International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics Volume 5 Number 3. Intellect Ltd 2009. Article. English language.

. doi: 10.1386/macp.5.3.217/1

Gender and images of nature and sport in British and German news magazines: the global and the national in images of advertising
Martha Wrsching Loughborough University Abstract
The article has an interdisciplinary approach, drawing on research from gender, media, sport and cultural studies. It considers the discourses of nature and sport in advertising which targets mainly men, in the editorial context of two examples of British and German news magazines, namely The Economist and Der Spiegel, from a critical cultural and gender studies perspective. It aims to outline the relational nature and hierarchical structure of gender reflected in constructs of popular culture; to assess whether promotional discourses of nature and sport are conceived to assert a uniform, global hegemonic masculinity, or whether nationally distinctive target-groups are addressed in specifically national ways. It analyzes the particular gender ideologies contained in commodity advertising that use metaphors of untamed nature and competitive sports to address audiences who are considered to be opinion leaders in Britain and/or Germany. The aspiration towards global competitiveness or neo-colonial domination visualized by wild, virgin landscapes and global sports will be questioned in relation to the concept of global or national identity.

Keywords
advertising news magazines Britain Germany masculinities hegemony power sport nature

Introduction
Since the rise of womens and gender studies in the 1970s, the focus of research had been mainly on the representation of women, while, more recently, critical studies on men have called for a specific focus on men to analyze the gendered nature of men (Kimmel, Hearn and Connell 2005; Hearn 2004; Knoppers and Anthonissen 2005; Mac An Ghaill 1996; Mangan 2000). To provide a better understanding of the dynamics of gender, it is the declared aim of critical, feminist studies on men to make masculinity visible, while at the same time highlighting the specific forms of masculinities. Many such studies concerned with media representations of men have tried to pin down the phenomenon of the New Man in the growing number of mens lifestyle magazines (Huster 2001; Jobling 2005; Meusser 2001; Nixon 1996; Zurstiege 1998); however, representations of men in the mainstream media have been much less scrutinized from a gender perspective. This article considers typical commodity advertisement in two prestigious news magazines, comparing the German Der Spiegel with the British

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Following a number of comparative studies of advertising in the German media (see bibliography), this is a trans-national study based on material from Der Spiegel and The Economist, considering commodity advertizing which use metaphors of nature and sport; the primary material analyzed has been collected over some years, with the bulk of it taken from the two weeklies during the summer of 2005.

edition of The Economist.1 Both represent a type of magazine seen as serious or difficult, they are hardly read for relaxation or pleasure and they are of course not normally called mens magazines, although their readers are mainly men (Croteau and Hoynes 1992; Hanke 1998; Kevin 2003; Rasmusson 2007; Smee 2004; Spie 1988). By discussing advertisements produced for the readers of two prestigious news weeklies, I want to highlight the relational nature and hierarchical structure of gender visualized in the imagery of typical advertisements targeting affluent men who are considered as opinion leaders in Britain and/or Germany. The promotional constructs are considered as illustrations of masculinist discourses that are all-pervasive in contemporary popular culture. The focus is on metaphors of sport and nature commonly used in such advertisements. It will be asked whether they are conceived to assert a uniform, global hegemonic masculinity or whether nationally distinctive targetgroups are addressed in specifically national ways. The aspiration towards global competitiveness or neo-colonial domination visualized by wild, virgin, uninhabited landscapes and global sports will be questioned in relation to the concept of global or national identity, and it will be asked what these depictions of masculinist ideology say about the concerns of affluent men in the two countries.

