It is not uncommon to see cheerleaders at every professional sports game. They usually comprise young, mostly white women who have a profession outside their cheerleading careers. A game pamphlet typically has information about the team’s cheerleaders – not only their names and pictures, but also their occupation and age are made public.
Continue reading “A Controversy around the Cheerleading Industry”
Nearly 112 million people in the United States watched the Super Bowl last year. Super Bowl XLIX in 2015 was, per NPR, the most watched show in the history of television. Clearly, professional sports are highly esteemed in America. In the run-up to what is sure to be another highly anticipated Super Bowl, it is a good occasion to consider the moral value, if any, of athletic competition. To do so, I want to draw your attention to a curious occurrence that happened several years ago in a much less popular sport, badminton.
Continue reading “The Super Bowl, Badminton and the Athlete’s Social Contract”
When conjuring up the perfect image of masculinity in your mind, most people imagine the typical high school jock. He plays football, basketball, ice hockey, or a similar hypermasculine activity. Rarely does a runner, swimmer, or this sort of “second tier” of masculinity in sports arise. By assigning masculinized predispositions to certain sports, could the conversation surrounding masculinity become skewed from a young age? If so, this would certainly create a problematic discourse around certain sports and limit a conversation for LGBTQ+ communities to have a voice within this realm.
The Chicago Cubs have won the 2016 World Series. The curse is finished; after 118 years, the wait is finally over. Who the hell cares? Well, a lot of people. There has been an unusual hype regarding this sporting event. Five million fans showed up for the celebration parades.
Only days before the second Presidential debate, a video of Donald Trump making misogynistic comments about women surfaced. The video is an excerpt of a conversation between Access Hollywood reporter Billy Bush and Donald Trump on an Access Hollywood Bus in 2005. Throughout the video, Trump can be heard recounting his attempt to seduce a married woman, and stating that he can “do anything” to “beautiful women” because he’s famous. Numerous gendered slurs are used by Trump in reference to his sexual advances on women, which also sound a lot like sexual assault. The release of this tape was met with outrage by citizens and politicians alike. Despite this, mere minutes into the second debate Donald Trump brushed off his comments as “locker room talk” and admitted that he was “not proud of it”.
Continue reading “Beyond the Locker Room: Donald Trump and American Misogyny”
With the increased prominence of LGBTQ issues and the implications of former Olympic superstar Bruce (now Caitlyn) Jenner transitioning from male to female this year, it comes as no surprise that the International Olympic Committee has turned a fresh eye to its regulations and practices. An announcement was made January 24th indicating that new guidelines had been released, and would be in effect for this year’s Olympics in Rio.
Halloween has just passed, and it is clear that public discourse on culturally sensitive and appropriate costumes continues to increase. These discussions about cultural appropriation are particularly prominent amongst America’s educated youth, who are on their way to becoming the next generation of leaders and advocates against racial discrimination. This heightened awareness is now slowly but surely making its way towards the world of sports.
Continue reading “The Sports “Race””
Originally appeared in The Indianapolis Star
The Federal Communications Commission is supposed to ensure that the electronic media serve the public interest. A current FCC rule, however, works primarily to serve the interests of a few of America’s wealthiest individuals. That’s why the FCC appears poised to end its blackout rule for National Football League games.
For many years, NFL television contracts have prohibited the broadcast of any game in a local market in which the stadium is not sold out. The NFL wants to guarantee the revenue stream that sold-out stadiums provide, even though some economists claim there is no connection between broadcasting games in the home market and fan attendance.
The FCC decided in 1975 to support the NFL’s local blackouts by also prohibiting cable or satellite services from importing broadcasts of those games. Thus, the NFL, which already has anti-trust protection from the government, also has had FCC collaboration in preventing fans from seeing their hometown teams on television.
Late in last year’s football season, acting FCC chair Mignon Clyburn proposed getting the commission out of the sports blackout business. Clyburn questioned whether the blackout rules were in the public interest, “particularly at a time when higher ticket prices and the economy make it difficult for many sports fans to attend games.”
FCC commissioner Ajit Pai had even stronger words against the rule in a speech last month in Buffalo: “I don’t believe the government should intervene in the marketplace and help sports leagues enforce their blackout policies. Our job is to serve the public interest, not the interests of team owners.”
