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In 1999 the U.S. women’s soccer team won the Women’s World Cup. Brandi Chastain kicked the winning goal in an overtime penalty shootout with China, and dropped to her knees and raised her fists in victory. She also tore off her jersey, exposing a modest black sports bra. Obviously overcome by the same emotion exhibited by all male athletes at the moment they are crowned the kings of their sport, Chastain’s act became a much talked about mini-scandal. Her exposed torso and sports bra became headline news in the larger media realm, overshadowing an historic win. But by the 2007 Women’s World Cup, attention on women’s soccer had waned so much, the Women’s U.S. team ran ads with pictures of the team captioned with “The Greatest Team You’ve Never Heard Of.” The 2011 Women’s World Cup is currently underway in Germany, but has earned a sliver of the international attention lavished on last year’s Men’s Cup. If the world of women’s sports was a stadium, it would be encased by a glass ceiling. The athletes are skilled and brimming with passion, but they continue to be ignored and dismissed. Female athletes are routinely sexualized to appeal to a broader – read male – audience, or derided for being too masculine. During yesterday’s world cup game between Sweden and Australia, an announcer referred to a player on the latter team as “the pin-up girl of Australia.” The new “away” uniforms worn by the US women’s team have been criticized for an unnecessary design feature – a V-shaped piping coming down from the neck line to give the impression of an open blouse. My guest Jennifer Doyle writes that this design is not only ugly, it is an “anxious apology” and an affirmation that “we are not the men’s team.”

GUEST: Jennifer Doyle writes regularly about women and sports at her blog, “From A Left “Wing: soccer & sports polemics.” She also teaches at the University of California, Riverside. and is the author of Sex Objects: Art and the Dialectics of Desire, and is currently writing on a book about art and the athletic gesture.

Read Jennifer Doyle’s blog here: http://fromaleftwing.blogspot.com/