I was horrified when I read the prompt for this article and found it was not in pink sparkly letters. Mortified, I reached for my iced matcha only to find—I had none. Flustered by all this information I scrolled on TikTok to take a breather and found a pink guiding light: Halo, the Sky Sports account for girls.
Marketed as the “little sister” of the Sky Sports TikTok account, Halo was Sky’s pitiful attempt of jumping on the ‘I’m just a girl’ bandwagon, posting videos such as one that depicted a male footballer playing and captioning it “when the hot girl walk + matcha combo hits.” It was deleted within three days of its inception because Sky “didn’t get it right”, claiming this was an attempt to “build a welcoming community for female fans, whether casual or committed, through fun, trend-led, and relatable content.”
Sky also seemed to forget that women can actually play sports with the majority of their posts portraying men, dangling the historic lack of female representation in sport before our eyes as from 1921-1971 women’s football was banned by the Football Association (FA), although it was still played in this period it was not nearly as popular as it had been prior to the ban. In recent years this popularity has returned, however there’s still prejudice.
Accounts like Halo that attempt to make sports inclusive trip and fall flat on their faces, feeling like an afterthought as they portray lazy and damaging stereotypes of women to appear ’empowering’ yet turn a blind eye to real issues of women in sport as they continue to be overshadowed by their male counterparts even when they are arguably more talented (cough cough, the Lionesses, cough cough).
Women are perfectly capable of consuming Sky Sports without the sparkles and bows, this whole Sky Sports family tree positions women’s sports as an extension to male sports and not its own separate entity, where’s the rest of the family? Is Sky Arts the uncle that still clings to the good old days?
This infantilisation is a reflection of social media now but initially it was a way of reclaiming the term ‘girl’ and showing some humanity as women. Sometimes we make stupid financial decisions like spending £50 on Vinted, sometimes we eat a big pack of Sensations crisps and call it dinner, and sometimes we call our dad in the circuit laundry room and ask if it’s ok if cottons go in the dryer (it was not, my clothes have now shrunk). But there’s a difference between lighthearted jokes about some moments of incompetence and blatant belittling. Halo crossed this line.
If Sky truly cared about their female audience, they would elevate sportswomen and give more screen time to female sports, encouraging a safe space for women among all their accounts, not forcing us into pink sparkly boxes.
“Tynecastle before the Sky Sports Cup Final – 53608454151” by daniel0685 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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Sky Sports’ Infantilisation of Women is Insulting
I was horrified when I read the prompt for this article and found it was not in pink sparkly letters. Mortified, I reached for my iced matcha only to find—I had none. Flustered by all this information I scrolled on TikTok to take a breather and found a pink guiding light: Halo, the Sky Sports account for girls.
Marketed as the “little sister” of the Sky Sports TikTok account, Halo was Sky’s pitiful attempt of jumping on the ‘I’m just a girl’ bandwagon, posting videos such as one that depicted a male footballer playing and captioning it “when the hot girl walk + matcha combo hits.” It was deleted within three days of its inception because Sky “didn’t get it right”, claiming this was an attempt to “build a welcoming community for female fans, whether casual or committed, through fun, trend-led, and relatable content.”
Sky also seemed to forget that women can actually play sports with the majority of their posts portraying men, dangling the historic lack of female representation in sport before our eyes as from 1921-1971 women’s football was banned by the Football Association (FA), although it was still played in this period it was not nearly as popular as it had been prior to the ban. In recent years this popularity has returned, however there’s still prejudice.
Accounts like Halo that attempt to make sports inclusive trip and fall flat on their faces, feeling like an afterthought as they portray lazy and damaging stereotypes of women to appear ’empowering’ yet turn a blind eye to real issues of women in sport as they continue to be overshadowed by their male counterparts even when they are arguably more talented (cough cough, the Lionesses, cough cough).
Women are perfectly capable of consuming Sky Sports without the sparkles and bows, this whole Sky Sports family tree positions women’s sports as an extension to male sports and not its own separate entity, where’s the rest of the family? Is Sky Arts the uncle that still clings to the good old days?
This infantilisation is a reflection of social media now but initially it was a way of reclaiming the term ‘girl’ and showing some humanity as women. Sometimes we make stupid financial decisions like spending £50 on Vinted, sometimes we eat a big pack of Sensations crisps and call it dinner, and sometimes we call our dad in the circuit laundry room and ask if it’s ok if cottons go in the dryer (it was not, my clothes have now shrunk). But there’s a difference between lighthearted jokes about some moments of incompetence and blatant belittling. Halo crossed this line.
If Sky truly cared about their female audience, they would elevate sportswomen and give more screen time to female sports, encouraging a safe space for women among all their accounts, not forcing us into pink sparkly boxes.
“Tynecastle before the Sky Sports Cup Final – 53608454151” by daniel0685 is licensed under CC BY 2.0.
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