My fellow intern Sahar Tartak argues that the National Collegiate Athletic Association’s (NCAA) change of its name, image, and likeness (NIL) policy has resulted in the “commodification of yet another group of young women.” While I appreciate Sahar’s concerns, I don’t share her conclusion.
Using the basketball-playing Cavinder sisters as her prime example, Sahar implicitly acknowledges that the profit incentive is not what motivated their TikTok performances. The Cavinder sisters “had blown up on TikTok already,” according to Sahar (I have to take her word for it, because I am not a TikTok user). The sisters were not led to do something they otherwise would not have done because of the incentive to earn cash; they are simply enjoying some of the value they were providing gratis before.
If there’s something exploitative about whatever the sisters are doing on TikTok — which Sahar doesn’t specify — how does getting paid make the behavior worse? As Peter Jaworski and Jason Brennan write in Markets without Limits: Moral Virtues and Commercial Interests, “if you may do it for free, then you may do it for money.”
Sahar laments that “sponsorships for female athletes tend to reward them for being attractive . . . as opposed to rewarding” them for their athleticism. Female athletes, like their male counterparts, ought to be valued more for their competence than for their appearance. It’s unfortunate that this is not the case. But the change in the NCAA’s NIL policy isn’t to blame for men valuing women for their physical beauty; it simply permits the expression of this reality.
Ironically, the lascivious “beer-drinking ‘dudes’ who ‘appreciate girls . . . in bikinis making mindless videos’” increase the bargaining power and wages of female athletes whose games they buy tickets to attend and whose names they cheer from the stands. Their motivation may be less pure, but it nonetheless marginally contributes to female athletes’ struggle for parity in viewership and income with men.
Sahar remarks that the Cavinder sisters are rewarded “for achieving unrealistic body standards, not necessarily for their physical health.” But why it is unethical to value beauty as much as one does physical health? I largely share Sahar’s conviction, but surely there is something valuable about beauty in and of itself, whether manifest in the human form, art, nature, or elsewhere. Plenty of sports are detrimental to the health of their athletes — football, boxing, and full-contact combat sports come to mind.
Sahar also raises the concern that the svelte Cavinder sisters exacerbate “the eating disorders that their young viewers suffer from.” That may well be true for some portion of their female viewers, but they surely inspire many others to exercise, thereby making themselves healthier and more attractive. There is a plethora of male fitness influencers who are valued at least as much for their beauty as they are for their physical health, who profit from sponsorships, and who inspire men to hit the gym to become healthier and better-looking versions of themselves.
Both men and women, athletes and otherwise, are valued by others for their physical beauty as well as for their competencies. Perhaps we should strive to live in a society in which people are only judged by the latter. But considering this is not and will never be the case, I don’t think women are hurt as a class when those regarded as especially beautiful profit from being so.