It's easy for a male to avoid writing about gender issues in sport since he's a good chance to sound either hollow or biased whatever he says. But gender has been conspicuous lately, and interesting in new ways. In the space of three days Channel Seven celebrated with vigour the Williams sisters at the tennis, promoted the new women's football league and gave us the Miss Universe pageant, which I watched.
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Sport is still a place where gender issues are not straightforward. The most obvious reason being that it deals in athletic disparities, which change sporting products that ultimately are for commercial sale. But you can see when it's nudged with marketing, and some money, how quickly old ideas about women in sport are reshaped, even avoided altogether.
Tennis is the perennial example of this, since it was the first to really brave the standard by rewarding women equal pay at grand slams. Equal pay is still a contentious issue on the professional tennis tour, but nobody can say it has not elevated the perception of women's tennis, and to some extent women as serious sporting figures beyond Olympic mythology.
Fighting, ironically, has set marketing standards for female athletes by taking them seriously in this way. A fighter, after all, is the literal embodiment of a serious thing. The UFC pushed this with the skill and style of Ronda Rousey, and instantly found a paying audience. Of course, the UFC also made millions selling the subsequent humiliation of Rousey, but its marketing style has made a clear difference to the perception of its women.
Cricket and netball have altered their marketing techniques to better reflect authenticity, and now the AFL is in step. Establishing a women's football league before there is enough depth of talent to fill it might be ambitious, but it's the only way to really grow the game. Nobody wants to participate in a space where they don't feel welcome. Now that it has been built, I imagine it will grow quickly, and go well.
Still, there are some unnecessary commercial challenges to women's competitions, and some of them are to be found on the same television channel that will broadcast the women's league. One of these, I'm sure, is the Miss Universe pageant, which aired on Monday. A slow week in the aftermath of the tennis, perhaps, but it's a show currently hosted by one of Donald Trump's apologists, Steve Harvey, and seems to laugh in the face of equality champions.
My first reaction to the Miss Universe pageant was confusion. It was dutiful, and empty. The ever-caring contestants sounded like propaganda tools for a socialist government, and looked like the wet dream of a billionaire misogynist. It had a comical effect, but not in a rewarding way. Outside of tennis grand slams, you realise, this type of "competition" is still one of the more lucrative crowns for a young woman to win. What's interesting is that it still exists and, more than this, that it thrives.
The show is beset with slogans about confidence and beauty, and otherwise the empowerment of women. It raises money for AIDS victims, and for the homeless, and every kind of philanthropic, wholesome pursuit imaginable. Yet the standard for its contestants has been narrowed to a set of largely unnatural attributes that renders all of the women as one visible product. The lips are too full, the eyes all lit-up like the criminally insane, and all of them wore the grin of a person asked to smile at gunpoint.
Why am I talking about this? Because in some way that competition came to me like a handbook for 2017, and the bouncing carriages behind Trump's engine.
Commercial television shifts between exaggerated moral standards and basic instincts. One day it's profitable to celebrate the female sports stars, the next to patronise by congratulating the luck of beauty.
Donald Trump bought the company that ran Miss Universe in '96. It has been reported he used to walk in on naked contestants backstage. "Is everything OK?" he'd say. He lost the broadcasting rights with NBC in 2015 after statements about Mexicans and about a Latina Miss Universe he called "Miss Housekeeping".
Imagine it. Trump was essentially impeached by his own beauty pageant for being shallow. With the settlement money from the NBC he bought the pageant outright, and sold it at a profit three days later to IMG. It's hard to not laugh at that.
It's not a coincidence that Trump is so fond of the Miss Universe competition.
The pageant was another way to mainstream ideas usually kept quiet by people of substance – one of these being that the woman of the Universe is one that you choose like a lobster from a tank. His passion for pageants is not an unfair summary of his political style, since it's driven by first-thoughts.
Harvey, the show's host, claimed during the program there were 100 million online votes for the winner. That's a lot, perhaps an alternative fact, but somehow in 2017 that is not beyond imagining. Say what you want about this kind of program, apparently there is an audience out there with an appetite for it.
Given this evidence, it's not unreasonable to assume that good-looking players in the women's league will be the most recognisable by season's end. Is this an intractable fact of the old world, or a dull idea that will be swallowed up in the new one? One way or another, the direction of sports marketing and commercial programming will play a big part in the answer.
