Girls Have Muscles Too

When is the last time you were watching TV and your favorite female athlete was in a commercial? It is very rare and when she is it always ends up being the tampon advertisement. Most people remember the Mia Hamm Michael Jordan advertisement for Gatorade back in the 90s, but that was the last time a female athlete was really an icon and a household name in America.

When looking at the contracts of professional sports athletes it is quite scary to see the real amount they are making is very little. For athletes that are not a part of the big time sports such as track star Lolo Jones, most of her salary is made in the few number of advertisements she is able to do generally right before the Olympics. As she pointed out in one of her post Olympic interviews, the Olympics are only every four years and as an athlete that gets paid very little for competing, her monetary needs fall on advertisement deals. So what about athletes that cannot generate advertisement deals?

There are a large number of female athletes that have suffered from lack of sponsorship due to lack of “sex appeal”. Companies want to sponsor good-looking athletes that are attractive to the public in which they will be advertising to. This proposes a big issue for female athletes that generally spend more time in the gym training than in front of a mirror doing their makeup. For men, the more time they spend in the gym the better it tends to be for advertisement because that’s what other men want to see. In the superficial world we live in, people like to see women as feminine and lady like not muscular and strong.

In the summer of 2012 there was story released about this very subject. Weightlifter Sarah Robles was considered to be the strongest women in the United States, an incredible athlete and yet no one knew who she was. Robles struggled desperately in order to find sponsorships and was continuously unsuccessful due to what she believes is the way she looks. She is not the ideal stereotypical female being portrayed in the US today. For a country that loves our sports stars it is amazing that we expect them to be both extremely gifted athletically but born with Hollywood looks as well.

Sources:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/jtes/the-strongest-woman-in-america-lives-in-poverty