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Televised texts of women’s sports are examined using the hermeneutical method. This study begins with the observation that women’s participation in team sports and certain “male-appropriate” individual sports is significantly lower than men’s participation in these sports. More striking yet is the media’s (particularly television’s) virtual disregard of women in team sports and certain individual sports. On the basis of these observations, the authors frame their research question: Do these imbalances constitute a symbolic denial of power for women? To answer this question, the authors investigate televised depictions of basketball, surfing, and marathon running. In each sport, the television narratives and visuals of the women’s competition are contrasted with those of the men’s competition. These depictions reveal a profound ambivalence in the reporting of the women’s sports, something that is not present in the reporting of the men’s sports. This ambivalence consists of conflicting messages about female athletes; positive portrayals of sportswomen are combined with subtly negative suggestions that trivialize or undercut the women’s efforts. Such trivialization is a way of denying power to women. The authors conclude by asserting that sport and leisure educators have an ethical obligation to redress the imbalance of power in the sporting world.

The purpose of this study was to investigate (a) the relationship between children’s judgments regarding the legitimacy of potentially injurious sport acts for adults and for children, (b) the relationships between children’s legitimacy judgments and their moral reasoning, aggression tendencies, and sport involvement, and (c) the relative ability of the latter three variables to predict legitimacy judgments. Analyses were based on 78 girls and boys in grades 4 through 7 who participated in a moral interview, completed aggression ten dency and sport involvement questionnaires, and evaluated the legitimacy of potentially injurious sport acts depicted in a series of slides. Analyses revealed that children accepted more acts as legitimate for adults than for children. Boys’ legitimacy judgments were significantly related to their moral reasoning, aggression tendencies, and involvement in high-contact sports, but girls’ legitimacy judgments were correlated only with their life aggression tendencies. Children’s aggression tendencies were found to be the best predictors of their legitimacy judgments.

The limited coverage of women in the sports media is not due simply to journalists’ bias against women’s sports. The exclusion is woven into news-workers’ beliefs about the contents of the news and their own methods of uncovering the news. Utilizing data from fieldwork in a U.S. newspaper, this article examines some features of the newspaper production process that read women out of the sports news. In casting the news net, journalists seek subjects that are both deemed newsworthy and able to provide reliable and accessible news material. The advantage enjoyed by men’s sports lies in the assumption of greater public interest and the greater resources of men’s commercial sports that guarantee preferred access to the media. Another practice that biases the sports news is standardization of the contents of the sports section. The range of contents is reduced by regularly covering only certain subjects, again mainly men’s sports. Newsworkers see this standardization as a practical necessity that enables them to do their job. They believe they are printing what their audiences wish to read. Their reliance upon bureaucratic news sources and the standardization of the production process mean that newsworkers routinely define sports news as news about men’s sports.

What follows here is an essay—a rather one-sided viewpoint that is both tentative and, within the limits of a journal article, incomplete. I attempt to understand how our recent preoccupation with our bodies is being mobilized as one solution to the fiscal crisis of the welfare state. The deep-rooted assumptions of voluntarism that characterize liberal ideology, I claim, are surfacing again in the debate over lifestyle. And lifestyle, it appears, has become an ideological construction which diverts attention from the structural impediments to well-being by framing health issues in terms of personal, moral responsibilities—a “pull yourself up by the bootstraps” alternative to state intervention in health care. Some implications of the lifestyle ideology for physical educationists are presented.

The observation that sport represents a unique context has been widely discussed, but social scientists have done little to empirically examine the moral adaptations of sport participants. In the present study, the divergence between levels of moral reasoning used to discuss hypothetical dilemmas set in sport and in everyday life contexts was investigated among 120 high school and collegiate basketball players, swimmers, and nonathletes. Protocols were scored according to Haan’s interactional model of moral development. It was found that levels of moral reasoning used to discuss sport dilemmas were lower than levels characterizing reasoning about issues within an everyday life context. Findings were discussed in terms of the specific social and moral context of sport experience.