). According to Knoppers and Elling, the
commercial logic “allows them to present women athletes in sexualized ways because
the readers/viewers find that ‘interesting’ (and because the women athletes themselves
are assumed to prefer that)” (p.67).
As an additional factor, competition for career advancement, recognition, and finan-
cial gain is common among sports journalists as individuals. Banagan (2011) claims that
entitlement is a core belief within this group that motivates within certain individuals a
desire to maintain or increase one’s status in the sports world through self-promotion.
Undoubtedly, this creates questionable journalistic practices that are “above reproach”
(p.164). For example, Oates and Pauly (2007) describe promotional activities within
sports journalism that support interdependence between “itself and its corporate partners
(the teams and leagues)” (p.339). Certainly, if particular styles of depicting athletes were
liable to promote readership, there would be a low likelihood that collateral exploitation
would be regulated.
The sexualization of female athletes in the news media cannot always be considered
deliberate, as the choices that are made on a day-to-day basis that result in biased rep-
resentations, such as which photographs to feature where, are made in a context of
cultural factors that are taken for granted, as a matter of course, rather than queried
appropriately – not only in the newsrooms themselves, but in the larger public that

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consumes the news media. As Shugart (2003) notes, “the hegemonic potential of that
coverage is profound; packaged as progress, equality, and power, the mediated contem-
porary female athlete instead delivers highly traditional female sexuality. Strong, we
are told, is sexy; this sounds like progress, but in fact, it is an appropriation in which
female strength has been redefined as male pleasure” (p.27). As the interviews by
Knoppers and Elling (2004) illustrate, this hegemony makes it simple for the agents in
the process to defer responsibility or justify their actions in the minority of cases where
they are even able to recognize a bias. According to Wensing and Bruce (2003), “even
at its best, media coverage of women athletes tends to be ambivalent, meaning that it
juxtaposes positive descriptions and images with descriptions and images that under-
mine and trivialize women’s efforts and successes” (p.387).

Future directions
Considering the complications and ambiguities inherent in this issue, it would be some-
what premature to start thinking about solutions before fully understanding the prob-
lem. Nonetheless, the extent of the problem and how well known it actually is within
the journalistic community is currently unclear. It is essential that researchers be
allowed to observe and study photographic activities in sporting events to investigate
these types of voyeuristic activities. The kinds of questions that have been briefly out-
lined above have interesting implications both for our theoretical understanding of
sociocultural issues around sport, and for their relevance in addressing a social problem
that has considerable potential for harm. The first step in exploring these implications
is to encourage open discussion of the issues.

Research
From a theoretical perspective, literature regarding the field of sports journalism, such
as the sources discussed above, has a lot to offer an exploration of voyeuristic images
taken of female athletes. However, particularly problematic is that one of the only epi-
sodes of sports voyeurism to garner any significant news coverage, the water polo case,
involved images of male athletes that appeared on pornography websites aimed at gay
men. Other cases of men using images of male athletes for prurient purposes have also
been recorded (e.g., Edwards, 2000; Pack, 2009). While it is certainly the case that men
are not excluded from the processes of sexualization that occur within the sports jour-
nalism community, in the sense that many of these processes reinforce norms of mas-
culinity, the use and distribution of voyeuristic images among gay men is an interesting
facet of this phenomenon that deserves to be explored in much more depth. As noted
by Morrison (2004), “despite the apparent ubiquity of gay pornography, and gay men’s
evident familiarity with the medium, academics – particularly those in the social sci-
ences – have been curiously mute on this topic” (p.2). Similarly, homosexuality typi-
cally only arises in sports research with regard to gay athletes, in the context of
homophobia among athletes and sports news media (e.g., Hardin et al., 2009; Kian and
Anderson, 2009), for example, or the experience of coming out (e.g., Gough, 2007),
with negligible attention paid to gay men as viewers of sport. Considering that