Gender hierarchies, the public and the private sphere

Critical gender studies see gender as a socially constructed category in its dichotomous form, as a crutch to prop up identity (Hagemann-White 1988: 225). Thus, it is more than merely a role to be cast off like an old garment. The psychic and physical acquisition of a gendered habitus (Bourdieu 2001) from birth to adulthood is seen as an active process of habituation, and it is increasingly experienced by the individual as a process which needs constant reassessment and confirmation in fastchanging social circumstances and over the individuals life-cycle. Gender relations are also hierarchical in our societies: that is, there are social structures at work which not only define men as the polar opposite of women, but they also subordinate womens social role to the masculine principle of domination. Thus, although factors of class, ethnicity and sexual orientation cannot be ignored, women as a class are subordinated to men, while the majority of men taking into account other social factors are also subordinated to the ideal of hegemonic masculinity (Bourdieu 1997; Connell 1995, 2002; Flood et al. 2007, Hearn 2004; Meuser 1998a). This concept, derived from Antonio Gramscis idea of class hegemony (Forgacs 1988) was developed in the early 80s, critiquing the male sex role literature and proposing a model of multiple masculinities and power relations; gender dynamics thus can be seen to change historically. While femininities are not deprived of their own agency, the structure of gender is one of hierarchy and inequality, where men, in general, benefit from the patriarchal dividend in relation to women, yet most men and all women are subordinated to the male hegemonic ideal (Connell 1995; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005). The myth of the totally autonomous, heterosexual, globally competitive, western, white and victorious hegemonic man though hardly represented by any real man seems

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nonetheless a powerful ideal which men feel compelled to achieve, often to the detriment of themselves and others (Brndel and Hurrelmann 1999; Connell 2002; Connell and Messerschmidt 2005; Flood et al. 2007; Hearn 2004; Meuser 1998b). This hierarchization is also reflected in the dichotomous relationship of the public and private spheres to which men and women are respectively allocated in a seemingly natural and one-sided way (Connell 2002; Hearn 2004; Moller Okin 1998). Even though women today in both Germany and Britain are actively involved in employment and public life to an historically unprecedented degree, the gender contract, nonetheless, implies that unpaid reproductive work (e.g., housework, shopping, the physical and emotional care for family members) is seen as the natural task of women (whether employed or not) and as such is subsumed under mens labour market capacity. Thus, gender as a social practice is still ordered in relation to the reproductive arena of the private sphere which is delegated to women, while men certainly hegemonic men are freed from reproductive work to be unencumbered for the tasks of public life which alone are deemed serious and prestigious. The traditional division of labour where women at least middle class women did not generally enter the labour market is now a thing of the past; instead, most women are now in paid employment, while still doing the bulk of reproductive work. The fact that women continue to carry the main responsibility for managing the increasingly complex arrangements of everyday private life also means that only a small and privileged group of women will be able to combine professional success with a full family life. They do this mainly at the cost of, or with the help of, other women; while men in particular, professionally successful men (Behnke and Liebhold 2001) see the public sphere as their seemingly natural environment and are unwilling to reduce their professional commitments in favour of family work (Morris and Lyon 1996; Rerrich 1996, McDowell 2003).

Gendered media and advertising

This gendered division into private and public spheres and responsibilities, and thus interests of media audiences, is reflected in the clearly gendered stratification of media genres. Marketing information is produced for advertisers to provide them with a clear consumer profile of the target group, and gender is seen as highly relevant for consumption. There is no doubt that advertisers see male and female consumers as distinct in their media as well as consumption habits and preferences, which are still determined by the division of labour between the genders, particularly in the case of older, hegemonic men whose everyday private consumption needs are typically cared for by women. One only has to flick through womens magazines, or watch the commercial breaks in soap operas and chat shows, to see that these media advertiseeveryday commodities which emphasize gendered household roles. Women are targeted as the main decisionmakers on, and managers of, everyday private household consumption. Conversely, news media, violent thrillers and sports programmes all concerned with the public arena are used as the ideal context to target men with adverts for commodities seen as typically masculine goods and

