When did female football fans become sexual objects?

By Michelle D’Vaz

Many years of struggling to find what to wear to watch my weekly football matches is still an ongoing challenge. Honestly, it is a common factor that most female football fans have to face, week in week out. Over the many years that I have been going to watch my club I have had to wear ill fitting football shirts that have been originally designed for male supporters. Straight sides and no give especially around my chest has led to me usually having to adapt the shirt with a few snips with the scissors.  

In recent years, football clubs have tried to address this by selling women’s shirts that are more tailored at the waist and lower on the cleavage. For me these adaptations fall way short of being something I would want to wear to football.  I feel these new style shirts have added to the sexualisation of female football fans with their very low cut fronts.

By not thinking about the comfort, femininity and fashionable approach that female football fans want and are looking for, it feels that these shirts have been created by men for women.

The media has regularly portrayed women in football shirts as sexual objects with them even creating calendars of women in football shirts and hot pants for men to hang in their work places.

As female football fans we want to feel empowered and confident so that we can support our team with the same zealousness of our male counterparts, with the same amount of knowledge of the beautiful game, we don’t want to feel like we are on show and our cleavage’s are there as a subject of conversation by our fellow male supporters.

As someone who is curvy I long to find a top I can wear to football that acknowledges my love of the game but is also comfortable and yet contemporary enough to make me feel that I am still fashionable and current.

Don’t get me wrong, I do not speak for all women and I fully support a women’s right to wear whatever they want, wherever they want, especially if they feel personally empowered through the expression of their sexuality. But, why must we all be subjugated to fit one mould of what males believe female football should look like?