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Keats and Keats-Osborn 653

pornography is generally used more openly among gay men than straight men (Thomas,
2010), further exploration of this aspect of sport viewership would likely provide key
insights into the nature of sports-related voyeurism.
With regard to exploring the link between sports-related voyeurism and cultural or
institutional factors at play within the field of sports journalism, qualitative studies
involving sports photographers may be the most direct way of exploring the knowledge
of voyeuristic activities within the community. As noted, in our personal communica-
tion with the three photojournalists, it became apparent that journalists may be reluc-
tant to talk about the issue because of the potential for negative implications regarding
their careers or reputations. For this reason, research designs need to emphasize strict
confidentiality.
Studies involving athletes and their coaches are also likely to be fruitful, particularly
in elucidating the potential impact on the victims of these kinds of images. Our corre-
spondence indicated that some athletes are aware that such images had been taken of
them and inappropriately distributed, and their perspectives would be invaluable. As an
additional issue, the sportswear of many athletes, both male and female, is mandated by
their sponsors or other regulations (MacDonald, 2009); in 2004, for example, the
International Federation of Association Football (FIFA) president Sepp Blatter went on
record recommending that female soccer players ought to wear more revealing uni-
forms in order to bring more attention to the game (Millward, 2004). The role of their
clothing in increasing the ease with which these images are taken, and more generally
the role of clothing in sexualizing athletes, needs to be explored in depth as a key part
of this investigation. In addition, the role of athletes posing for adult magazines and
other publications, often for promotional purposes and in exchange for payment (e.g.,
Bissell and Duke, 2007; Koh, 2009) cannot be ignored for contributing to the sexualiza-
tion of female athletes in the media, or at least the perceived permissibility of doing so.
Speaking with individuals from the internet community, including webmasters and
online safety organizations, such as the aforementioned WiredSafety, will likely also
prove fruitful, particularly in clarifying the extent of the problem, the source of many
of the images, and the processes through which the images are shared and distributed
online.

Potential solutions to explore

Ethical guidelines.  One way of creating awareness is through professional ethics guide-
lines. Wulfemeyer, in 1985, suggested additions to the Associated Press Sports Editors
(APSE) ethics guidelines (http://apsportseditors.org/apse-ethics-guidelines), which he
proposed would strengthen the sports journalism profession and its reputation. Self-
interest was among his suggestions. He recommended that sports journalists “take great
pains to guard against letting their personal beliefs, attitudes, values, and interests affect
reporting. When a conflict of interest occurs, sports journalists will remove themselves
from reporting assignments” (p.85). Twenty-seven years later, the current guidelines
remain similarly indefinite by warning both editors and journalists to avoid activities that
may create or give the appearance of a conflict of interest (i.e., being a game official,
writing for league publications, or being disloyal to a newspaper). Without being specific

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654 International Review for the Sociology of Sport 48(6)

about inappropriate actions, these guidelines leave ideas about self-interest or conflict of
interest open to interpretation and difficult to enforce. We recommend naming and defin-
ing sexualized voyeurism as a clear violation of sports photography and journalism
ethics.

Accreditation status.  Accreditation may also be an avenue in which to explore interven-

tions. Photographers who wish to cover Olympic events from within the venues, for
instance, have to undergo a relatively robust accreditation process before they are admit-
ted. Because there is limited space for photographers, and because certain legal rights to
broadcast the Olympics are held by a limited number of organizations, accreditations are
granted on the basis of quotas determined ahead of time by the International Olympic
Committee (IOC). While the IOC determines the quotas for each country, it is the
National Olympic Committees (NOCs) within each country that are responsible for dis-
tributing the accreditations among that country’s press organizations. To be eligible for
accreditation, a photographer must be affiliated with a news organization, and their
application has to be validated by that news organization and by the photographer’s local
NOC. The IOC and the local organizing committee monitor the compliance of the
accreditation holders and reserve the right to revoke accreditation to an individual or an
organization at their discretion (International Olympic Committee, 2009). In such a con-
text of strict regulation of accreditation, an open dialogue about the potential for voyeur-
ism will better equip accreditors and news organizations to monitor and intervene with
voyeuristic activities.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or
not-for-profit sectors.

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