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services: for instance, cars, IT equipment, banking or insurance. Such items differ from the everyday private commodities considered as feminine and trivial, as they involve one-off, relatively expensive transactions that are seen to reflect the public status of the male purchaser based on good professional standing and/or income. Thus, the specific forms of advertising, as much as the typical forms of consumption, reflect the gendered division of labour which is still characteristic of our post-industrial societies. This neither mean that in real life all purchasing of private everyday goods is delegated to women, nor can it be said that men are the only ones making decisions about purchases which demonstrate public standing. Nonetheless, in post-industrial societies where gender identity is much less clearly defined by employment status than before, consumer culture encourages a constant display and fashioning of specific identities in unambiguously feminine or masculine ways of consumption. And, while everyday shopping is considered a typically feminine occupation, marketing experts see men in general as problematic and reluctant consumers. Mens employment status is still their main source of self-worth (Brndel and Hurrelmann 1999; Bourdieu 2001; Connell 2002; Hearn 2004), and thus advertising, which aims to convince men that they should take consumption more seriously needs to place commodities in the context of public achievement particularly if these also involve purchases for the aesthetizisation of mens own bodies, their personal appearance and the personal realm in general. Yet, even the growing impact of male lifestyle magazines mainly addressing younger men has not been totally successful in persuading mainstream adult men that they should consume in a more conspicuous way: on the one hand more like women, yet still distinctively as real men. Therefore, advertising uses all tricks of the trade to masculinize its products through its promotional appeals, to convince the male target group that it is no longer enough just to be a man and act like a man: the message is that men must demonstrate and legitimize dominant status by masculine ways of consumption (Williamson 1986; Nixon 2003, Zurstiege 1998). In her study of popular media from a feminist perspective, van Zoonen maintains that as a cultural form, advertising displays a preoccupation with gender that is hardly matched in any genre (1994: 67). Referring to Goffmans seminal work of 1979 on gender and advertisements, van Zoonen underlines the obsession with gender which is typical for advertising as a form of popular culture: This obsession is said to spring from the signifying power of gender. Advertisements and commercials need to convey meaning within limited space and time and will therefore exploit symbols that are relevant and salient to society as a whole. As one of the most deeply felt elements of subjectivity and the social structure, gender provides such symbols most effectively (1994: 67). The typical conventions in advertisements addressing either men or women reflect the structural gendered differences based on the private/public dichotomy. Stereotypically, female audiences are addressed with fantasies of woman as body, as object or provider of physical pleasure for others, whether in sexualized or non-sexualized ways. The personal, intimate context and the care for self or other are always emphasized, either

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through sexualizing narratives, scenes of domestic bliss or merely the personalizing eye-contact with the audience. In contrast to this, the promotional constructs which try to persuade men to overcome their reluctance to take personal consumption seriously, conjure up narratives of man in the world, in impersonal scenes of urban, rural and wild, uninhabited landscapes, in contexts of business and especially as will be considered later in the context of sport. The impersonal is often underlined by abstract scenes, while sexualization takes place in the form of womens sexualized, objectivized bodies for the male gaze, providing the male onlooker with the role of the active subject for identification. If men as bodies are portrayed at all, they are depicted as lone adventurers, risktakers, warriors and sports champions. Their attention is focused on the task of controlling or conquering the elements and the competitors out there or also the self within, which needs to demonstrate its invincibility.

Der Spiegel and The Economist the editorial context of advertising

As Croteau and Hoynes have shown for the North American media, the genre of newspapers, news magazines and news broadcasting is mainly produced for men, just as it is mainly about men in public roles, and produced by men who deem themselves close to the seats of public male power (1992). Thus, the two authors see the news media in general as dominated by mainly white, highly educated, older and self-assured men, while at the same time sanctioning a particular narrow view of the world that of elite white males (Croteau and Hoynes 1992: 167). This is supported by Rasmusson: Men particularly white, heterosexual, wealthy and powerful men dominate global news media as its producers, owners and subjects . . . They are often depicted flatteringly in news stories . . . Men not only determine what qualifies as news, but also place themselves at the centre of that definition and representation (2007: 351). The readers, in choosing this medium, appear to be motivated by their desire to participate in public life as the proper place of men (Bourdieu 2001; Croteau and Hoynes 1992; Hanke 1998; Rasmusson 2007; Smee, 2004; Sparks 1992), and in their interest for the public they identify with elite men. Readership research shows clearly that news media are mainly read by men. The narrow, masculinist editorial background at the same time seems to confer elite status on the commodities advertised. Independent media auditing institutes such as the Informationsgemeinschaft zur Feststellung der Verbreitung von Werbetrgern (ivw) in Germany and the British equivalent, the Audit Bureau of Circulations (ABC) produce data on reader demographics, and what advertisers are particularly interested in: data on readers gender and income. In contrast to more down-market products, such as Mens Health or Loaded and Maxim which generally target younger and less wealthy men, news magazines are seen to provide the ideal environment to promote commodities to older male audiences who would like to see themselves as public decision makers and who have an above-average income. It is no surprise that advertisers use this particular readership, the mainly male reluctant older consumers, to target them within this editorial context which clearly is

