In an upcoming article in The Nation (available online), Mary Jo Kane, Professor of Kinesiology and Director of the Tucker Center for Research on Girls & Women in Sport at the University of Minnesota, takes on the argument that sex sells women’s sports.

Kane explains that too often the little attention devoted to women athletes is sexual in nature. She turns to the much discussed coverage of Olympic gold medal winning skier Lindsey Vonn as example.

Even Sports Illustrated—notorious for its lack of coverage of women’s sports—couldn’t ignore this historic moment and devoted its cover to Vonn. SI’s cover, however, blatantly portrayed Vonn as a sex object and spoke volumes about the rampant sexual depictions of women athletes.

The portrayal of Vonn comes as no surprise to people like Kane who have seen study after study confirm that sports coverage offers hypersexual images of female athletes while focusing on the athletic prowess of their male counterparts. However, many of those who cover and market sports believe that this is not a bad thing. They argue that the images of scantily clad women athletes actually helps bolster the popularity of the sport. Being skeptical of the claim that sex sells women’s sports, Kane decided to conduct a series of focus groups to gather empirical evidence.

Study participants were shown photographs of female athletes ranging from on-court athletic competence to wholesome “girls next door” to soft pornography and asked to indicate which images increased their interest in reading about, watching on TV and attending a women’s sporting event.

It turns out that the sex sells approach did little but alienate the core fan base of women’s sports—women and older men. For young women it was the images of women athletes actually playing sports that caught their eye. And for women of all ages and older men, the sexual images did little but offend.

Even when younger males, a prime target audience, indicated that sexually provocative images were “hot,” they also stated that such images did not fundamentally increase their interest in women’s sports, particularly when it came to attending a sporting event. The key takeaway? Sex sells sex, not women’s sports.

Kane concludes the article with a rather novel suggestion: maybe women’s sports should be sold through focusing on the excitement of the sport itself – the athletes’ skill and determination, the drama of the competition, and the heated rivalries.

Millions of fans around the globe just witnessed such media images and narratives during coverage of the Women’s World Cup in Germany. Perhaps such coverage will start a trend whereby those who cover women’s sports will simply turn on the camera and let us see the reality—not the sexualized caricature—of today’s female athletes. If and when that happens, sportswomen will receive the respect and admiration they so richly deserve.