The Photo as Science: Women and their Fists
The weather in New York may be bleak, but hearts and minds are aglow with the memories of the Giants win over the Dallas Cowboys yesterday. Helping the good feelings are all the dazzling photos of Jessica Simpson, who is being blamed by Cowboy fans for vacationing with Dallas quarterback Tony Romo during his team’s bye week. It beats looking at more pictures of crazy Britney Spears.
Speaking of sports photos (only we professionals can do transitions like that), I happened to be scanning one of my favorite science blogs, Cognitive Daily, and found an interesting post about some recent research concerning the way men and women celebrate sport victories. The post questions an observation by a researcher, Thomas Schubert, that men commonly celebrate victory by raising a fist, while women do not.
In my never-ending effort to find news ways of wasting time, I went to Google and started looking for pictures of women making fists. I found a couple pretty quickly, including this one of my favorite tennis player, Maria Sharapova, who will be playing this week in the Australian Open. I think we can say that women make fists when celebrating victory, though further research is needed. This coming weekend I will watch the Giants-Packers games at my local sports bar and will take careful notes about men and women making fists. I did notice that in many pictures of celebratory women that their fists were not held high, but rather furtively at mid-body. I feel that photos would be essential in illuminating Schubert's research. Can anyone point to particular pictures that shed light on this matter?
--David Schonauer
A quick search on Getty for "woman winning" turned up - in the first 3 pages - many images of women making fists when celebrating a victory from all different sports - swimming, running, skiing, handball, tennis, speedskating...And the women in the photos were from all different countries (Indonesia, Sweden, Germany, France, Norway, Belgium, Russia).
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Posted by: Erin Giunta | January 17, 2008 at 01:38 PM