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more elevated than that of the explicit mens magazines or sports media. Thus, a brief outline of the characteristics of the most prestigious examples of German and/or British news weeklies is necessary to understand their attractiveness for advertisers who target men in an editorial space in which older, more educated and affluent men feel confirmed in their superior gender status. Der Spiegel is the best-known example of German news media, generally considered to rank in a top position of news journalism as well as national marketing categories. The following characterizations of Der Spiegel and The Economist are gleaned from their own websites, underlining how they present themselves to their readers and more importantly to potential advertisers, with the aim of emphasizing their prestige and hegemonic standing. Established during the occupation period after the war, in January 1947, in the British Zone, as one of the first independent titles, Der Spiegel came to reflect the political history of West Germany, from the time of reconstruction after the war to increasing prosperity in the 60s and 70s to today. It has survived the competition of brassier and more lively news media springing up in the years after German unification in the 90s, such as Focus Magazin or Die Woche (Boothroyd 1998; Kevin 2003). With an audited circulation of 1,072,079 and a reach of 6.77 million, the magazine is generally considered to be Germanys most important news magazine, with the highest circulation of any of its rivals in Europe (www.media.spiegel.de, July 2005). It claims to be justifiably synonymous with investigative journalism in Germany and the most quoted of any media in Germany (www.media.spiegel.de, July 2005). Compared to its rivals, it reaches the highest proportion of well-educated, affluent people who are considered to be opinion leaders. For many years, DER SPIEGEL has been prescribed reading for those interested in political, economic and cultural affairs. Those who have a say in Germany or want to contribute to debates, read the SPIEGEL. Like no other, this news magazine reaches decision makers in industry, politics and society, opinion formers as well as those with particularly high purchasing power (www.media.spiegel.de, July 2005). The Economist can boast of a much longer tradition. It was established in 1843 in the early years of Victorian Britain, to campaign for free trade, laissez-faire and individual responsibility . . . [and] its principles and methods remain relevant 150 years later (Edwards 1993: 3). Its first editor was James Wilson, an advocate of free trade and the repeal of the Corn Laws; other famous editors were Herbert Spencer (18481853) and Walter Bagehot (18601877). According to its own website, from the earliest days, The Economist has looked abroad, both for subjects to write about and for circulation (www.economist.com, September 2005). This means that under a new editor from 1993, Bill Emmott, circulation increased from a relatively modest level during most of its existence, by an unprecedented 74 per cent during the following years, reaching a worldwide circulation figure of 1,009,759 in the second part of 2004. However, more than 50 per cent of its sales are in North America, 20 per cent in Continental Europe, a mere 15 per cent in the United Kingdom, 11 per cent in Asia/Pacific, 2 per cent Middle East/Africa, with not more than 1 per cent

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in Latin America (http://printmediakit.economist.com, July 2005). John Micklethwait, new editor since 2006, continued the increase in circulation internationally, and over 80 per cent of its readership is now from outside the United Kingdom, with global sales having doubled since 1997 (www.nationmaster.com/encyclopedia/The-Economist, December 2008) This geographical sales distribution can be seen to reflect the power hierarchies of the global economy; no doubt the spectacular circulation increase was helped by increasing globalization and the electronic media revolution, but it demonstrates at the same time the hegemonic role of English as the language of global media as well as of global politics and economics (Onysko 2004). Interestingly, during the last few years the circulation figures of both products have fluctuated around the million mark, but their national reach differs considerably. Der Spiegel may aspire to be heard beyond Germanys borders, and this can be seen from the fact that it has now an English language online version (http://www.spiegel.de/international/, December 2008), but the vast majority of its print edition is bought in Germany, while The Economists distribution in Britain is relatively small, reaching a much more narrow, high-end segment of the market, with the bulk of its sales in countries abroad. This high-brow, high-end weekly magazine (Los Angeles Times, quoted in http://printmediakit.economist. com, July 2005) is even said to have become a status symbol in the United States (The Times, quoted in http://printmediakit.economist.com, July 2005), underlining its global and up-market reach. In gender terms, The Economists readers are also much more exclusive, with 92 per cent of them being men (http://printmediakit.economist.com, July 2005). In contrast, a good third (36 per cent) of the German magazines readers are female (www.media.spiegel.de, July 2005). No doubt The Economist offers the more hegemonic, exclusive, globally reaching editorial content for the fictitious, globally competitive, hegemonic man. Thus, for advertising purposes, The Economist can be seen to be an upmarket, homo-social, masculine place, more than Der Spiegel with its numerically high but less exclusively men-only readership. This exclusivity is certainly underlined by the magazine itself as its marketing pages proclaim: The Economist readership is a powerful and influential audience of exceptional value to corporate, business-to-business, financial and travel advertisers. Their high income and affluent lifestyle ensure that they are also a key audience for luxury goods advertisers (http://printmediakit. economist.com, July 2005). However, compared with the German title with its 72 pages of advertising in a total of 190 pages on average,2 The Economists 100-page magazine on average only contains 17 pages of commodity advertising, followed by about the same amount of classified adverts (Executive Focus, Courses, Appointments, Tenders, Tenders & Personal etc.).3 However, in the discussion later, I will only consider images of sport and nature in commodity advertising. Compared with The Economist, there were not only more commodity adverts in Der Spiegel, but also a wider variety, ranging from IT goods, cars, finance, watches, alcohol, media and air travel, down to occasionally coffee, pain-killers, razor blades, toothpaste or even toilet paper. This list

