By Liz Ellis
Play like a girl.
It used to be an insult. Now women are reclaiming it, and when it comes to netball it's another way of saying "awesome". It's also the tagline for the new ad on Fox Sports promoting the ANZ Championships.
Controversial? Or tough?
I'm going to show my hand early and say I love it. It's no secret that I relish watching a good contest for possession, and one of my favourite things about netball is the commitment of strong, tough and uncompromising athletes to get their hands to the ball first. Finally we have an ad campaign that matches that.
ANZ Championship Netball - Play Like a Girl from Tiffany Field on Vimeo.
The fact that I love the ad puts me in the majority, but it turns out the love is not universal. Channel Nine journalist and champion of women's sport Sam Squiers wrote a thought- provoking response to the ad on her Sportette.com.au website. In it she claims that the ad "screams violence, not toughness".
With respect, I have to disagree. The ad doesn't show any netballers violently pushing, shoving or brawling. There are no punches thrown, no late knees to the kidney and no one grabbing an opponent's shirtfront with malicious intent.
Nope, just great shots of some of the best who play the game – Laura Geitz, Geva Mentor, Bianca Chatfield, Kim Ravaillion, Kim Green, Ash Brazil and Sharni Layton showing what it means to run, jump and pass like a girl, followed by footage of some big collisions. No one is bloody, no one is concussed. It is the final image of the ad though that appears to be causing the most consternation and it has prompted some to draw comparisons with domestic violence campaigns.
The image shows Diamonds star Sharni Layton staring intently at the camera sporting a bruised and bloodshot left eye, the result of a clash in training a couple of days before the ad was shot. Anyone who has ever watched Sharni play knows that she has an incredible "game face". The best way to describe her is that she is fierce. A pussycat off court, she is a lioness when she steps over the white line and prowls her territory. The final image sums her up beautifully, and it's one of the reasons I love watching her play.
Significantly, Sharni was offered makeup to cover the bruising when the ad was made. She declined on the premise that there was no reason to do so, as the bruising was the result of a clash in training and that is simply how she looks. As the mother of a girl, my heart sang when I heard that – a role model who says "look at what I can do, not at how I look".
To draw a line between this image and a domestic violence campaign is unfair to both, and suggests sadly that we live in an age when the assumption can be made that when a woman is bruised she is a victim.
This is not to play down the devastating impact of domestic violence, but rather to point out how pervasive it is when an image of a female athlete with a black eye can be interpreted in such different ways. On one reading of it she is a warrior, on another, she has suffered terribly at the hands of another.
To this end I look forward to a time a woman with a black eye is not routinely asked "who did this to you?" but "so, did you get the ball?"
So did Fox Sports get it right by featuring Sharni and her bloodshot and bruised eye at the end of the ad? Overwhelmingly my sense is that they did. The ad is a great promotion of the skill, athleticism and yes, toughness of the women who play netball at the elite level. They are all things that should be celebrated.