Friday, August 22, 2008

This is why...

...photographs that cut women up into body parts aren't innocent, cute fun.

When you dehumanize a woman and reduce her to parts -- just the ass for example. That is exactly what she becomes -- a piece of ass. She becomes SEX itself, not a whole, human being, a person with a name, a personality, an athlete....


This female Olympian has been cut up and 'othered' so much that she is now the acceptable icon for "sex" itself.

The article is pretty much as disgusting as you can imagine

...there were the indigenous lovelies who came to watch the competitions. And then there were the female athletes - literally thousands of them - strutting, shimmying, sashaying and jogging around the village, clad in Lycra and exposing yard upon yard of shiny, toned, rippling and unimaginably exotic flesh. Women from all the countries of the world: muscular, virile, athletic and oozing oestrogen. I spent so much time in a state of lust that I could have passed out. Indeed, for all I knew I did pass out - in a place like that how was one to tell the difference between dreamland and reality?

and then there's this


...success does not work both ways. Gold-medal winning female athletes are not looked upon by male athletes with any more desire than those who flunked out in the first round. It is sometimes even considered a defect, as if there is something downright unfeminine about all that striving, fist pumping and incontinent sweating. Sport, in this respect, is a reflection of wider society, where male success is a universal desirable whereas female success is sexually ambiguous. I do not condone this phenomenon, merely note it.
I do not have the energy at this point in a Friday to talk about all the ways in which this article is tasteless, sexist and vile. I just want to get done with work and have a big f---ing drink.

1 comment:

Bianca Reagan said...

This is part of why I'm not watching the Olympics.