Our friends at The Believer are now publishing web exclusives. To celebrate, we’re sharing excerpts of their inaugural weekly column, in which Katie Heindl (author of the beloved Basketball Feelings) writes about the WNBA for both longtime fans and the casual observer. If you want to follow along and bypass the paywall, pick up a Believer digital-only subscription. For just $16 a year, you’ll also have full access to the magazine’s complete two-decade archive, including the most recent issue.
The recent surge in the WNBA’s popularity has had a side effect I didn’t anticipate: all this discussion about women’s bodies. It might seem a strange thing to be surprised by but, confusingly, in sports, athletes’ bodies often seem secondary to the actions they execute.
There’s been such a sense of shock from new viewers over the sight of women’s bodies in the midst of their regular, professional routines. They run and jump and, as a result, sometimes collide. They are just bodies at work, but they are described using words like “assault” and “attack” (this from an Indiana congressman). There is a discomfort, it seems, in seeing women’s bodies moving without restraint.
Sports discourse has always existed in the context of its biases. These can be relatively innocent, like rooting interest and recency bias creeping into game coverage, or they can veer into more noxious territory, like athletes in predominantly Black leagues being referred to as thugs. Despite this, men’s professional sports are still seen by a majority of fans as existing outside the biases that inform it—a haven removed from the real world, a place of escape. “Sticking to sports” is still a golden rule for many major sports news desks.
Read the rest of the essay over at The Believer