This was generally the case during the summer of 2005 when the material for this research was collected. More recently, with the growing importance of the on-line version of Der Spiegel where the majority of articles now have to be purchased by the reader, the number of full-page commodity advertizing in the printed version has considerably declined. The international on-line version in English can be seen to be the magazines attempt to gain a more global reach. The analysis of online advertizing from a gender perspective would be an interesting project. The Economists website provides a wealth of articles and specialized dossiers for sale. No doubt both magazines now create increasing amounts of revenue via online subscription, as advertizing revenue is declining.

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reflects approximately the frequency of advertising for such items in rank order. In the more up-market context of The Economist, the range is narrower, from IT goods, cars, finance, watches to air travel. No doubt the bulk of these products are traditionally seen to be for men. How they are particularly masculinized by the creative minds of the advertising industry will be discussed later.

Discourses of sport and nature

My earlier research on men and the media convinces me that one of the most common cultural fields, from which the language of advertising borrows to address men, is the field of sport (Wrsching 2000, 2004). Once your attention is drawn to this fact, you can see the metaphors of sport everywhere in the media targeting men. This leads one to question about men and their relationship not only to their bodies, to nature, but also to their bodies as part of nature. In popular culture in general, and especially in the context of sport, male and female bodies are on view in more or less explicit and voyeuristic ways. Male and female athletes are certainly used to market a wide variety of goods. However, the ideology of hierarchical gender relations means that it is usually womens bodies that are sexualized to sell commodities to both men and women. When addressing men in the prestigious context of a current affairs magazine, mainstream culture avoids the depiction of men as mere bodies, men as sex objects or in intimate relations, as the fear of homosexuality is part of the construct of public, hegemonic man. Examples of advertising in the context of news media show that sports images and references to sport can lend themselves particularly well to addressing men, as they emphasize a socially validated type of impersonal, dynamic, strong, competitive masculinity. The sports context depicts men in socially powerful positions, in a pleasurable and traditionally masculine way which seems unthreatening to male target groups in general (Wrsching 2007). In societies where physical strength has become irrelevant to the production process and labour market, sport, as one of the most masculine institutions, has become the favourite area through which boys are initiated into masculinity and learn how to be men (Messner and Sabo 1990). This process demands a special effort no gain without pain as sport is employed in the social and psychosomatic construction of masculinity (Messner and Sabo 1990). Thus, sport has an important function in the discourses of hegemonic masculinity: with the focus on the body, masculinizing and feminizing practices associated with the body result in naturalizing the polarized and hierarchical constructions of masculinity and femininity (Hargreaves 1994). As Messner maintains, sport is the institutional realm in which men construct and affirm their separation from, and domination over, women (2005: 314). Yet, the way in which advertisements in up-market news media celebrate male champions as exemplars of hegemonic masculinity suggests that it is not the physical body, but the disciplined mind transcending the bodys limitations which leads to ultimate success and it is this controlling power of the mind which is identified with high masculine status (Wrsching 2000). Thus, the medias focus is often on the mental attitude

