NIL and the Sexualization of White Female College Athletes

Here’s a problem non-election related for today’s discussions.

I am fully 100% supportive of college athletes making money. That’s a great thing. The NIL thing is a bit of a wild west out there right now. But at least people are making money for their work. Even better, it’s not just all going to football and men’s hoops players. Female athletes are also making money.

However, it will probably surprise no one that the companies paying female college athletes are often looking for hot blonde white women and they are finding them, creating both the sexualization of the athletes and the reinforcement of racial inequality and gender stereotypes.

But the new flood of money — and the way many female athletes are attaining it — troubles some who have fought for equitable treatment in women’s sports and say that it rewards traditional feminine desirability over athletic excellence. And while the female athletes I spoke to said they were consciously deciding whether to play up or down their sexuality, some observers say that the market is dictating that choice.

Andrea Geurin, a researcher of sports business at Loughborough University in England, studied female athletes trying to make the Rio Olympics in 2016, many of them American collegians. “One of the big themes that came out is the pressure that they felt to post suggestive or sexy photos of themselves” on social media, Geurin said.

She noted that some of the athletes had decided that making public such imagery wasn’t worth it while others had found it was one of the primary ways to increase their online popularity and earning power.

Scroll through the social media posts from female college athletes across the United States and you will find that a significant through line on many of the women’s accounts is the well-trod and well-proven notion that sexiness sells. Posts catering to traditional ideals about what makes women appealing to men do well, and the market backs that up.

Stanford’s Tara VanDerveer, the most successful coach in women’s college basketball, sees the part of the N.I.L. revolution that focuses on beauty as regressive for female athletes. VanDerveer started coaching in 1978, a virtual eon before the popularization of the internet and social media, but she said the technology was upholding old sexist notions.

I am most certainly not blaming any of these women–make the money while you can. But it does connect to a lot of problems in our society.