Star argues that for the heterosexual audience the issue is sex (and masculinity): the principal object of the television ‘gaze’ in telerugby is male bodies. She notes one of the few explicit women’s accounts of pleasures in watching ‘Aussie Rules football’ on television:
What attracted my interest were the images of male bodies. Here were barely clad, eyeable male bodies in top anatomical nick. The cameras follow their rough and tumble disport with relentless precision, in wide angle, close- up and slow motion replay. With the commentary turned down and some music the imagery may be released from its imposed fixated meaning and the performance enjoyed, as choreographed spectacle: lyrical, flagrantly masculine, and erotic.
(Poynton and Hartley 1990:150)
However, as Beverley Poynton points out in her analysis of the ‘pleasures in watching Aussie football, the text is not in fact constructed for women’s voyeuristic enjoyment’. Poynton argues, as does Star, that male sports texts like ‘telerugby’ are primarily constructed for men to gaze at men.21