Thursday, June 14, 2007
Amanda Beard has nice boobs... allegedly.
The caption underneath this photo of 25-year-old, blue-eyed swimmer Amanda Beard on ESPN's Web site reads:"Amanda Beard's Playboy debut may harm her status as a role model to young girls."
This is called editorializing, a no-no in the unbiased media business. Later, the nameless Associated Press reporter states the following:
"Inside, she takes off her clothes in eight pictures certain to create a stir among rivals and young girls who consider her a role model."
Do young girls lack the ability to consider a woman a role model if and when she poses topless for a magazine? Is it a universal fact that once the public sees a woman's boobs that she is less respectable and virtuous?
The rest of the story provides Beard's reasoning and beliefs behind posing for Playboy, and it comes off as a defense against the nameless reporter's insinuation: that what she did is classless and of poor taste.
Amanda Beard has participated in the Olympics three times, winning two gold medals, four silvers and one bronze. She won an NCAA National Championship in 2001 while attending the University of Arizona. She's a spokeswoman for Defenders of Wildlife, a nonprofit organization dedicated to keeping humans from accelerating rates of extinction and altering and destroying habitats.
Beard comes across as hardly apologetic in this story, and that's a good thing. If a group of Puritans shows up at my door to balk at me for planting flowers while my wife mows the lawn they'll be in for similarly disinterested dialogue.
"You have to remember, I'm still just a swimmer," Beard says in the story. "I am living a great lifestyle and I'm making good money, but I'm not a basketball player. These deals are not $40 million deals."
This statement brings the issue closer to its real point(s). The mere fact that Amanda Beard can earn a fat paycheck for showing her boobies is a reflection of many other social issues more important than neo-Puritanism, such as capitalism, sexism, female athleticism, objectification, beauty, art, and countless others - none of which necessitates the opinion of some stupid AP writer.
So, Mr. or Ms. Associated Press writer, take your opinion, preconceptions, judgments and photo captions over to your sexist editor's desk, spray them down with some Kathy Ireland perfume, and eat them.
http://sports.espn.go.com/oly/swimming/news/story?id=2896989