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necessary to master body and mind, which is seen as proof of the disposition to win, as it displays the somatized habitus of masculine domination (Bourdieu 1997: 166). It is therefore not surprising that advertisements targeting men will use the culture of sport as a preferred source of inspiration for its imagery. There are numerous examples in both magazines which use the sports context in more or less direct ways. If one considers specific issues of the two magazines in the same weeks in June and July 2005, one can see a clear pattern of between five or six full-page adverts with references to sport in Der Spiegel, compared with three or four in The Economist, while there are between two and three explicit depictions of wild nature in both magazines; indeed, in several adverts the sport and nature imagery is conspicuously mixed. Considering that the German magazine with a lot more pages also carried a larger number of commodity adverts, the frequency of the theme of sports in advertising is striking in both magazines. This frequency is best illustrated by comparing two specific weeks in tabular form. Table 1 below shows full-page advertisements with references of sport and nature in the two magazines in the second week of June 2005, listing them by commodity, sport/nature image, with captions in brackets4:
Der Spiegel GE Transportation, Olympics, sky and a jet engine with the Olympic rings (GE imagination at work) En BW, Football, sky and ships masts waving in the wind with FIFA Championship logo (Fresh wind in the energy market) Nike, athletics, athletes shoe (Power for your feet) T-Systems, Yachting, yacht with a man on the mast top (business flexibility) Land Rover, off-road driving, car on rough terrain (Start game: in 7.6 seconds: The new Range Rover Sport . . . Go beyond) Audi, sea and sky in exotic location [two page spread] Deutsche Bank, massive bridge head being constructed into green virgin woods (Together we enter new territory . . .) The Economist IBM, Tennis, Centre Court, Wimbledon, grass court with white lines and an anonymous female player (little players) Rolex, Golf, US Open Championship, rolling green landscape

Words in italics in the captions used in Der Spiegel highlight that the original was in English; this is not unusual for German advertizing language which frequently uses English and/or American to suggest international attractiveness.

Easynet, Athletics, athlete on parallel bars (Power. Control. Flexibility) IndexChange, pouncing leopard (the natural force of the market)

Table 1: Sport and nature images (June 2005, week 2). The same pattern was evident throughout June and July 2005, and this can be exemplified again by listing such adverts published in the third week of June:

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Der Spiegel Toyota, Car Racing, German racing circuit at Hockenheimring, road and sky Altana Pharma, Biking, image of a racer, mountains (. . . three million asthmatics . . . Think on) Bunte [German popular magazine], Beach Volley Ball, two national German players [mentioned by name in the advert] dive for the ball (Team Germany) DSF, Tennis, Wimbledon Centre Court [Boris Beckers name mentioned in caption] Frankfurter Rundschau [German Daily], Chess, chess-board (Read in black-and-white what moves Germany) ORIS, Formula 1, picture of Nick Haidfeld, BMW Williams logo Total, snowy landscape with man in white overall and white rabbit (As European market leader . . . high standards for the protection of air, water and soil . . .)

The Economist GE Transportation, Olympics, sky and a jet engine with the Olympic rings (GE imagination at work) Chanel, Yachting, man in rigging, sea and sky (Allure Homme Sport) BASF, Mountaineering, man dangling on a rope from a rock face, rugged peaks and deep blue sky

XL Capital, choppy sea, bridge and dark blue sky

Table 2: Sport and nature images (June 2005, week 3). Only the advert for Nike running shoes constitutes the promotion of sports equipment, and this is quite rare in both magazines. The sports context is clearly used to masculinize general commodities which have in themselves nothing to do with sports (Chanel Allure Homme Sport) or to claim their extreme competitiveness and superior international reputation. The depiction of famous international sports men for instance the Formula 1 driver Nick Haidfeld to sell Swiss watches draws attention to the product and by association claims its champion quality. Let me illustrate this with an earlier promotion series of TAG Heuer watches in Der Spiegel from 1999/2000 where the German Tour de France winner Jan Ullrich, his compatriot and one-time Wimbledon champion Boris Becker and the Finnish Formula 1 winner Mika Hkkinen were used. Here, the men are not shown in sporting action, but as frozen icons of self-control; the focus is not their bodies, but their faces as sign of unique individuality; what is visualized here is their absolute concentration on the goal to win. The steely grey picture of Hkkinen here is not the image of real sporting practices, but the incarnation of a man of steel, the mindset of all-out competition and total control of mind over body. What is emphasized here is the desperately serious goal of domination of self and others. This becomes even clearer in the caption of the Becker advert: Inner strength. Fear makes me strong. The fear of losing. I dont remember victories. Only defeats (3 April 1999).

