Ads Have Sexist Idea Of What Girls Made Of

Reebok understands girls. Nike seems confused.

Nike was the first sports company to “get” women. A few years ago they published a series of popular print advertisements with sayings like, “You do not have to be your mother.” The poetic prose spoke to ordinary women who were lifting weights or doing aerobics for the first time. Since then, Nike has created Air Swoopes, the first basketball shoe named for a woman, and has sponsored the U.S. women’s soccer team, the high school girls’ All-America basketball game, and a huge annual volleyball festival in Davis, Calif., for 7,500 high school girls.

Now Nike is airing two new commercials about girls. The most talked-about one opens with a girl sitting on a swing. “If you let me play sports, I will like myself more,” she says.

“If you let me play, I will be 60 percent less likely to get breast cancer,” says another girl.

Other girls say, “If you let me play sports …

“I will suffer less depression.”

“I will be less likely to get pregnant before I want to.”

“I will learn what it means to be strong.”

Many women, including feminists and sports advocates, adore this commercial. They like that it correlates sports with strength and health and self-esteem. They like that a major company is addressing key women’s issues such as breast cancer and depression. They hope it will convince parents to let girls play.

I don’t like it. It’s not blatantly sexist, like the short-lived Nike commercial that showed 6-foot-3 volleyball player Gabrielle Reece writhing on a bed, but it’s subtly sexist, and often that’s worse.

One obvious problem: Why do the girls have to beg? What are their brothers doing while these girls stand passively on the playground? Boys don’t have to ask permission to play sports. Like adults, they just do it.

In fact, boys who play sports are less likely to develop heart disease and high blood pressure. But if a Nike commercial showed boys sitting on swings, pleading to play sports, boys would find this amusing.

Fortunately, girls are laughing too. A coach reports that the girls on her team are using the phrase “If you let me” jokingly, the way they joke about “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up.”

“Most of the girls on my team think the ad is dumb,” says Mary Hricko, who coaches girls’ and boys’ cross-country at W.S. Guy Middle School in Youngstown, Ohio.

Another dumb thing about this ad: One girl says, “If you let me play sports, I’ll be more likely to leave a man who beats me.” Why is Nike telling girls to expect to be beaten? And why is leaving the solution? In fact, women who leave abusive husbands increase their chances of being killed by those men.

Where is Nike’s commercial in which a male athlete (O.J.? Mike Tyson? John Daly? Warren Moon? - there are so many potential spokesmen to choose from) atones for his past violence against women and encourages other men and boys to respect women as people? Now there’s a commercial I’d love to see.

In another misguided Nike spot, girls spike volleyballs while a voice says, “They are not sisters. They are not classmates. They are not friends. They are not even the girls’ team. They are a pack of wolves. Tend to your sheep.”

What is Nike thinking? Who’s supposed to be afraid of these “wolves”? Isn’t there some way to conceive of female athletes who are neither meek supplicants nor rapacious animals?

Yes, there is, says Reebok. In its new commercial, you see girls play soccer, basketball, softball. You see trophies. You see happy athletes kick balls, laugh, ride the bus, drape their arms around each other. A girl’s voice says, “If you don’t play, you can hang out. You can watch. You can brush your hair a lot. But you can never say, ‘I was a player.’ And you can never say, ‘I was on the team.’ And worst of all you can never do all this incredibly exciting, hilarious stuff with these girls who are like sisters. So … want to play?”

This is the commercial I want to show my 8-year-old friend Carlyn Sylvester, who recently made her select soccer team, and my almost-8-year-old niece Annaliese Henwood, who just joined Little League.

“There is an athlete in all of us,” the Reebok commercial concludes. That athlete shouldn’t have to grovel. She should get to play because sports are exciting and hilarious and a lot more fun than sitting around brushing your hair.

Mariah Burton Nelson is the author of “The Stronger Women Get, The More Men Love Football: Sexism and the American Culture of Sports,” recently released in paperback by Avon Books. She can be reached via e-mail at: Mariahbn(at)aol.com.)