The location of Pai’s speech is noteworthy. The Buffalo Bills’ games have been blacked out more often in recent years than any other NFL team. By the way, it’s often bitterly cold outside when late season games in Buffalo are played. And the Bills haven’t had a winning season since 2004.
Current FCC chair Tom Wheeler also has announced his opposition and will call for a vote to discontinue the blackout provisions at a meeting later this month.
The NFL faces fourth and very long in its efforts to keep the rule, but that hasn’t kept it from a massive lobbying and public relations effort, complete with scare tactics and half-baked reasoning. The NFL, for example, has enlisted the National Association of Broadcasters to threaten that elimination of the FCC rule could lead to all games being telecast only on pay services, not free over-the-air channels. In fact, that could happen only if the NFL itself chose to move in that direction.
The NFL also has gotten the support of the Conference of State Legislatures and the Congressional Black Caucus to claim that elimination of the rule would hurt local economies by keeping fans away on game days, thus harming stadium employees, nearby restaurant owners and so forth. The reality is that stadiums fail to sell out when teams lose too often or inclement weather interferes. The FCC blackout rule doesn’t fix either of those problems.
The NFL generates about $10 billion a year in revenue, with the biggest chunks from television contracts and merchandise. Ticket sales aren’t as big a factor as in 1975. The NFL money machine generated $275 million in new revenue this fall by signing CBS to air eight Thursday night games. That should be more than enough to cover a few empty seats in Buffalo in December.
Virtually all NFL owners are billionaires. Meanwhile, television ratings hinge on the eyeballs of millions of fans who can’t afford to pay high prices to attend a game, many of which are played in stadiums built with taxpayer money. It is high time for the FCC to end this 40-year losing streak and win one for the fans.
At 1:00 AM on September 8 TMZ posted a disturbing security video showing Ray Rice, formerly of the Baltimore Ravens, punching his then-fiancée, Janay Palmer, rendering her unconscious. At 11:18 AM the Ravens tweeted that Rice’s contract had been terminated. At 11:41 AM, the NFL tweeted that Rice had been suspended from the league indefinitely.
Here’s at least one odd thing about this: it was already known that Rice punched Palmer and rendered her unconscious. As early as February 2014 there were reports of what the video depicted. So, why the outrage now? Why the sudden calls for action? After all, nothing morally relevant is changed by the fact that now many people have seen the punch rather than merely having been told about it.
Perhaps you’re like me, though. Although there were reports of the incident in February 2014, you weren’t aware of the incident until now. There’s nothing about seeing the incident that changes its moral features, you might say, it’s just that the video gave the story a wider reach and now you’re aware of it. This, in turn, increased the pressure on the Ravens and the NFL to take action.
That’s perhaps a comforting thought, at least with respect to our reaction to the case (it’s not so comforting a thought with respect to the Ravens and the NFL). But it masks a thought that is less comfortable, even for you and me. The less comfortable thought is that even if you or I had known about the incident in February, we still probably wouldn’t have responded in the same way as we did after seeing the video. Why? Because there is considerable psychological evidence that our moral responses to cases are strongly influenced by our emotions. [1. For a nice, accessible, summary of some of this research, see Joshua Greene’s 2013 book, Moral Tribes (Penguin Press) His website includes additional papers on the same topic] And—for most of us anyway—seeing a video of domestic violence is much more emotionally engaging than reading a dry report of the same thing.
This should give us pause. Sure, suffering might feel worse if we see it, but does it really make it worse? It seems not. A seen punch hurts just as much as an unseen one; a child that we see starving suffers just as much as one that we do not see. There’s an important lesson here: our moral psychology can sometimes fool us into making spurious distinctions. Our proximity to suffering or way of learning about suffering is not plausibly a morally relevant feature of it, but we often treat it as if it is.[2. This is not a new point. In his 1972 paper, “Famine, Affluence, and Morality”, Peter Singer writes: “The fact that a person is physically near to us, so that we have personal contact with him, may make it more likely that we shall assist him, but this does not show that we ought to help him rather than another who happens to be further away.” (p. 232).] This can have profound consequences, not just with respect to domestic violence in the NFL, but with respect to us playing our appropriate moral role in the world.