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Versions of these earlier images are varied and adapted to the sports and champions of the season. In summer 2005, the golf champion Tiger Woods is employed to claim high-class quality for the business consulting service Accenture (Economist, 2 July 2005), and in an advert for Mazda which incidentally appears in both The Economist and Der Spiegel in July 2005 he is shown in golfing action beside the car: Award-winning Mazda, now sportier than ever. Easy, Tiger. In all these cases, the champions are not visualized in their physical prowess or youthful stamina, but as icons of will-power. This is also the case in the advert for a popular German magazine showing two German Beach Volley Ball players (see Table 2) with glistening bodies in almost naked muscularity: any personalizing or sexualizing interpretation is kept at bay by the caption that spells out the masculine seriousness of the competitive product status by maintaining in the caption that, without the magazine in question, the contest between players would be just a sport! British sports venues or trophies of international standing are also frequently utilized to associate top quality with products in the British media. Thus, Wimbledon is used for an IBM advert (Economist, 11 June 2005), and in Summer 2005 there is a series of two-page adverts for Rolex watches in The Economist, where the reader is introduced to the historical significance of Wimbledon (25 June 2005), the Fastnet Race (8 August 2005) or St. Andrews (16 July 2005); a combination of colourful images of the venues and the lengthy and convoluted, technical text create pseudo-documentaries to underline the hegemonic, exclusive tradition of such British sporting events. However, the use of British and also American sports events in the German magazine can show particularly well how these promotional messages are constructed to invite identification with the hegemonic AngloAmerican ideal, which can be illustrated particularly well with a Rolex advert published in 2002: on the occasion of the US Masters Championship, three named top US golfers are depicted as the fraternity of global patriarchs who with hands on each others shoulders in manly mutual approval are shown to agree that In the long run, there are more important things than rivalry (SPIEGEL, 27 February 2002). Clearly, the model of aspiration for the German man who dreams of high public acclaim is in the Anglo-American mould symbolized by exotic, elite sports such as polo (Rolex advert in Der Spiegel in 2000), tennis or golf. Champions must have proven their metal on the world stage, and the venues have to be of international renown, such as Wimbledon or the US Masters. Other ways of validating a product through associating it with international sports is achieved through visual references to a wide range of sports paraphernalia: a chessboard to market a German daily (Spiegel, 13 June 2005), a yacht in stormy waters with the legend Business flexibility T-Systems (Spiegel, 13 June 2005) or sea, sky and a man high up in a ships rigging to masculinize the perfume Chanel: Allure Homme Sport (Economist, 18 June 2005). International sports events are also conjured up simply through logos: the Olympic rings appear on a jet engine hovering among billowing white clouds in an azure blue sky; the same advert appears within days of each

