by Brenda Guesnet

The FIFA World Cup is the largest sporting event in the world. The 32 best national male soccer teams compete, attracting an audience of more than 26 million people worldwide and costing billions of dollars every time it is staged. This time, the host country of the cup was Brazil, and advertisers and media outlets were happy to produce a variety of world-cup themed images in order to cash in on the soccer craze. Whether it’s beer, cars, lingerie, fast food or soft drinks, companies were eagerly drawing upon nationalist sentiments as well as staging their products within a Brazilian wonderland to attract millions of soccer fans to their brand.

These two strands – nationalist symbolism and the romanticization of Brazil as an exotic and beautiful playground – tie into another popular trope used in the World Cup imagery: that of the beautiful, scantly-clothed woman present merely as something to be looked at in order to complete the straight male soccer fans’ wet dream. While most companies focus on the male players themselves, producing hyper-masculine, ultra-serious advertisements, those that include women will often do so in a highly sexualized manner.

Take for instance the Heineken banner that many bars in Amsterdam placed in their windows to not only signal that they are a Heineken selling-point, but also their enthusiasm for the World Cup and the national team. Two men taking a selfie in their Holland jerseys form the centerpiece. They lead an all-orange (the Dutch national color) crowd where women in the background are destined to wear bikinis and tight dresses rather than soccer jerseys. A darker-skinned woman is inexplicably perched high up in full Brazilian carnival attire, strikingly framed by a traditional Amsterdam balcony and strictly confined to this space where her body becomes a spectacle.

Then there were the T- shirts the sports brand Adidas released on occasion of the World Cup. One showed a thin woman in a bikini posing in front of a Rio de Janeiro landscape, bearing the words “Lookin’ to Score”. Another showed the phrase “I <3 Brazil”, with the heart shaped like a woman’s behind in a thong. The shirts were retracted when the Brazilian tourism board complained that they promoted sexual tourism, and the case illustrates Brazilian women’s ongoing struggle of being seen as hypersexual and readily available to men.

In the context of this years’ World Cup, these are only two examples of many instances where Brazilian women are ‘exported’ as visual commodities, displayed in an ultra-sexualized, exoticized manner for the pleasure of male soccer fans around the world. This polished image becomes even more disconcerting considering the state violence that has surrounded the tournament in Brazil. Just as Brazil tries everything to cover up the mass evictions and police violence surrounding the tournament to present the country as an exotic, happy, and equal state (in the spirit of “a copa de todos”, the cup for everyone), the portrayal of women is often geared towards confirming stereotypes about Brazil and using sexualized and picture-perfect images of women to make Brazil more attractive as a host country and as a destination. The message is clear: affluent, mostly foreign men are the protagonists of the event, while women are  secondary supporters present primarily for their heightened pleasure.

Although the Brazilian tourism board’s reaction to the Adidas shirts was commendable, the mass-marketed images of Brazilian carnival, where women’s bodies literally become a national attraction, have strongly fed the cliché of the beautiful and exotic Brazilian woman – which has been welcomed by international advertisers on the occasion of the World Cup. Representation matters, and hypersexualization of Brazilian women marketed towards tourists has a very real and violent impact on the country’s women’s wellbeing. Child trafficking is a massive problem in Brazil, and the hundreds of thousands of visitors to the 2014 World Cup have reportedly made the issue worse. Their disposable income and willingness to exploit vulnerable girls leads to an increase in demand for cheap, illegal sex transactions with children – and advertisers share responsibility in this when they portray Brazil as a sexual wonderland.

I happen to enjoy watching soccer, along with millions of other girls and women. So when will advertisers acknowledge us as equal supporters of the team, and not as accessories to the “real”, male, soccer fans? When will they show us playing soccer not in our underwear or high heels but with sneakers and jerseys? And way more importantly,  will FIFA  ever startliving up to its proclaimed “duty to society . . . to improve the lives of young people and their surrounding communities”, instead of unlawfully destroying the homes of impoverished communities and endorsing deadly violence against protestors? So much has gone wrong with this year’s World Cup – if FIFA and other brands take a step forward and reject sexist, classist, and racist policies and stereotypes, perhaps the World Cup has a chance to become a more inclusive and less violent event.