*Note: I don’t know why this post is formatting this way, and after 10 minutes of no success in changing it, it’s just going to stay the way it is.  Enjoy the half nude athletes anyway.

As I’ve travelled down the Ph.D. path, it took me almost two years to get to my current area of research, which is a little surprising to me.  In a nutshell, I’m studying media portrayals of athletes, including differences in gender.  In the spring I did a really fun paper where I looked at how female athletes were affected by the images of elite female athletes in the media.  Right now, our undergrads are apparently desperate for research participation abilities, so my advisor had the idea to revise something we did to try to get it through IRB asap, and hopefully take advantage of the willing participant pool.

So I started looking at my survey, and decided to do something in the vein of what normal, non-athletes think of how male and female athletes are portrayed.  Female athletes are generally sex objects, and we see them in the following ways:

Nothing really atypical, for what past research has shown for female media portrayals.

Then I started looking at images of males. And surprisingly, I found these:

Um, what?  And these weren’t even hard to find.  These were some of the first images that popped up on Google.

So sex sells.  We know this.  We may not necessarily like it, but in reality?  We don’t do much to stop it.

But these images of the guys?  (and yes, they are all pictures of athletes, not models).  FASCINATING.

So my question becomes – what does it mean?  What do people think of it?  Is it good?  Bad?  A positive for sports?  Or are we just demeaning athletes of both sexes now?

I love my job.