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other in both magazines (Spiegel, 13 June 2005 and Economist 18 June 2005). The FIFA logo is on a Canon advert (Economist, 25 June 2005), as the Football World Cup 2006 seems to suggest modern, forward-looking technology of the German electricity firm En BW: The wind to be harnessed by the enterprise drives the clouds in a blue sky and inflates white bulging sails blowing from electric masts, while the green fields stand for a healthy natural environment, as . . . we provide fresh wind into the energy market (Spiegel, 13 June 2005). That economic life is a jungle in which only the fittest survive and that you have to be hunter as not to be the hunted is powerfully suggested in an advert for the financial service IndexChange, showing a hunting leopard with the slogan The natural force of the market (Economist, 11 June 2005). The jungle metaphor is ironically deployed in another advert for financial consultants: Never be intimidated. Go on. Be a Tiger! which shows Tiger Woods hacking away at a forest of grasses (Economist, 23 July 2005). The metaphor of wild nature thus captures the vagaries of the outside world, the seemingly natural law of competition, social Darwinism, the battle for domination and the fight against the untamed beast within. The last examples of images of nature and sport here focus finally on narratives where the exploitation and/or protection of the natural environment are implied. Wild mountains, arid deserts, rough seas and skies are quite commonly used in the media to sell luxury cars. Such landscapes seem to reflect the desire for escape from the humdrum urban reality and the freedom from social constraint. The wish for freedom also appears as the neo-liberal and neo-colonial, globalizing drive for markets and resources. Thus, in an advert to underline the high performance of the German chemical company BASF, we see a climber precariously dangling from a sheer rock face; the firms wide-product range is superimposed on a range of mountains towering above the clouds (Economist, 18 June 2005). A similar metaphor is employed in an advert for Total (Economist, 2 July 2005) and it might be useful to compare it with an advert for the same product in Der Spiegel (2 June 2005) during a similar period. In The Economist, the lonely mountaineer at the bottom of the picture views the clouds and the sea below from his vantage point, while above the adventurous diver is reviewing the oil issue in depth and bringing new solutions to the surface, bringing light to the dangerous situation of increasingly scarce natural resources. Both the climber and diver are shown to face and dominate the elements; for them, nature is there to be conquered and exploited. The construction in the German magazine is very different: a cuddly snow rabbit as the potential victim of climate change is depicted on a field of snow, while high-technology man dressed in white comes to service the high-tech installation: Secure the demand. Protect nature. These rather different spins on the same message (Our energy is your energy Total) show that the target groups of the two magazines are seen by advertisers to be distinctive. Like the earlier example of an advert for sustainable energy production in Der Spiegel (En BW, see Table 1), this seems to reflect a much wider awareness of green policies in Germany than in Britain, and

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this may explain the nurturing narrative in the German advert for Total. But it also highlights the fact that the ideology encoded in advertising in The Economist is generally of a more brutally open, violent kind. The implied British reader is deemed to be higher up in the hierarchy of global rule, a position to which the German reader may aspire, while at the same time he may wish to believe that complicity with the hegemonic ideal offers freedom from responsibilities for the destruction of nature and that a softer type of capitalist competition and the potential of science and technology may save the world.

Conclusion
The aim here was to show that discourses of sport and nature in advertising in news media in two different European countries are constructed for an elevated male target group to market mainly global status commodities to affluent men. The German magazine has a much larger and lessgendered readership, and this means that the product range marketed is wider and includes also some products of everyday personal consumption. However, it also shows that the cultural model aspired to by the German reader is the global one, even if there is some evidence of nationally distinctive, softer ideologies. The types of commodities in both magazines can be seen to have a global presence, just as they are validated and masculinized through association with global and typically British and American sports and international champions. In addition, the frequent use of the English language in many German advertising texts underlines this obsession with the globally hegemonic, Anglo-American model. Such discourses of sport lend themselves to exploit mens fears of not being masculine and dominant enough. With economic restructuring, increasing globalization and the consequent rapid social changes, many men experience their privileged position as precarious, as the habitual security of hierarchical gender roles is put under pressure. This gendered insecurity is targeted by advertising as it suggests that men today should demonstrate their high social status by specifically masculine conspicuous consumption, to prop up gendered identity and thus display the appropriate habitus of global domination. In general, such metaphors of sport reflect an ideology which is based on the iron law of ruthless competition; it preaches domination over instead of care for self, for the other, the natural body and the natural environment. At a time when sport has become one of the most vital sites of male self-definition in a world where work is becoming increasingly scarce, this ideology is very potent. It works to reproduce unequal gender relations, but it must be recognized as non-sustainable and self-destructive. Thus, to critique gender ideologies in the popular culture of advertising may be as necessary as the call for an end of the male dominance of news journalism which would be essential for gender equity and democracy (Rasmusson 2007: 353). References
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Suggested citation
Wrsching, M. (2009), Gender and images of nature and sport in British and German news magazines: the global and the national in images of advertising, International Journal of Media and Cultural Politics 5: 3, pp. 217232, doi: 10.1386/macp.5.3.217/1

Contributor details
Martha Wrsching is a lecturer at the Department of Politics, International Relations and European Studies, Loughborough University. She has published in the context of media, gender and youth studies. Contact: Martha Wrsching, Department of Politics, International Relations and European Studies, Loughborough University, Ashby Road, Loughborough, LE11 3TU/UK. Tel: 0044-1509-222 998; Fax: 0044-1509-223917. E-mail: M.M.Worsching@lboro.ac.uk

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