"You Throw Like a Girl": Sports, (Wo)men & the Gender Order

In a commercial for Adidas sportswear, Derrick Rose is shown battling with Spanish bullfighters in a foreign looking arena. Basketball in hand, he charges the fighters' red capes as if he's a bull but instead of aggressively trying to gore the matadors, he puts on the moves and jukes them. After he makes the last matador look silly, he speeds towards a conveniently placed basketball net and dunks the ball in slow-mo fashion. Cheers erupt and flowers are thrown.

 

 The first gendered aspect I noticed about this advertisement is that Derrick Rose is being directly compared to an animal. Bulls are very strong and very large, they can be very aggressive and intimidating, and they can easily maim another human being. Those traits, therefore, are valued today in sport as being preferable to other types of strength such as discipline, intelligence or sensitivity.

This comparison of a player to a bull, in this commercial, only takes into account what we perceive to be the traits associated with bulls that we also like to see in players. We like to see toughness, grit and resistance to pain. But there are other aspects of bulls that we wouldn't want to associate with players, and this ad tries to keep those traits from coming to mind. For instance, we fatten bulls to slaughter them so they're tasty. The difference between this ad and real bullfighting is that the bull is killed for the entertainment of the audience at the end. Am I to assume Derrick Rose is to be maimed following his epic dunk?

Another way this commercial is gendered is through the roles males and females play. There are no women in the ring, on the field. The picadors on horseback and the matadors with their capes are all white men (there's a racialized aspect, too, in that they're versus a black man). It's not until a shot is shown of the crowd jumping on their feet that a woman is shown. And it doesn't even show her face. All we see is her shoulder and breast and some hair as she jumps up and roses fill the air.

This commercial reinforces gendered stereotypes and roles through its depiction of Rose as a bull and of women as only spectators. Although the content of the ad itself doesn't explicitly state this, one can analyze these messages from looking more closely at the roles of all involved and at thinking about what isn't shown and what's not on screen.