It's good to see that sleepless scrutineer of sexism, Jimmy Deenihan TD, complaining about the way the Irish media cover women in sport. The worthy deputy was part of an Oireachtas committee which recently produced a report on the subject, writes Kevin Myers.
"I was very disturbed by the skewed nature of sports coverage in newspapers. A lot of the time you would be hard-pressed to find a female face in the sports pages and the statistics bear this out." Well, you could equally say you would be hard-pressed to find a male model’s photograph in our fashion sections, but I don’t think that Oireachtas committees are likely to bother their pretty little heads on such a such subject. Our political class was long ago won over to the feminist agenda, which is why its members find it so easy to spout nonsense about the way journalists cover sport There isn’t a more admired athlete in Ireland than Sonia O’Sullivan.
There isn’t a more admired athlete in Britain than Paula Radcliffe. Running her close second is Jenny McArthur —and only a fairly witless and hysterical chauvinism about England winning the rugby world cup prevented her from winning the BBC Sports Personality of the Year Award. If you remember, she was leading the round-the-world yacht competition when a wave snapped off both her masts, and her rudder, and she had to finish the final 5,000 miles in 100-foot waves and a force-18 hurricane, using a hand-held face-cloth as a sail, and steering with her foot. She finished second.
But what have yachting and running got in common? This. Neither is a regular weekend, mass-spectator sport. Perhaps Jimmy Deenihan wants us to have daily news reports on Sonia O’Sullivan’s training sessions, but the poor journalists given that duty might find themselves running short of inspiration after the fifth month of Sonia’s daily 15k jog. What our sports reports cover are sporting events which people really want to watch. On the same principle, our political reporters spend little effort— the lazy hounds!—following the careers of candidates who lose elections.
The women’s senior football final last Sunday was watched by either 20,706 people or 27,000. The GAA doesn’t know. When people don’t count the spectators accurately, you can be sure the interest isn’t really there. It certainly wasn’t in the terraces—the men’s all-Ireland attracted not merely 80,000 spectators, but could have filled a stadium three times the size of Croke Park. Even relatively unimportant county matches between men would effortlessly match the crowd watching the highlight of the women’s footballing year.
There are no sporting events in Ireland played by women which attract large crowds. Or medium crowds. Or even small crowds. The only sporting events in the world involving women which draw large crowds are those held in conjunction with men’s events —athletics and tennis. Maybe an all-female Wimbledon and all female-athletics meet would prove a larger draw than all-male events. Who can say? The heart of sporting coverage occurs every weekend. Yes, our sports journalists have been wantonly indifferent to the MiltownMalbay Ladies Darts Gala every Sunday, and also scandalously negligent of the women’s weekly badminton challenge in Birr—but then we are not alone in that. You can count the spectators for both events on one hand, and even that’s after the accident with the chainsaw.
We don’t want to watch women playing sports because, generally speaking, they’re not very good. They’re small and they’re weak and they’re slow, and watching an average woman throw an object is a deeply moving tragedy. Moreover, most (obviously, not all) schoolgirls detest physical team contests—which brings us to the Oireachtas committee’s proposal to introduce special sports awards to encourage women to be more athletically active. Young men play football because they love it, not because they’re bribed to play it: indeed for the most part, they’d pay for the privilege. Go to Phoenix Park on a Saturday or a Sunday, and you’ll find hundreds of young men playing Gaelic and soccer.
Which is why the official Irish Sports Council figures that show that 50 per cent fewer women than men play sport seem a little dubious: there is no female equivalent of the rugby clubs and their myriad of male teams down to the fourteenth XV, so where are all these women athletes performing, and what are they doing? Shopping doesn’t count. Nor does using the mobile phone while you’re parking.
To be sure, obesity is a growing problem among teenage girls—but a sporting bribe is not going to lure these teen-tubbies to the running track or the camogie pitch. In all truth, the requisite social engineering to attack this problem is not possible in a democracy. Why, our laws are so wretchedly inadequate that we can’t even prevent corpulent teenage girls from wearing those curious boob-tubes which eveal a vast, bare hillside of abdominal lard in public.
The kind of sporting gender-journalism which Jimmy Deenihan and his committee want is one which pictorially celebrates plucky failure and gallant inadequacy, provided the athletes concerned have ovaries. Yet both men and women prefer to see pictures of women in newspapers. That’s why, given a choice, and all other things being equal, a picture desk will always opt for of a picture of a woman over man. So sports pages, which show men’s pictures rather than women’s, go against the journalistic grain. They don’t do it because they want to. They do it because it’s the truth.